And then you repeat that cycle, dozens and dozens of times, until you’ve done them all. You only want to sell them if you’ve already fully researched that dino’s genome, or if it’s a valuable rock with no dino-DNA, so there’s no actual decision-making happening here, just mandatory robotic actions. Then you go to a separate screen where you see the random assortment of fossils you’ve acquired – resembling a lootbox-style card pack – to click on the fossils to research or sell them. It almost seems like something out of a bad mobile game: You go to the map screen and click on the dots representing dig sites around the globe where you have a chance to discover fossils from a set of species to send your dig team, then wait for the roughly two-minute timer to expire.
(My almost-three-year-old son absolutely loves them.) The problem is, the process of unlocking and improving their genomes is painfully dull and repetitive, and doing it 42 times is a special kind of tedium. There are 42 different species available, and watching everything from the nimble gallimimus to the lumbering brachiosaurus roam around the screen making movie-authentic noises is great the first few times. “But just like the park-going public, we’re here to see dinosaurs, and their detailed models and animations are the best thing about Jurassic World Evolution.
