It makes your park feel weirdly empty, despite being packed with visitors and staff. The same happens with viewing platforms, where one visitor will stand on the same spot rocking back and forward, completely oblivious to the dinosaurs below.
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It’s a little odd, to be honest, zooming in to a restaurant and seeing a series of empty tables, even though the game tells you that there are currently 84 visitors in the building. For example, if a visitor walks up to a shop, they simply disappear into nothingness.
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It wouldn’t matter if you could see these fish tanks and TV screens in your shops though, as visitors don’t enter buildings anyway. Instead, you can enrich your stores and food courts with fish tanks, fossil displays and other attractions to increase the income they bring in, but as these additions don’t add any physical changes to your buildings, it becomes an exorcise in simply picking the one that makes you the most money. You can change what your shop sells, for example, you can set up a doughnut shop instead of a steak house, but you can’t set menu prices or employ and monitor staff for the buildings. The same goes for shops and other visitor attractions which, while the addition of cosmetic changes is more than welcome, still feel like the most underbaked aspect of the game. Frontier has tried to give visitors more personality by giving them traits this time around, like making certain visitors Adventurous so they’re more likely to pool around carnivorous species, but it’s still not enough to make them feel like an interesting aspect of JWEs algorithm. You still can’t set ticket prices and visitors are still lifeless, carbon copies of each other who, outside occasionally getting eaten by dinosaurs, can’t be interacted with. What’s still lacking improvement is some of the basic park management traits you expect from a game such as this. It’s not perfect, but it helps ingest a lot more personality into your park designing skills. Added cosmetic additions to amenities, like shops and food courts, allows you to make your park feel more like your own, while additional foliage and signage lets you feel more in control of your parks overall image. To give Frontier credit, they have listened to many of the aspects of the feedback placed upon the original JWE. They are also used for researching and distributing medicine to your dinosaurs, and why many of these elements aren’t drastically different to JWE on their own, they feel more fleshed out with the added micro-management of the Scientists as an added task to becoming a successful dino entrepreneur. You can use them for all manner of tasks, like sending them on excavations for new fossils or flying them out to capture roaming beasts terrorising suburban America. A new addition to JWE2s key operational output are scientists, a group of experts almost as tricky to manage as your dinosaurs. Just like in its predecessor, Keeping your dinosaurs safe and secure within your park in JWE2 requires the likes of power sources, ranger outposts and paleo-medical facilities before it’s considered fit for purpose. Parks are crafted in the same fashion as JWE, as you create suitable environments for different species of dinosaurs based on their size, terrain and companionship needs. When compared to Frontiers other, frankly, often overwhelmingly dense management sims, JWE is the most user-friendly, obviously catered for fans of the franchise rather than simulation Aficionados. Under the surface, JWE2 is exceedingly similar to its predecessor.
These are the moments that make JWE an experience no dinosaur fan should forgo, but they, unfortunately, come at a cost. Somewhere deep in the park, the haunted screech of a Velociraptor can be heard as it closes in on an unsuspecting goat. Down below, a herd of crest-headed Parasaurolophus scatter into the forests, spooked by an Ankylosaurus swinging its massive armoured tail in defiance to the fences of its enclosure. It’s the John Williams strings, the growing orchestral beats while I watch my Brachiosaurus reach into the conifer trees to munch on a mouthful of leaves. It’s strange that, while Jurassic World Evolution is Frontiers lightest park management sim, it’s their franchise that draws me back the most.