Jurassic World Evolution 3 lets you design a custom park and fill it with macro beasts but at the cost of bit too much micromanagement

Date:
Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Description:
I love breeding dinosaurs and designing scenery in Jurassic World Evolution 3
but all the busywork feels like an unnecessary distraction

FULL STORY ======================================================================Review info Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X, Series S, PC
Release date: October 21, 2025

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a beast of a management simulation game that allows you to manage your own prehistoric park. Its by far the most creative entry in the series so far, offering you the ability to create your own buildings and scenery from scratch for the first time. The challenge mode, sandbox mode, and innovative campaign are crammed full of things to research and create, not to mention 70 different dinosaur species. But Jurassic World Evolution 3 also sometimes gets in its own way with systems that distract from, rather than deepen, your core objectives.

I should probably mention that Im a bit of a park management games addict, particularly those developed by Frontier Games. Not only did I write our Planet Coaster 2 review, but Ive poured a truly disgusting amount of time
into some of their other games. My current play time on Planet Zoo totals 1,100 hours or six and a half weeks solid so even though Im new to the Jurassic World Evolution franchise, Ive invested probably more of my life in park sim games than is entirely good for me.

While Jurassic World Evolution 3 might not offer quite the same absurd open sandbox experience of its sister titles, it does offer far more satisfying
and comprehensive management, bringing it far more in line with some of the best simulation games . I could always take or leave park management in the Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo games which is why I often switched it off entirely. But in Jurassic World Evolution 3 , management is much more in its genes.

At the heart of Evolution 3 , theres a really tight management loop. You hire scientists, send them on expeditions to harvest fossils, use them to extract the juicy dino DNA contained within, and then set them to work synthesizing any of the 70 species included in the game. You can then peruse the traits of the eggs this creates and decide which ones to hatch before incubating and releasing them into your chosen exhibit. (Image credit: Frontier
Developments)

Naturally, though, this is only half of the experience. Keen though the game is to stress that youre running a sanctuary for all these saurians, they sure look a lot like zoos, and, as with any zoo, you have commercial
considerations to take into account. Youll create viewing galleries to allow your guests to spy on your cretaceous critters, tours to get them up close
and personal, and amenities to make a fast buck keep them fed and watered.

Simple as this sounds, theres way more layered on top of this. Theres
dinosaur breeding to manage, research to conduct, and diseases to diagnose
and treat. And unless youre quick to tranquilize and return any carnivorous dinosaurs that break out to their pens, theyll scarf down your guests bringing a whole new meaning to the term paleo diet.

But it wouldnt be Jurassic World if you couldnt conduct crazy experiments
that cross a line man was not meant to cross. Before synthesizing species of dinosaurs, you can tinker around with their DNA, adding traits that modify their appetite and thirst, ups their resilience, improve their sociability,
or even improve their combat potential. And if thats too vanilla for you, you can also research awful genetic chimeras, including the Indominus Rex, Indoraptor, and Spinoceratops. On the campaign tail (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

In fact, there are so many mechanics at play, I was glad the Campaign was there to hold my hand. Its the first time Ive found the Campaign mode of a management sim game to genuinely be unmissable, rather than something I can just dip my toes in. And theres certainly plenty to get your teeth into here.

After the events of the Jurassic World franchise, youre leading the Dinosaur Integration Network (DIN), an organisation dedicated to helping dinosaurs coexist alongside humanity. Conveniently, keeping the public safe from
vicious man-eaters and helping endangered dinosaurs breed looks a lot like running a certain Jurassic-themed park, so you wont find much of a tonal
shift here.

While the campaign is structured across a series of parks around the world, youll work across them concurrently although youll be moved on to new locations as you complete story objectives, as your international reputation improves, further objectives are unlocked in maps youve already visited. This feels far more dynamic an incentive to return to former parks than just improving a star rating: I genuinely felt like I was running a global network of sanctuaries that each impact one another, rather than just visiting isolated maps that I was done with the second I moved on to the next one. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

The voice acting is generally excellent. Jeff Goldblum is fantastic as always as Ian Malcolm, even if his lines largely are just arch variations on: Welp, here we go again! And while I wouldnt say the story throws that many curveballs, there are just enough elements like interfering corporate interests and human-supremacist saboteurs to add some bumps in the road.

