![]() ![]() And assigning these staff members to tasks eats away at their fatigue gauge. Want to research better fences? Staff member. Want that synthesized dino put into an egg? Going to need another staff member for that. Want a dino? You'll need to assign a staff member to the creation lab to synthesize one. Every action close to the idea of developing the park is tied to these staff members. Staff come with salary requirements, a skillset that can be improved by training, and bonus perks that make them work better in one area than another. Now, the player is required to find warm bodies/potential dino snacks to fill them. It's no longer enough to plop building down. Probably the big new addition to gameplay mechanics is the introduction of staff management. On an island this makes sense, unless you want to teach your T-rexes how to doggy paddle, but in a setting where no bodies of water can be seen for miles, it kinda feels like lost potential. Seeing open landscape stretching out to meet the sky in the far distance is great and all, but the arbitrary build-limit perimeter makes sure to keep things together. Speaking of jumping around to places that are certainly not remote tropical islands, the decision to set JWE2 in larger landmasses presents a curious feeling that's very akin to what the fenced-in dinos must be feeling. The game says it is flying in the same carnotaurus from the previous level, but it could have easily been an entirely different one, like a parent who had to pull a fast one by blitzing to a pet shop to buy a replacement hamster lookalike before the kids get home from school, and 1) I wouldn't have noticed if they had brought in a completely new one otherwise and 2) It's not like I had hours to build up memories of teaching that carnotaurus tricks such that I would even recognize it when the transport helicopter lowered its snoozy, limp-tailed body to the ground. But this kind of callback lacks any kind of meaningful feel. Now, to be fair, the third level does have a minor callback in the form of dinos from the previous 2 levels being flown in at random times, requiring the player to drop everything to hastily assemble an enclosure within a 2-minute warning period by, I guess, hurriedly hammering a bunch of dowel rods into the ground and sprinting around the perimeter to wrap the entire thing in duct tape. Oh, and that one, 30-minute Arizona level? That's 20% of that campaign. Now move onto Washington where none of that previous work matters anymore. Cage a baryonyx, 3 triceratopses, and a 4-pack of stegos in Arizona? Great. With the sequel, the levels that make up the campaign feel like just that, levels. It felt like a management sim of the island chain, even if each island unexplainably had its own bank account for funding. The player could dabble around on one island for ages while the others unlock around them, completely abandon one island when a new one opened, or bounce back and forth among a few islands when one got boring. The original left me with the impression that each of the Five Deaths islands was its own little free-build sandbox (aside from things like arrival/departure points for guests). Onto the differences, everything feels a lot less free in this follow-up. ![]() At the end of the day, this is still a game about putting dinos behind fences and then putting them there again after they find a way out like overly large, scaly, murder kittens who want to explore away from momma for the first time. Along with the return of these characters is the return of the voice talent behind them in the form of Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard, even if we have to endure a store-brand version of Grady now with 120% more trying-too-hard humor and the unfortunate but necessary vocal stand-in for the late Richard Attenborough. Malcolm and a resigned sigh for Cabot Finch and Isaac-though a little grayer and with an additional wrinkle here or there. The personalities of the original game are back-with a thumbs-up for Dr. Dino animations are fully believable and even when the human models tend to move in herds (They do move in herds), its easy enough to believe that perhaps its just another example of how people walking in a group will sometimes fall into step with each other. The sequel has the same gorgeous attention to detail that the first one had. To begin, if someone were to show me a mixture of screenshots from both games with UI elements removed, I wouldn't be able to tell one from the other. It somehow manages to be both more of the same and significantly more complex than the 2018 original. So, I gave it a go on my Twitch channel last night for a little over 3 hours. I picked up Jurassic World Evolution 2 a couple of days ago, and it was unlocked yesterday. ![]()
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