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Review data
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 administration simulation sport that means that you can handle your individual prehistoric park. It’s by far probably the most inventive entry within the sequence thus far, providing you the power to create your individual buildings and surroundings from scratch for the primary time. The problem mode, sandbox mode, and modern marketing campaign are crammed filled with issues to analysis and create, to not point out 70 completely different dinosaur species. But Jurassic World Evolution 3 additionally generally will get in its personal method with programs that distract from, relatively than deepen, your core aims.
I ought to in all probability point out that I’m a little bit of a park administration video games addict, significantly these developed by Frontier Games. Not solely did I write our Planet Coaster 2 review, however I’ve poured a really disgusting period of time into a few of their different video games. My present play time on Planet Zoo totals 1,100 hours – or six and a half weeks strong – so though I’m new to the Jurassic World Evolution franchise, I’ve invested in all probability extra of my life in park sim video games than is completely 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 may all the time take or depart park administration within the Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo video games – which is why I usually switched it off completely. But in Jurassic World Evolution 3, administration is rather more in its genes.
At the guts of Evolution 3, there’s a extremely tight administration loop. You rent scientists, ship them on expeditions to reap fossils, use them to extract the juicy dino DNA contained inside, after which set them to work synthesizing any of the 70 species included within the sport. You can then peruse the traits of the eggs this creates and determine which of them to hatch earlier than incubating and releasing them into your chosen exhibit.
Naturally, though, this is only half of the experience. Keen though the game is to stress that you’re 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. You’ll 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, there’s way more layered on top of this. There’s dinosaur breeding to manage, research to conduct, and diseases to diagnose and treat. And unless you’re quick to tranquilize and return any carnivorous dinosaurs that break out to their pens, they’ll scarf down your guests – bringing a whole new meaning to the term ‘paleo diet’.
But it wouldn’t be Jurassic World if you couldn’t 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 that’s too vanilla for you, you can also research awful genetic chimeras, including the Indominus Rex, Indoraptor, and Spinoceratops.
On the campaign tail
In fact, there are so many mechanics at play, I was glad the Campaign was there to hold my hand. It’s the first time I’ve found the Campaign mode of a management sim game to genuinely be unmissable, rather than something I can just dip my toes in. And there’s certainly plenty to get your teeth into here.
After the events of the Jurassic World franchise, you’re 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 won’t find much of a tonal shift here.
While the campaign is structured across a series of parks around the world, you’ll work across them concurrently – although you’ll be moved on to new locations as you complete story objectives, as your international reputation improves, further objectives are unlocked in maps you’ve 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.
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 wouldn’t 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
Best bit
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: let’s hop in this chopper and chase after some plodding sauropods.
Not everything in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is quite so high-stakes. There’s 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 computer with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, however from a chicken’s eye view, it was fairly, however didn’t essentially blow me away in the way in which I anticipated.
However, when you get right down to the extent the place you’re face-to-face along with your dinosaurs, the 3D fashions are superbly detailed and animated, whereas raytracing offers lighting results and shadows a literal glow up. At one level, I watched some sauropods wading throughout the shallows in entrance of a visitor’s canoe, and the way in which they have been silhouetted towards the solar was spectacular. I simply want my parks had fairly the identical pop when seen from an overhead perspective.
Fortunately, there are many excuses to immerse your self in your parks. You view all the things out of your visitors’ views, whether or not that’s viewing their perspective from experience cameras or strolling round within the in-game Google Street View. But, on high of this, you possibly can take the wheel of each automobile in your park to ship meds to your dinosaurs or mend fences when the inevitable occurs and there’s a breakout.
There’s additionally the chance to channel your inside architect and create your individual surroundings. Frontier’s video games have all the time been creatively anarchic: you’ve full freedom to design no matter you need to embellish your parks and zoos, however the instruments at your disposal have been ceaselessly chaotic, usually requiring every kind of botches and onerous work to make bespoke surroundings that seemed actually natural.
Up till now, Jurassic World Evolution has been the exception to this rule, limiting you to prefabricated buildings and surroundings gadgets.
Well, not anymore. In Jurassic World Evolution 3, Frontier has added the power to create your individual facilities and decorations from scratch, including an infinite toybox of surroundings components so that you can play with. From rock formations and fossils to gantries and girders, it enabled me to construct up my very own blueprints piece by piece, together with aquatic coral reefs and a barely wonky fountain centerpiece.
But whereas Jurassic World Evolution 3 has been studying parts from different video games in Frontier’s fold, it’s additionally been refining them.
Path-placing mechanics are much more clever – I used to be capable of shortly lay out straight routes and curving arcs just by putting my cursor the place I wished it to go, relatively than messing round with path angles. The part-scaling that was launched in Planet Coaster 2 has been expanded right here, permitting me to tweak the dimensions of virtually any mannequin to realize rather more selection in my surroundings design. And crops are actually absolutely animated, swaying within the breeze and bending double throughout storms, making them really feel much more alive.
In my opinion, there’s much more Jurassic World Evolution 3 may be taught from its sister titles, although. Enclosures nonetheless aren’t as versatile as in Planet Zoo – visitors actually solely work together with dinosaurs from set-pieces relatively than marvelling over them from each viewpoint, and creature path-finding isn’t as refined, making multi-height habitats not possible. And there’s no solution to create raised paths, which makes multistory buildings and bridges over enclosures not possible, so maps are by necessity a lot flatter than I’d like. I’m not fairly as free as I’d prefer to create sprawling, hyperrealistic dino parks, and that’s a disgrace.
Micromanageasaurus
Fundamentally, there’s 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, I’d have to drop what I was doing because my prehistoric pets weren’t 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, wouldn’t stop perennially trying to break out of her prison until I’d 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 you’ll often have four radically opposed needs to meet.
Satisfying conflicting needs is a zero-sum game: painting in one removes another, and, as you seemingly can’t pin two different dinosaurs’ needs on screen at once, you’ll often come away happy that you’ve pleased one cretaceous critter only to discover the other is now sulking over the lack of swamps.
Even once you’ve reached an equilibrium, laying tours through exhibits will carve swathes through the undergrowth, meaning you need to repaint it all over again. Ultimately, I’d 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.
Now, I’ll 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 Houdini’s genome could have allowed me to make her more relaxed about her environmental requirements. However, these are tools you’ll only research later in a map playthrough, and in the interim, you’re left with a bunch of busywork that commits the cardinal sin in a management game: it’s 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 I’m 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?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
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 computer and on my Steam Deck, to see the way it fared on a number of gadgets. I additionally performed it utilizing a keyboard and mouse and utilizing a PowerA Moga XP-Ultra multi-platform wi-fi controller to check out varied management modes.
In phrases of expertise, not solely have I been reviewing gaming {hardware} for round 5 years, however I’ve spent my complete life taking part in simulation video games, courting proper again to Theme Park on the PC. I’ve additionally performed lots of Frontier Developments’ video games so far, having performed Planet Coaster and Planet Coaster 2 and clocked up a ridiculous 1,100 hours in Planet Zoo.
First reviewed: October 2025