Should you want a more focused test of your skills, Challenge mode provides a variety of scenarios for you to tackle. From containing vicious carnivores with limited fencing to pacifying grouchy giants without tweaking their genome, I found there was a decent variety of trials to help me flex my management muscles. Jurassic Parks & Recreation (Image credit: Frontier Developments) Best bit (Image credit: Frontier Developments) Zipping around
in vehicles to vaccinate velociraptors, snap photos of protoceratops, or
tranq raging tyrannosaurs never ceases to amuse me. Yes, you can automate this, but why would you let your artificial park employees have all the fun? Come on: lets hop in this chopper and chase after some plodding sauropods.

Not everything in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is quite so high-stakes. Theres always the option to just kick back and enjoy the fun of creating your
perfect park, whether in the campaign missions or in the dedicated sandbox mode. And this is where the game really shines: designing your dream habitats and getting up close and personal with the prehistoric beasts in them.

Part of the reason for this is that the creatures themselves are exquisite. Generally speaking, I found the graphics in Jurassic World Evolution 3 to be good, if unexceptional. On Ultra settings, the game ran at a smooth 60 fps on our Acer Predator Helios 300 laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, but from a bird's eye view, it was pretty, but didnt necessarily blow me away in the way I expected.

However, once you get down to the level where youre face-to-face with your dinosaurs, the 3D models are beautifully detailed and animated, while raytracing gives lighting effects and shadows a literal glow up. At one
point, I watched some sauropods wading across the shallows in front of a guests canoe, and the way they were silhouetted against the sun was spectacular. I just wish my parks had quite the same pop when viewed from an overhead perspective.

Fortunately, there are plenty of excuses to immerse yourself in your parks. You view everything from your guests perspectives, whether thats viewing
their perspective from ride cameras or walking around in the in-game Google Street View. But, on top of this, you can take the wheel of every vehicle in your park to deliver meds to your dinosaurs or mend fences when the
inevitable happens and theres a breakout.

Theres also the opportunity to channel your inner architect and create your own scenery. Frontiers games have always been creatively anarchic: you have complete freedom to design whatever you want to decorate your parks and zoos, but the tools at your disposal were frequently chaotic, often requiring all kinds of botches and hard work to make bespoke scenery that looked truly organic.

Up until now, Jurassic World Evolution has been the exception to this rule, limiting you to prefabricated buildings and scenery items. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Well, not anymore. In Jurassic World Evolution 3 , Frontier has added the ability to create your own amenities and decorations from scratch, adding an enormous toybox of scenery parts for you to play with. From rock formations and fossils to gantries and girders, it enabled me to build up my own blueprints piece by piece, including aquatic coral reefs and a slightly wonky fountain centerpiece.

But while Jurassic World Evolution 3 has been learning elements from other games in Frontiers fold, its also been refining them.

Path-placing mechanics are far more intelligent I was able to quickly lay
out straight routes and curving arcs simply by placing my cursor where I wanted it to go, rather than messing around with path angles. The
part-scaling that was introduced in Planet Coaster 2 has been expanded here, allowing me to tweak the size of almost any model to achieve much more
variety in my scenery design. And plants are now fully animated, swaying in the breeze and bending double during storms, making them feel far more alive.

In my opinion, theres even more Jurassic World Evolution 3 could learn from its sister titles, though. Enclosures still arent as flexible as in Planet
Zoo guests really only interact with dinosaurs from set-pieces rather than marvelling over them from every viewpoint, and creature path-finding isnt as sophisticated, making multi-height habitats impossible. And theres no way to create raised paths, which makes multistory buildings and bridges over enclosures impossible, so maps are by necessity much flatter than Id like. Im not quite as free as Id like to create sprawling, hyperrealistic dino parks, and thats a shame. Micromanageasaurus (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Fundamentally, theres a reason for this more restrictive gameplay. Unlike
some of its sister titles, Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a management sim first and a creative sandbox second. And while this often works to its
favour, there are points in the campaign where I started to find its
mechanics became as gargantuan and unwieldy as the genetic revenants I was managing.

Regularly, while playing Jurassic World Evolution 3 , Id have to drop what I was doing because my prehistoric pets werent happy with the flora on offer in their exhibits. With a single species of dinosaur in an enclosure, this is trivial to satisfy you quickly paint in different kinds of cover, water, fiber, nuts, and fruit until the sliders representing their preferences are satisfied.

