30 | New Scientist | 8 January 2022
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The games column
THE original Jurassic Park was
released in 1993, and as a dinosaur-
obsessed 7-year-old, I simply had
to see it. I badgered my parents
to take me, even though I was
probably a bit too young to watch
people being eaten by monsters.
Needless to say, I loved it, and
have had a soft spot for both the
books and films ever since. So
I jumped at the chance to make
my own dinosaur park in Jurassic
World Evolution 2.
The game adds dinosaurs to the
template of classic management
sims such as Theme Park or
RollerCoaster Tycoon. You begin
after the events of the fifth film,
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,
when dinosaurs were released
en masse into the wild. Your job,
working with the US Fish and
Wildlife Service, is to round them
up. This teaches you the basics
of building enclosures, looking
after dinosaurs and so on, but
it isn’t particularly exciting.
Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas
Howard voice their characters
from the films and offer advice,
but it seems the developers
couldn’t secure Chris Pratt,so settled for a substitute that
sounds nothing like him.
While the campaign serves as
a useful tutorial, where the game
really shines is in Chaos Theory
mode. This puts you in charge of
parks from the five films to see
if you can avoid disaster, and is
much more fun. In the era of thefirst film, dinosaurs don’t exist
yet, so you send scientists out to
find fossils and extract their DNA.
I started with velociraptors, or
at least the Jurassic Park versions,
which are roughly as big as a
human – the real thing was turkey-
sized and had feathers. Despite
this inaccuracy, it was a thrill to
release them into their enclosure,
ready for paying guests. “Every
precaution has been taken, we’re
following the science,” said one
of the researchers, in what feels
like a knowing wink to the UK’sHere be dinosaurs Raising an island’s worth of dinosaur clones is a thrill,
but keeping the park running is far less exciting than unleashing chaos on
an unsuspecting public, says Jacob Aron“ I hatched two T. rex.
They began fighting.
Then one killed the
other, bust a hole in
the fence and escaped”handling of the coronavirus
pandemic – Frontier
Developments is based
in Cambridge, UK.
Keeping your park going
involves balancing science,
business, entertainment and
logistics. You need a steady
stream of research to create new
dinosaurs and modify their DNA,
but that requires a positive cash
flow. Guests are your main
revenue source, but they don’t
only want dinosaurs: you have
to build restaurants, hotels and
toilets to keep them happy. Then
there is the back end of the park –
power stations, park rangers and
medical teams – which supports
everything else.
With all this to keep track of, it is
no wonder that John Hammond’s
original Jurassic Park was a
disaster. I managed to hold things
together, just. There is a fun
moment when Hammond echoes
the “we have a T. rex?” line from
the original film, which he asks
with a mixture of glee and surprise
as you prepare to unleash one.
I actually hatched not one T. rex
but two and plopped them down in
an enclosure I had built to house
them as the pride of the park.
Unfortunately, I didn’t give them
enough food and they began
fighting. Then one killed the
other, bust a hole in the fence and
escaped. It was a scary moment,
until I realised I could simply
dispatch a helicopter to tranquilise
it and ferry it back to the enclosure.
That moment highlights a
tension that the game doesn’t
quite manage to solve – you want
your park to run smoothly, but to
really recreate the atmosphere
of Jurassic Park, you want to
unleash chaos. ❚FR
ONTIER^ DEV
ELOPMEN
TSYou can run a safe theme
park. Or you can unleash
chaos. Which is more fun?Game
Jurassic World
Evolution 2
Frontier Developments
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5,
Xbox One and Series X/SJacob also
recommends...Games
Jurassic Park
Ocean Software
NES and Nintendo GameBoy
This 1993 movie tie-in game
featured a bazooka-toting
Alan Grant, making it hardly
representative of the film,
but I still loved it.Planet Zoo
Frontier Developments
PC
If you prefer your
management games to be a
bit more realistic, Planet Zoo
shares much of the same
DNA as Jurassic World
Evolution 2.Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s
deputy news editor. Follow
him on Twitter @jjaron