Although the story moments never feel like they’re part of a cohesive, overarching narrative, it does help give the game a little structure, and the various challenges the different islands provide delivers a serious learning curve - perhaps a little too steep at times, but that’s also fuelled by my earlier gripes about tutorials. Each one offers a slightly different challenge, whether it’s having to worry about tropical storms as well as your killer dinosaurs, or trying to fit your park onto a tiny, and oddly shaped, volcanic island, while still making enough cash to keep afloat. But, more importantly, it unlocks new islands for you to create parks on. Doing all these builds your relationship with three factions - Security, Science, and Entertainment - which all eventually give you lovely rewards and perks that’ll get you more money flowing into your park. It helps that there’s just enough story content to keep you propelling along, giving you boxes to tick and goals to reach that feel stimulating but never overburden. I still have no idea how time skipped from 8pm to 1.30am in the blink of a Parasaurolophus’ eye. It’s all so wonderful that I’ve lost entire evenings to it without even thinking. When your beasts and your guests are all happy, the dino dosh is coming in fast, and you can just zoom around your park in your ‘copter or 4x4 waiting for the inevitable disaster of the scaly or natural variety, it’s wonderfully zen, even if it is served with a side of mild panic. Other elements are a little easier to grasp, but there are baffling obtusities to some of the mechanics. I just want to give my T-Rex some water damnit! And don’t even get me started on the frustrating landscaping tools, and their bombardments of terrain and obstruction errors. Other sim games utilise power but without ruining the design aesthetic, or making the explanation about how to simplify things much clearer, and maybe mention that stations provide the power but the substations actually distribute it to your facilities. But in order to provide electricity to all areas of your park, including the electric fences, you need power stations, base stations and a spaghetti network of pylons connecting it all. It’s to give me the panic of outages, and make it all feel Jurassic Park-y, isn’t it? And that’s fine. I know why Frontier has included power grid management as a key element in park building. One of the biggest offenders in Evolution is the power system. I should have known better really, given that last Frontier game, Planet Coaster, literally tells you to go watch a YouTube video or three to understand its systems and mechanics. That’s because, although Frontier is an expert at creating management sims, it apparently sucks at the tutorials. Never before has a simulation title made me feel more connected to my creations. Being able to take in the ridiculous detail in which these dinos are rendered - from a real, human scaled viewpoint - is mind-blowing. Being able to leap into your Ranger Jeep or descend from above in an ACU helicopter only serves to add to the incredible immersion Evolution is offering. Who knew? Even better, you can get even more friendly with your dinos by getting down on their level. Turns out dinosaurs can get lonely, or be totally irritated by additional scaly friends. Keeping them from trying to take out all of your guests is a careful balancing act between making sure they’ve got enough space in their enclosure, ensuring just the right amount of trees, food, water and - depending on the species - fellow dinos to frolic with. Each dino has a status panel that you can view to check up on how happy they are, although, trust me, you’ll know when they’re not. Regardless of the species, it feels like each dinosaur has a distinct personality, and that doesn’t just come from not the way they behave - or misbehave - in the park.
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