[b]Reviewed On: September 8, 2026[/b]
[u][b]Overview[/b][/u]
Ever wonder what it would be like to be John Hammond, with a lot of money and questionable decision making skills? Well this is what Jurassic World Evolution gives you access to. Take on the role of the manager of various dino parks across a series of islands in Costa Rica, but don’t be surprised if things turn out the same way as the original park did or the second attempt at making a park...
[u][b]Visuals[/b][/u]
Released in 2018 the visuals for the game still kind of hold up even today. The various park locations are tucked away in lush green wilderness, the dinosaurs that you eventually permit to roam the park are well detailed and have some fairly accurate looking (based on what we saw of their movie counter parts anyways) animations attached to them. The guests that wander the park have a decent variety about them, though their animations are much more simple, mostly just walk (or run in the vent of a dino outbreak) along the paths that are set up, sometimes pointing at things. The main issue I find with the game’s visuals though is how clean they are. They’re fairly sanitized with no real grit attached to them, even if they were recently in a fight. Sure there’s combat markings, but it’s not something that leaves any permanent scars or anything, the blood and claw marks eventually just go away and they look like new. Same can be said about the structures, which have that overly clean look about them like they were in the Jurassic World movie (which a lot of the design was taken from). But they’re minor details I suppose, the overall look of the game still holds up rather well.
[u][b]Audio[/b][/u]
The audio of the game was lifted from the movies, so for those of us who watched the movies one too many times as a kid will be quite familiar with the sounds found in the game. Voice work is par for the course, with a few characters being voiced by their original actors. Overall, nothing really to write home about on the audio front. It does its job and isn’t annoying about it (well, maybe listening to some of the dialogue can get annoying after awhile when it’s kind of the same thing over and over again, but someone has to remind you of things).
[u][b]SteamDeck[/b][/u]
The game works out of the box on the SteamDeck and the default settings hold at my 40FPS target in most cases. I did find that when down at ground level things would drop down to 30FPS and sometimes have difficulties holding that, but lowering the settings to medium seemed to have stabilized things (game was running at a custom high setting). It is a little bit blurry though (TAA is to blame here) and certain text can be a little hard to read, but overall game runs well.
[u][b]Story[/b][/u]
Things are pretty simple on the story front, you’re the new guy who gets to manage the various parks with the help of a few key members who will guide you along the paths of science, entertainment and security. You get a little bit of information regarding the different island park locations, but otherwise are tasked with making dinosaurs and profit.
[u][b]Gameplay[/b][/u]
Gameplay is... rather slow to be honest. And by slow I mean unlike most other games where they give you an option to speed up time, Jurassic World Evolution only has one speed. So you will find yourself doing a lot of sitting around, twiddling thumbs and waiting for something to happen. On the one hand it’s helpful as it gives you time to plan things out and never really feel rushed to do things, but on the other hand you will probably need to find yourself something else to do while waiting for things to happen. So get a video ready or work on some reports because you’re going to be waiting a lot.
With that little disclaimer out of the way, the game has you managing the various elements of the park. Power, expeditions, rangers and animal control are the key elements to maintain and expand your park. Once you've got those squared away and set up enclosures for your dinosaurs to roam, you can set up a lab and begin to incubate what ever dinosaurs you've collected sufficient DNA for. The more of their genome you have, the higher the success rate of incubation becomes. This can however be lowered if you attempt to modify their genetics to improve them from their vanilla version. Some of this can be offset by upgrading your lab with certain modules, but there's a limit to how many upgrades a building can have. The dinosaurs that you do release can usually take care of themselves, but they do have their own needs. Food and water is obvious, but they also need a certain amount of forest, wetland and grassland in the enclosure, which can prove tricky at times when you can't see the amount of each an enclosure has, have to eyeball it and have a look at their stats when they're roaming to see if they're good with what's there. Dinosaurs will also only co-exist with so many other dinosaurs in the enclosure as well as only so many of their own kind. This is easier to manage since that's easier to gauge. If a dinosaur gets uncomfortable, they may begin attacking the enclosure walls and break free to rampage around the park where your guests are, eating them in true Jurassic Park fashion.
As for your guests, they have their own wants to keep the cash flowing. Hotels and services will improve their opinion of the park and will net you passive income, transportation also helps because they don't like walking far, then setting up observatories at the enclosures will draw them to the main attraction. There's some overlays that will show where you can improve and sometimes it's just a matter of increasing staff presence at a structure to handle the number of people. This is something that you have to monitor though if you don't like wasting money as sometimes your services can be overburdened until you set up more and cause your other services to now have fewer people visiting it.
[u][b]Is it worth it?[/b][/u]
If you’re looking for a game where you manage a dinosaur park at your leisure, then Jurassic World Evolution is worth a look into. There are probably better games (and then there’s the sequels to this game), but depending on your system specs and budget, it may be worth looking into.
