The more (and more exotic) dinosaurs you collect, the more visitors will be drawn to marvel at the park’s exhibits, eat in the park’s restaurants, and then be eaten by the park’s exhibits. With the help of series heroes Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and Owen Grady (someone who certainly knows who Chris Pratt is), you must make sure the dinosaurs are happy, which you do by covering their paddocks in the right kind of shrubs, keeping their doctor’s appointments regular and not accidentally airdropping them into pens with things that want to eat them. Later you’ll recruit scientists, who can be sent on longer-range kidnappings to return rarer species. Instead we have the faintly Metal Gear Solid V experience of sneaking up on confused dinosaurs, hitting them with a tranquilliser dart and then watching a cargo chopper swoop down and snatch them up and away to begin a happier life in the paddock you’ve just built for them. All of the busy work from the first film (finding a mosquito trapped in amber, sucking out its prehistoric meal of dino blood, and hoping like a kid with a new pack of trading cards that it’s not one you’ve already got) can be dispensed with. Thanks to the events of the most recent film, in which a plot device dressed as an eight-year-old girl causes dinosaurs to be released into the wild, there has never been a better time to open one’s own Jurassic Park. And where John Hammond failed, this is a park experience I can thoroughly endorse, even if people do get eaten with distressing regularity. Instead it’s a beautiful game predominantly about finding the wonder in the creatures you’re looking after (or chasing around in Jeeps).
A bridge between the spiritually bereft Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the forthcoming Jurassic World: Dominion, this could so easily have been another cash-grab movie tie-in.
L ike its hulking, tourist-gulping attractions, Jurassic World Evolution 2 has both a silly name and DNA that has been stitched together from several different animals to create something improbably beautiful.