JURASSIC PARK:
OPERATION GENESIS
REVIEW

A big sticking point with the modern Frontier management sims is the quality of the financial simulation aspects. A lot of people argue that they're just plain too easy; I remember when Planet Coaster first came out there were a lot of complaints about the fact that the three differing types of guests didn't differ enough in practice to care about, that condiments didn't affect price-per-unit of food, etc. Minor things really, but they all add up and make these games frustratingly easy.
I'd agree with these criticisms literally--these games are extremely easy--but I'd disagree that shallow finances alone make a management game bad. Planet Zoo, for instance, is so easy in challenge mode (not even getting into puppy-milling warthogs in franchise) that there's almost no reason to play it outside of an infinite-money sandbox where you can dedicate yourself to the really fun part: building the damn zoo. You can make pretty much anything you can imagine, seriously. I've seen people make everything from nearly 1:1 recreations of real zoos to bizarre fantasy parks with walkthrough polar-bear exhibits to unethical 1920s-styled zoos where every single enclosure is just plain concrete with a feeding bowl somewhere. I have no desire to ever touch the simulation modes again, but the building mechanics alone make it one of my favourite games of all time. It's not a financially deep game but it is still mechanically deep enough in other areas to be fun.
Jurassic World Evolution had the same financial depth as the Planet games but with none of the customization or building mechanics that makes those worth playing. I wrote a loose off-the-cuff review here recently from my memories of 50 hours' playtime years ago, but the short version is that it has nothing interesting in the way of management, a handful of miniscule decorations with exciting names such as 'rock 2' and 'fallen log', OK dinosaurs, and basically nothing to recommend it on. I've been told the sequel is better but I ain't dropping 60 dollars to find out.
Discussions of JWE's quality, in my experience, inevitably descended into 'JPOG did it better' regardless of topic--the dinosaurs, the management, the difficulty--and I was always sorta curious as to whether these JPOG superfans were right or just nostalgic for a Zoo Tycoon variant they dicked around on as a kid. I finally went and ran a park to see and my God I am sorry for ever doubting them. This game is killer.

The main difference between this game and JWE, to me, is that JWE felt like you were managing a really hands-off, low-density (yet huge in scale) zoo-resort hybrid. JPOG feels like you’re managing Jurassic Park. The management is harder, sure, but more importantly it’s more thematic—the pull between making your guests happy, guessing at what your dinosaurs want and trying to keep them healthy and safe, trying to make money, and trying to preemptively prepare for the next tropical storm or dinosaur breakout is constantly on your mind and constantly important. This is the first time I've seen a game use a research mechanic well, I think--every time I was researching something that wasn't a vaccine or stronger fences it felt like I was taking a real risk. Every time I added a new, more impressive species I was excited because, yay, new low-polygon dinosaur!, but I was also thinking, shit, when the next storm hits if this Albertosaurus pack gets out I am capital-F fucked. In JWE you could click on a dinosaur and see the exact numbers to make it happy--space, herd numbers, plants, etc.--and here you get some vague bars that I wasn't even sure how to read for a good first chunk of time (if the hunger/thirst/predation bar is full it's actually a bad thing.) That may not be intentional but it sold the 'nature is inscrutable and unpredictable' theme of the franchise way better. Finances aren't super tight (more on that in a bit) but I did have to worry over them and a high-level dinosaur death could be as devastating as a guest casualty simply because a new Stegosaurus would cost me 5000 dollars and lack the same draw as it's predecessor because it hasn't gored any carnivores to death yet.
Meanwhile, nearly all the things I liked in JWE are here: piloting helicopters and driving Jeeps (well, land cruisers here), photography for extra cash, some great dino designs, kitschy 90s heavily-themed buildings, tropical ambience--in many ways this feels like the improved sequel, playing it second. It's just a better game all-around I feel.

Speaking of ambience--this might be the first management game I give special praise to the soundtrack of. The orchestral score here is really good. I'm not sure how much is borrowed from the movies and how much is original (I've only ever seen the first Jurassic Park), but the way it slides between pastoral to tense depending on what you're doing is excellent and the music itself is all really well-done. I need to read up on some music theory sometime so I can talk about this stuff without sounding like a moron but yeah, it's, like, good, man.
Dinosaurs are fun-looking and interesting to watch, especially when you keep them in herds and see them having internal fights for dominance. They all feel pretty different from each other--Edmontosaurus sticks out in my mind as being noisy and particularly nervous compared to other large herbivores, Stegosaurus and Kentrosaurus felt and looked different enough to justify keeping both, etc. JWE had an issue where a lot of dinosaurs just felt like better versions of other dinosaurs but the smaller cast and higher creative license here avoids that pretty handily. And you can keep a carnivore in with some herbivorous dinosaurs without having them all killed nearly immediately!! And people actually like seeing herbivores get hunted so if you want to make a 'thrill attraction' you don't have to spend a shitton of money making carnivores hunt each other while still paying for goats!! How is THIS the one that came out in 2003?

On the financial end, things aren't super tough but I did dip into the red a few times and actually spent time experimenting with food prices and stuff like that, which is good enough for me. The really tough parts are storms, which destroy fences and break buildings until you pay out the ass for repairs--plus they can cost you your dinosaurs, through stress, having to be 'retired' to prevent guest casualties, or a tornado straightup hurling one of them into the ocean, never to be seen again. I only saw 2 during my playthrough here but there seems to be a good variety in how they behave and there are some other weather conditions like heat waves that affect your park. I didn't find anything that could be super easily gamed but then I only mucked around with one park so I could be missing something.
I ended up abandoning my first save not due to financial issues but due to poor layout planning--none of my guests were heading deep enough into my park to see the real high-ticket dinosaurs like Triceratops and Brachiosaurus which were costing me an arm and a leg to keep, and everyone complained about crowds no matter how high I jacked tickets because I had basically made the park in the shape of A Line That Went South. That's on me. And it makes me want to see what layouts really work here, knowing that they count so much. But it's also possible that something about guest AI in this game makes it have the same problem Planet Zoo's guest AI has, and that there's no way to fix this, which would be a real point against this game. I'd have to experiment more to find out, I guess.

And this is a more minor note, but the usage of the movie characters here is pretty great. Ellie’s anguished "you have to do something!" whenever a dinosaur gets sick or the lawyer dude’s smarmy "if you can drag yourself away from the park for a moment, I’d like to speak to you" whenever you get a new quarterly report alone have more character than the entirety of JWE’s original cast (and falling-asleep-intro-Goldblum) combined.

The only real issue that jumps out at me so far is that there's a lot of dead time with nothing to do. I think this is an intentional design decision since there's no pause function here but I did spend an awful lot of time just watching dinosaurs hang out waiting for either a new influx of cash or something bad to happen.

Overall I had a really good time with this and will keep it in my simulation-game list for the future. As a 'Berta girl I have to love it anyways for having Albertosaurus and Edmontosaurus featured, goated dinosaur selection forreal