EDIT - Coming back to change my review now that I'm not as angry about it. Listen, I love Frontier's library of games - I love the original Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. This game is just really bad. Let me break it down into some points.

1 - The voice acting and the writing is terrible. It's like listening to an English translation of a Vietnamese game. The voice acting is so stilted I constantly wondered if they had used AI voices to capture the likeness of certain characters. It goes in one ear and out the other - at this point they should have just dropped the storyline entirely for how much it detracts from the game.

2 - There waaaay too many steps to do the simplest things in the game. It's so un-intuitive. Even things the original game had and were good now suddenly have three to ten more arduous steps or complexities to completing them. Not every mechanic needs fifteen steps to be completed. It doesn't add life to interactions it just adds noise. Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

3 - The time wasting oh my god the time wasting. Why does everything take two to five real life minutes to complete - with how many steps everything takes this issue compounds so damn badly that something as simple as getting a dino takes thirty minutes. Was this originally supposed to be a mobile game with timer micro-transactions?? Runtime padding.

4 - The UI is downright hostile to the player. Every menu, asset, and control setting is working against you at every step of the campaign. You'll spend many hours in real life googling things that should be intuitive because things are not where they naturally should be or certain settings and information are lost in the visual noise of "artsy graphic design". Don't get me started on the vanilla controls - whoever decided the scroll wheel should be the back button and the camera movement button at the same time should be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fired.

5 - It's super unpolished in the technical department. Sure it looks nice but even on a high end computer there is issues with optimization and the bugs are really really annoying. There is nothing quite like your medic truck deciding to stop driving itself while every dinosaur dies of a disease that came on in seconds.

This game makes me so angry.

EDIT - Coming back to change my review now that I'm not as angry about it. Listen, I love Frontier's library of games - I love the original Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. This game is just really bad. Let me break it down into some points. 1 - The voice acting and the writing is terrible. It's like listening to an English translation of a Vietnamese game. The voice acting is so stilted I constantly wondered if they had used AI voices to capture the likeness of certain characters. It goes in one ear and out the other - at this point they should have just dropped the storyline entirely for how much it detracts from the game. 2 - There waaaay too many steps to do the simplest things in the game. It's so un-intuitive. Even things the original game had and were good now suddenly have three to ten more arduous steps or complexities to completing them. Not every mechanic needs fifteen steps to be completed. It doesn't add life to interactions it just adds noise. Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. 3 - The time wasting oh my god the time wasting. Why does everything take two to five real life minutes to complete - with how many steps everything takes this issue compounds so damn badly that something as simple as getting a dino takes thirty minutes. Was this originally supposed to be a mobile game with timer micro-transactions?? Runtime padding. 4 - The UI is downright hostile to the player. Every menu, asset, and control setting is working against you at every step of the campaign. You'll spend many hours in real life googling things that should be intuitive because things are not where they naturally should be or certain settings and information are lost in the visual noise of "artsy graphic design". Don't get me started on the vanilla controls - whoever decided the scroll wheel should be the back button and the camera movement button at the same time should be fucking fired. 5 - It's super unpolished in the technical department. Sure it looks nice but even on a high end computer there is issues with optimization and the bugs are really really annoying. There is nothing quite like your medic truck deciding to stop driving itself while every dinosaur dies of a disease that came on in seconds. This game makes me so angry.