I'm gonna start this post with a disclaimer that I played this game for like, an hour, and then requested a refund from Steam. So like, take it all with a grain of salt. Still, I believe my experience with this game was still worthwhile, so I'm writing this post.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 is, as you can guess, a follow-up to Jurassic World Evolution, a zoo tycoon about taking care of dinosaurs. It's also pased on a movie, but I didn't see it so I can't really say anything about this specific bit.
JWE2 is also a game about making dinosaur parks and the likes, but with a twist: dinosaurs are no longer lab-only creatures. They've escaped and started living in the wild. Your job is thus not only a park manager thing, but also more generally a wildlife ranger, working on relocating dinosaurs to places where they won't be ginat invasive species that fuck up the ecosystems. Through the game you will have to catch wild dinos, heal dinos taken from poachers, ect ect. I think this rules as a concept tbh, I don't think I've seen anything like that in a zoo tycoon game before.
To take care of your dinos, you will have to get them nice enclosures that have enough space, grass, rocks, and anything they might need. A really cool thing they introduce is the concept of territory; when a dinosaur gets in an enclosure, there is only one specific part they will consider their territory, and thus one specific part that will affect their health. Ie if you make a huge enclosure, but there are too many territorial dinos unwilling to share, you can't fix it as easily as widening the enclosure you'll have to be a bit more creative than that.
If you've played the first JWE game, they've included a lot of quality of life improvements here. The roads are easier to draw, the generators no longer need to be linked to roadwork, ect. It's pretty neat.
"Okay," you ask, "you only said good things about this game so far, so what's the catch?"
FPS sections.
In the first JWE game, you could go into first-person mode and directly control your guards and other vehicles, if you thought they were not effective enough on their own. It was a cool little tidbit I almost never used. I'm guessing it works similarly in this game. Except, for some reason, they decided to make it mandatory for the first two campaign quests- you know, basically the tutorial. You have to physically control the helicopter to go shoot tranquilizers at wild dinos yourself. Multiple times.
Words cannot describe how little I want to play an FPS when I boot up a tycoon game. Words CANNOT describe how profoundly unfun it is to spend two whole minutes trying and failing to shoot a dino to get the privilege of getting past the tutorial, because I have shit games and that is precisely why I'm playing a tycoon game and not an FPS. Adding more mechanics to your game doesn't automatically make it good trust me you guys could have kept it simple for the love of god please keep it simple.
Anyways. If this isn't a dealbreaker to you, you can give this game a try, it's like an AAA for management games, and the first one was pretty good. But I'm drawing the line in the sand, man. I refuse to play an FPS. I fucking refuse.