A few years ago, I wrote about how Jurassic World Evolution 2 was my favorite “sequel” to Jurassic Park, as it was the first time since that magical moviegoing night in 1993 that I felt genuine love for this franchise again. I spent countless hours on the game's campaign and various other modes, completing my tasks and unlocking everything to make my parks as thoroughly satisfying as possible, in a game primarily created to help promote yet another junky movie in the series (Dominion, in that case).
Well, now it's 2025, and just as we have another underwhelming movie to waste two hours of our life we will never get back (Rebirth), Frontier Developments has given us a new installment, simply titled Jurassic World Evolution 3.
If you've played the others, you know the drill: you are tasked with keeping a variety of parks around the world up and running, completing objectives given to you by scientists and money men. Jeff Goldblum returns once again to voice Ian Malcolm, who will always warn you about the dangers of what you're doing but occasionally congratulate you on achieving the impossible: keeping the animals happy and the humans alive.
You'll create pens for the various dinosaur breeds (over 80 this time around), ensuring the ecosystem is to their liking and that any other dinos around will coexist peacefully, rather than fighting and scaring off the human visitors. But it's not all dino fun – you'll need to make sure the guests have plenty to eat and drink, hotels to stay in, and yes, shelters to hide in if the dinos break free. Of course, you can also ensure they'll never break free by simply remapping their DNA to be less hostile to other breeds. Or go the other way and turn the lovable Gallimimus into violent apex predators.
You'll also manage a growing team of scientists, sending them around the globe to excavate sites and recreate more dinosaur breeds, while ensuring they don't become overworked. Maintenance and response teams need to be dispatched to keep everything running smoothly and to periodically check on the dinos to make sure they're not sick or overcrowded.
And, while you can largely ignore it for the campaign, you can unleash your interior designer skills and create a park that rivals the aesthetic glory of the one we saw in Jurassic World, thanks to a robust scenery tool that lets you place trees, plants, displays, signs, and countless other things around the park. If you've seen it in one of the movies, you can build it here, and then customize it for good measure.
Do you still need this game if you've already played the other two? Well, if you loved those and enjoy making your own park, absolutely yes. The quality of life improvements across the board make this the definitive experience, to the extent that I can't imagine going back to the others again, as they'll seem so limited now.
Two things in particular have been literal gamechangers: maintenance posts and breeding. In previous games, fixing fences and refilling generators was a tedious, manual operation that slowed things down. Now you can place posts around the park and assign a team to automatically inspect everything in that vicinity, the same way you've always been able to send rangers and doctors to check on dinos. This means you won't be constantly besieged with power outages when your generators run out of fuel, a lifesaver in the early stages of the campaign, before you are given the opportunity to add actual power stations.
This update gives you more time to just enjoy the incredible animations for your virtual pets, especially when they nest. Yes, now you can make babysauruses! You don't have to wait for dinos with tree frog DNA to change their sex – you can do it yourself during the incubation process, making a few males to go along with the default females. Then you can add a nest in the pen and, eventually, the momma will lay some eggs in it.
However, you may want to remove the nest after a while, as some species breed prolifically; I had about four times as many Corythosauruses after a few hours, resulting in a very overcrowded pen. In previous games, you had to go back and incubate more eggs to replace your brachiosaurs and such as they got old and died. Now the population can self-regenerate, which adds a new gameplay challenge: as their population expands, so do their needs. You might need to make their area larger, add more water, or food sources to nourish them, etc. But what if you already built something else nearby? Planning ahead has never been more vital in these games.
There are also a lot more tour options to go along with the standard Jeep and gyrosphere adventures. You can now build a hot air balloon tour, a jungle cruise, and even small glass domes that can be placed inside the pen for up-close viewing, accessible via a tunnel that connects from the other side of the all-important fences.
These sorts of experiences increase the park's popularity, unlocking more options and areas of the world to visit, and allowing visitors to tackle new challenges. The gameplay loop has never been as addictive, and even after a couple of dozen hours, I still haven't managed to unlock all the various types of buildings and upgrades that are available once you complete certain objectives or reach a certain level of respect.
There are, however, a couple of caveats. One is that the campaign is incredibly long, but it also allows you to complete areas in any order you like. Which is fine in general, but occasionally leads you to feel like you're back in a tutorial, as the story writers clearly assumed you would have jumped around more often. At one point, I visited a park for the first time and had to listen to the NPCs explain how to build a power station and pylons to connect them, something I had already done hours ago in a different park where I had progressed far enough to unlock it.
