- Joined
- Feb 24, 2013
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- Conservative
So I picked this up to days ago after watching some Youtubers I follow playing it. It's a very solid "Tycoon" style game with a constant threat of dinosaur rampages.
Well, sort of... I think I broke the game with a simple deduction.
My pros and cons:
Pros:
- The game is absolutely beautiful at every level of zoom. There was a lot of care put into the visuals of this game.
- The game is really very deep and full of some great hard decisions. When you make a bad choice it can take a while for the scale of that decision to present itself... this kind of "unseen hand" type game evolution is essential, and done very well here.
- The coordination of dinosaur dig planning, DNA splicing and theme park design is amazingly compelling
Cons:
- The one major one so far is that the common sense that would have saved people throughout the Jurassic Park movie series works in Evolution. The solution: Don't incubate meat eaters. I mean, I do, eventually, but you can make amazingly successful parks using only herbivores. Moreover, the game almost forces you down this path because your park's success depends pretty heavily on the variety of dinosaurs and their visibility... the upside of herbivores is you can put them all happily into one big habitat and they live together happily... you can't keep carnivores in a pen with anything other than fellow carnivores as they kill each other. So the trick: One giant habitat for herbivores, and then one or two small habitats for a featured carnivore to boost ticket sales.
The game has hurricane and tropical storm mechanics that wreak havoc on your power system and management buildings, but these storms tend to force you to open your emergency shelters anyway... so if/when a dino escapes, you usually don't have people in harms way.
.. granted, they ramp up difficulty with each unlocked island, and there is always warnings of potential sabotage... so no doubt there will come a time when dinos are released into the park teaming with tourists, but so far not so much. Your worst enemy is yourself and poor money management.
Well, sort of... I think I broke the game with a simple deduction.
My pros and cons:
Pros:
- The game is absolutely beautiful at every level of zoom. There was a lot of care put into the visuals of this game.
- The game is really very deep and full of some great hard decisions. When you make a bad choice it can take a while for the scale of that decision to present itself... this kind of "unseen hand" type game evolution is essential, and done very well here.
- The coordination of dinosaur dig planning, DNA splicing and theme park design is amazingly compelling
Cons:
- The one major one so far is that the common sense that would have saved people throughout the Jurassic Park movie series works in Evolution. The solution: Don't incubate meat eaters. I mean, I do, eventually, but you can make amazingly successful parks using only herbivores. Moreover, the game almost forces you down this path because your park's success depends pretty heavily on the variety of dinosaurs and their visibility... the upside of herbivores is you can put them all happily into one big habitat and they live together happily... you can't keep carnivores in a pen with anything other than fellow carnivores as they kill each other. So the trick: One giant habitat for herbivores, and then one or two small habitats for a featured carnivore to boost ticket sales.
The game has hurricane and tropical storm mechanics that wreak havoc on your power system and management buildings, but these storms tend to force you to open your emergency shelters anyway... so if/when a dino escapes, you usually don't have people in harms way.
.. granted, they ramp up difficulty with each unlocked island, and there is always warnings of potential sabotage... so no doubt there will come a time when dinos are released into the park teaming with tourists, but so far not so much. Your worst enemy is yourself and poor money management.