But add multiple species to a single exhibit something that is not only encouraged but mandatory in some scenarios and requirements quickly
conflict. For example, my Apatosaurs love tall leafy plants and pasture,
while my Lokiceratops, Houdini, wouldnt stop perennially trying to break out of her prison until Id provided ground fiber and a wetland. And this is all exacerbated by the fact that juvenile dinosaurs have different requirements from adults, meaning exhibiting even just two species together means youll often have four radically opposed needs to meet. This is Houdini, the Lokiceratops. Her endless breakouts make her my nemesis. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Satisfying conflicting needs is a zero-sum game: painting in one removes another, and, as you seemingly cant pin two different dinosaurs needs on screen at once, youll often come away happy that youve pleased one cretaceous critter only to discover the other is now sulking over the lack of swamps.

Even once youve reached an equilibrium, laying tours through exhibits will carve swathes through the undergrowth, meaning you need to repaint it all
over again. Ultimately, Id regularly find myself having to expand exhibit sizes after the fact, moving all my guest facilities in the process, just to ensure I could satisfy competing demands that were now impossible to meet within the existing space. Balancing dinosaurs' needs can be painful and not that rewarding. (Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Now, Ill readily acknowledge the game has mechanisms to ameliorate some of these issues. Once you have unlocked enough dinosaur species, you can select pairings that align better with their requirements. And tweaking Houdinis genome could have allowed me to make her more relaxed about her environmental requirements. However, these are tools youll only research later in a map playthrough, and in the interim, youre left with a bunch of busywork that commits the cardinal sin in a management game: its just not that fun.

This is a real shame because many other tasks in the game are a real blast, and I loved releasing new monsters into my exhibits or building unique scenery. But if Im going to be pulled away from these enjoyable tasks to
fight fires, the mechanics should support me in dousing them permanently, not reignite the same one the second my back is turned. Should you play Jurassic World Evolution 3? (Image credit: Frontier Developments) Play it if

You want an innovatively designed campaign
I love the way Jurassic World Evolution 3 s main campaign plays out as a series of concurrent maps that have further objectives unlocked as your reputation grows. It gives a much better reason to revisit older maps and makes it feel like a true international network of parks.

You like having a lot on your plate
Whether youre managing expeditions, building exhibits, breeding dinosaurs, or trying to research monstrous genetic chimeras, theres an almost dizzying amount you can do in this game.

Youre a Jurassic Park super-fan
From Jeff Goldblums sardonic quips to the various movie-mimicking designs, there are a lot of elements here that will give you that nostalgic buzz. If you dont mutter clever girl the first time your velociraptor busts out of its enclosure, you have far more self-control than I do. Dont play it if

Micromanagement makes you Tyrannosaurus vexed
Everything you do in this game takes time to complete, while dinosaur needs are difficult to balance and feel a bit thankless at times. If youre not a
fan of having to wait for timers to count down or repeatedly tweaking things to balance sliders, you might want to give it a miss.

You just want Planet Zoo, but dinosaurs
Fundamentally, Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a management game and doesnt offer as smart creature simulation as a game like Planet Zoo . If you just want to build a wholesome zoo packed with cute dinosaur interactions, it may not be for you.

You want a limitless creative sandbox
The new building elements Frontier has added here have definitely added some much-needed creativity. But you still may not find it offers quite the same creative freedom as some of the developers other games, so bear that in mind. Accessibility

Jurassic World Evolution 3 has a good range of accessibility options. You
can tweak the colors of both the UI and management views for Deuteranopia, Protonopia, Tritanopia, and high contrast. You can also switch on highlight mode for dinosaurs, tweak the highlight color according to these same profiles, and set the highlight distance.

On top of this, you can tweak the size and opacity of subtitles, set
different colors for different speakers, and increase the scale of the HUD. There are also options to disable certain effects, allowing you to switch off camera shaking and flashing effects. How I reviewed Jurassic World Evolution
3

I played Jurassic World Evolution 3 over the course of two weeks. Not only
did I play my way through the campaign, but I also experimented with building my own park from scratch in Sandbox mode and explored the challenges available.

I reviewed the PC version, but I also tried it out on multiple platforms, including our Acer Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop and on my Steam Deck ,
to see how it fared on multiple devices. I also played it using a keyboard
and mouse and using a PowerA Moga XP-Ultra multi-platform wireless controller to test out various control modes.

In terms of experience, not only have I been reviewing gaming hardware for around five years, but I've spent my whole life playing simulation games, dating right back to Theme Park on the PC. I've also played many of Frontier Developments' games to date, having played Planet Coaster and Planet Coaster
2 and clocked up a ridiculous 1,100 hours in Planet Zoo .

First reviewed: October 2025



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/gaming/jurassic-world-evolution-3-review


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