[h2]The Good[/h2]
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*Juveniles, Family Units, & Breeding is very transformative to the gameplay loop, allowing the creation of self-sustaining populations at the cost of having to manage the changing needs and genetics of those populations
*Modular Buildings means we get better control over theming, and we can make combined buildings or buildings with a custom footprint
*The terrain tools are better than JWE 2s
*There is a lot more scenery/decoration
*Enclosures can incorporate scenery & terrain, limiting the need for fences and allowing more naturalistic enclosures, and the constriction managament view helps with troubleshooting enclosure boundaries
*New attractions like the petting zoo and river kayaks are really nice, though the petting zoo isn't the walk through type experience I really wanted
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[h2]The Bad[/h2]
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*Lagoons are in a really sad state - in JWE2, they where the most innovative feature of the game. In JWE 3, only one marine reptile species likes cohabitating with other species, and there are no ledges (the islands some marine reptiles would perch on), making Lagoons a lot less interesting. The game could also benefit from having lagoon environment brushes, as decorating lagoons is a pain otherwise.
*The terrain tools are still finicky, sometimes placing even a small building near your cliff enclosure edge ruins the cliff edge and the ramps to the enclosure by flattening the terrain.
*While you can favourite a dinosaur, that only places markers when they do something interesting, meaning there is no way to effectively "tag" a dinosaur - this makes removal of specific dinosaurs (say, ones born with negative traits) annoying, especially if you want to do it by manually piloting the capture team (often necessary due to task slot limitations), as you can't even see the dinosaurs name/number while aiming with the capture team.
*The expeditions where you rescue wild dinosaurs from JWE2 sadly got folded into the dinosaur market, which is a shame, because it gets rid of using the welfare skill on the expedition map.
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[h2]Things that Would be nice to Have[/h2]
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*The land hatchery drones are great, but to deep scan something, you have to manually pilot a drone all the way across the map from a hatchery, and if you have to leave the drone to attend to something, you have to start again at the hatchery. Most players just build the one hatchery, so the game would benefit from a small placable drone station to launch drones from (maybe even make it part of the ranger post you place in enclosures).
*The breeding system would really benefit from being able to set the game to notify you when a dinosaur is born with a negative trait
*Again, dinosaur tagging would be nice to make tranqing the right dinosaur easier
*The breeding program view should show what traits each dinosaur has, as well as their generation
*Lagoons really need some terrain brushes, and maybe even give the marine reptiles environmental needs to go with the brushes (reeds, reefs, open water, etc)
*Just give us a built in freebuild option, there are enough people who use it to justify it being a game feature instead of a buggy third party mod.
*A proper walk-through petting attraction would be nice
*Paths with attached lamps and seating would be nice options to have
*I often find myself placing an extra ranger station just to have enough task slots to be able to tranq a population of dinosaurs, which takes up a lot of space when all I need is the extra capture team - capture teams should have more task slots (especially when you have to deal with security cameras taking up slots), or just let us place an extra capture team on its own without the attached ranger teams.
*Planet Zoos enrichment feature would be nice, even if it was purely cosmetic (objects that dinosaurs can interact with with special animations).
*A non-campaign version of the Rebirth campaign (managing multiple parks with connected research/expeditions/finances, but in a sandbox setting) would be great, though I would prefer it to be singleplayer rather than semi-online, because the semi-online nature of Planet Zoos franchise mode means it doesn't support modded species.
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[h2]The State of Modding[/h2]
Before you buy this game, please note that the Awesome Cobra Script Extender team have abandoned support of JWE 3, making the future of mods for this game very uncertain. Currently the freebuild mod and ACSE do work, though are pretty buggy as neither has been updated in a while.
Additionall, the game has relatively few mods compared to other titles in the series, with only a handful of new species having been added by modders on nexus, and most come with the warning that releasing a new species from a hatchery and then loading a save might crash your game. Proper animation support has also apparently yet to be added for modding this game.
