**Jurassic World Evolution 3 Review**
Dear Frontier, if you’re reading this, please somehow make all your fantastic sims cross-compatible. Sure, maybe the wallabies from *Planet Zoo* might not want to procreate next to an enclosure of velociraptors while a triple inverted coaster screams overhead. Still, you say “build it your way,” right? Wishful thinking aside, thanks for *Jurassic World Evolution 3*. It’s the best of the series. It’s also just a wink and a nudge away from *Planet Zoo*, so let’s talk about that crossover.
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### Incremental, but Large Increments
In *Jurassic World Evolution 3*, your tasks remain essentially the same as in prior games. The overarching challenge is finding a balance between commerce and conservation, exploitation and, well, evolution. Turning a profit while advancing science, dinosaur genetics, and efficient keeping.
The tasks are not unlike those in *Planet Zoo*, but the captives are a bit more extreme. *Jurassic World Evolution 3* doesn’t throw the baby tyrannosaur out with the bathwater, because it doesn’t need to. The fundamentals remain solid.
There’s a campaign, a sandbox, and some one-off challenges — more than enough to keep fans satisfied for a good long while. However, for *Jurassic World Evolution 3*, Frontier has added a bit more depth around breeding, genetics, and the dinosaur growth cycle.
The game introduces juvenile animals. In addition to being adorable and audience-pleasing, they also have a separate range of behaviors with each other and their parents. They exhibit the blended genetic tendencies and appearance you might expect.
Juveniles have unique needs separate from adults. It means more stuff to balance, but that’s what players enjoy. Breeding now takes into consideration sexual dimorphism, fertility, compatibility, territory size, and nest placement. Part of the game’s campaign deals with bioengineering enough males to populate breeding programs.
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### Dr. Malcolm Returns
The singular Jeff Goldblum — aka The Fly, aka The Wizard of Oz, aka Dr. Ian Malcolm — returns to quip and intone his usual scientific warnings, but the cast is uniformly pretty good.
Overall, the game’s campaign is the best of the three games, taking the player from Hawaii to Japan to the Nevada desert. As always, the campaign is part narrative, part tutorial, and moves along at a welcome, streamlined clip.
The game’s challenge mode presents players with a range of one-off scenarios to test their ability in a variety of situations. If nothing else, the scenarios are a great practice tool for deep diving into the game’s systems.
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### Play in the Sandbox
For me, and I suspect many other players, the campaign is like the vegetables, and the sandbox is the dessert. That doesn’t mean the veggies aren’t nutritious and can’t be delicious, but the freedom of building in the sandbox is endlessly fun.
As always, players can shape the sandbox experience in extremely granular ways. For some players, paying attention to every detail of infrastructure, staffing, maintenance, and research is pure joy; for others, worrying about building a sustainable power grid is annoying.
For *Jurassic World Evolution 3*, Frontier introduces modular building tools and the ability to easily customize buildings and other design elements in far more detail. Easy is relative, of course. Building an aesthetically pleasing and entertaining park experience is always a challenge.
This version includes a few new attractions, maybe the coolest of which is a kayak ride. Guests can paddle down rivers while dinos graze on the banks. The new zipline ride lets people swoop over herds of dinosaurs. Will a pen of hungry allosaurs nip at the heels of zipliners? Let’s find out.
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### Fly in the Amber
I played *Jurassic World Evolution 3* on the PS5, which means using the controller for building. Thanks largely to Frontier porting its games to consoles, the practicality of playing a building sim with a controller has steadily improved.
It will probably never be as easy or intuitive as a mouse and keyboard, but the experience is relatively painless in *Jurassic World Evolution 3*.
Let me copy/paste my standard Frontier sim game complaint: lack of compatibility with prior games. Especially when a game’s tech is more iterative than dramatically different, having to repurchase content always smacks of greed. It was true in *Planet Coaster*, and it’s true in *Evolution 3*.
However, one really bright spot is that blueprints and player-made content in the Frontier Workshop is cross-platform compatible.
Generally, *Jurassic World Evolution 3* looks great, especially its lighting and scenery. At least on the PS5, some of the dinosaur skin textures have an unrealistic plastic/rubber sheen to them. However, dinosaur animations continue to evolve and feel ever more lifelike.
Players looking forward to playing on PS5 should note that there have been some issues with limits on park complexity. Frontier is working on this problem.
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Thanks to its modular building systems, new juvenile dinosaurs, and engaging campaign, *Jurassic World Evolution 3* is the best of the series. It feels like a more flexible and more refined version of a familiar game.
If it had compatibility with prior content, it would be a 10/10, but *Jurassic World Evolution 3* is a great foundation for expansion.
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*PS5 code provided by the publisher for review.*
https://cogconnected.com/review/jurassic-world-evolution-3-review/
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