Also, as has always been the case, each park has its own bank account it seems, so it can be frustrating to jump to a new park, when funds are not plentiful, and feel forced to use some of them to unlock a new building type when you have hundreds of millions just sitting elsewhere (yes, you can go to the richer park to unlock something and go back, but that's a cumbersome workaround).
The challenge modes are fun, though some can be more nerve-racking than necessary, particularly the Biosyn Sanctuary, which gives you a mostly empty patch of land and sends dinos (via airlift) every couple of minutes. I often barely finished building a new area for them before they arrived, and of course, had to figure out their environmental needs and assign rangers/medics to their area, a process that often wasn't finished by the time the next set of dinos was about to arrive.
You can delay their arrival for two minutes (once), but it's not even the timing that makes things an issue (indeed, that's the “challenge” you're there for) – it's the fact that you have no idea what the next dinosaur species will be. So, unless you've memorized the various types and their needs, you have to wait until they arrive to actually populate their new home, during the time you should be setting up a new area for the next arrival. Otherwise, you inevitably waste time/space/money on a pen for a dinosaur that it's not suited for.
I also encountered frequent crashes during my first week of play, even with a day-one patch. However, after a second update, I only experienced this issue once over the past few days. Perhaps by the time this is published, another update will resolve the remaining bugs. I should stress that this is on the PS5, so maybe Xbox and PC are more stable?
On that note, while these games are far more console-friendly than any other sim I've played. The enhancements to the scenery options this time around, as well as the new feature that allows you to create entire buildings from the ground up, are far too cumbersome for a standard controller in my opinion, and much more suited to a mouse and keyboard. The sheer number of options for scenery is a chore to scroll through, and even with various “snap to“ type tools, the process of putting a building together is just too finicky when you just have a pair of thumbsticks at your disposal.
As for sandbox mode, it's unsurprisingly the best yet. In addition to giving you all of the game maps to build your park, there is also an island generator that will make it *entirely* your own. Just as in the other games, you can customize the experience to make it as painless as possible (the dinosaur needs, population issues, electricity… you can turn off anything that annoys you) while being handed an unlimited budget with every item unlocked.
Even better, Frontier has finally added access for user creations, so you can download entire parks or specific custom builds (favorite find so far: a set that has the medics, rangers, and maintenance teams in one complex) that others have made and use them in your own worlds.
While it's not without a few quirks, it's a winner overall, and certainly the best game in the series in terms of options (and graphics upgrades, of course), making it the easy choice if you are a budding designer and want to create your own perfect Jurassic Park. The developers seem to have loosened the restrictions on how closely buildings can be constructed (although I still ran into some constraints that didn't make much sense to me), sped up the building process, and improved the snapping function when connecting monorail tracks or pathways.
The tools to flatten/raise the terrain have also improved greatly, and I am 99% sure they've severely reduced the number of storms and made them less destructive to boot. There will still be downtime while waiting for an egg to incubate or something, but for the most part, you will now spend most of the time on the fun parts of the game, with the frustrations kept to a minimum.
That said, if you have played the other two and tend to stick to the campaign/challenges and ignore the freedom of sandbox mode, then I guess it depends on how much you love this franchise. The campaign is a bit too long, and since the objectives mostly revolve around things you've done in the other games, it can feel a bit too similar if you're not all that interested in embracing the expanded options to fully realize the park of your dreams. There's only so many times you can build a Stegosaurus pen, you know?
Also, for what it's worth, Goldblum is the only returning cast member; the other two games had Laura Dern, Bryce Howard, Sam Neill, etc. (Chris Pratt never joined the fun), but here it's just Malcolm, who is mostly repeating himself at this point. Curiously, they didn't even bother to include the Distortus Rex or Mutadon from the new movie, though I suppose it could be saved for DLC, as both previous games released extra stuff to tie into the current sequels. But there's so much that IS here, it can almost be exhausting as it is, so “it doesn't have *everything*“ might actually be a pro, not a con.
Long story short, I'll be playing this for a long time. I still have the last bit of the campaign and some challenges to go through, and I've barely scratched the surface of sandbox mode. The aforementioned reduction in the game's most frustrating aspects (storms, fiddling with pathways, etc) makes it an excellent choice for those who want to shut out the annoyances of the real world for a while.
There's something kind of endearing about the pride I feel when I return to a park and see that it's still running smoothly. The ability to check out other players' parks can sustain a few game sessions all on their own. If you have designs to show off, please reply to the social media postings with your code so I can check them out!
