Video Game / Jurassic World: Evolution

Jurassic World: Evolution is a business simulator based on the Jurassic Park franchise (particularly Jurassic World), and a Spiritual Successor of 2003's Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. Developed and published by Frontier Developments, it was released (digitally) for PC, PS4, and Xbox ONE on June 12, 2018, and the physical version for PS4 and Xbox ONE on July 3rd, 2018. It was released on Nintendo Switch on November 3rd, 2020.

Congratulations, on behalf of the InGen Corporation! You are now the proud custodian of a small archipelago just off the coast of Costa Rica, known colloquially as "The Five Deaths". But don't let the name put you off! Play your cards right, and this set of sun-soaked paradises could make you a whole lot of money. How? You're going to make a theme park. Full of dinosaurs.

...whoa, whoa, what's with that expression? I mean, we know, there have been a couple of... minor incidents, when this idea was trialed before. But honestly, there's nothing to worry about! We've accounted for every possible scenario.

Really.

Your role will be centred around both park development and park management. Of course, the previous owners of these parks were a lot more incompetent than you seem to be, so there'll be a few minor issues to work out on the islands first - limited building room, severe financial shortfalls, wild dinosaur populations - but then you can work on creating!

Not only will you be creating new infrastructure such as restaurants, shops and viewing galleries for our guest population, but you'll be adding to our dinosaur population as well, through the miracle of our Hammond Creation Labs! Excavating dig sites will give you more DNA to use in bringing back the titans of history, from Velociraptor and T. rex to Stegosaurus and Triceratops!

Each of these animals has certain needs in terms of its food, space requirements and social group sizes, but you'll get the hang of those easily. And our resident head of genetic research, Dr. Wu, has already expressed a potential interest in diversifying our asset count, should you impress him!

You'll also be working closely with the heads of our Security, Science and Entertainment divisions. They'll give you targets to hit: targets hit means more cash allocated which means more dinosaurs! Just be careful. While most of it is likely just empty threats and bluster, some of their underlings do mutter from time to time about "potential sabotage" and "opening gates" if they feel like they're being ignored. As long as you spread your attention between the three divisions, there should be no problems there!

And of course, scientific veteran Ian Malcolm will be there to supervise your progress. Via radio, largely, but the man has a very compelling voice. A few other familiar faces might also check in here and there: Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have raised a few potential concerns about animal welfare, which we're sure you'll dissuade fast.

And that's about it, in terms of your day-to-day concerns! All you have to do is keep the dinosaur population diverse and the guests happy. And watch out for power cuts, and those tropical storms. And make sure there's a tidy profit at the end of the month. And try to make sure you don't run out of space, and that most importantly, all your prehistoric residents remain fed and watered and, most importantly, contained.

You'll be fine.

The announcement trailer can be seen here, and the first in-engine footage can be seen here.

DLC updates have added new species to the game post-release, including several from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The game's first story-based DLC, The Secrets of Doctor Wu, was released on November 20th 2018. Its trailer, revealing additional species of "natural" and hybrid dinosaurs, can be seen here. A second DLC campaign, Claire’s Sanctuary, depicts an adaptation of the events of Fallen Kingdom in which Claire leads you on a mission to rescue Isla Nublar’s dinosaurs from the impending eruption of Mount Sibo, and was released on June 18th, 2019. December 10, 2019 has seen the release of Return to Jurassic Park, where you join Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Malcolm in repairing and rebuilding the original 1993 park for its grand opening as well as return to Isla Sorna to rebuild Site B, and features the introduction of the Aviary and Pteranodon from Jurassic Park III as well as all of the buildings and aesthetics along with new models and skins for all the dinosaurs from the original trilogy.

A sequel, Jurassic World Evolution 2, was announced in June 2021, and was released on November 9, 2021.

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This game provides examples of:

• Adaptational Villainy: Dr. Wu. He starts off sounding like a Smug Snake, and only gets more sinister, even compared to his Camp Cretaceous portrayal, as the campaign progresses. One wonders if he only communicates via a still image so we can't see him making any sinister expressions. If he could stand there and cackle manically, he would. The contrast is made even more significant by his atoner status in Dominion.
• Alternate Continuity:
  • It's implied the game is set after the events of Jurassic World and represents a timeline where InGen tries to start up their park franchise again instead of leaving the islands to their fate (and presumably, Mt. Sibo remains dormant, instead of submerging Isla Nublar in lava).
  • Claire’s Sanctuary later has Mount Sibo erupting, but with a happier ending in which you are tasked with relocating Nublar’s dinosaurs to the proposed Sanctuary island (only without the double-cross that occurs in that movie that sends the dinosaurs to the mainland).
  • Return to Jurassic Park is explicitly billed as a "What if" story where John Hammond, Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Dr. Malcolm returned to Isla Nublar and set out to build a safe, sustainable park after undoing Nedry's damage. This also means that the trio learns of Site B long before 1997 in this continuity, which remains the breeding grounds for the park's dinosaurs.
  • This is complicated somewhat by the main campaign of the sequel, which has been explicitly announced to take place after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom while still vaguely alluding to the player's actions from the first game and bringing back original characters from said game. At most, the Evolution franchise takes place in a Broad Strokes version of the film continuity.
• Always Night:
  • On Isla Pena and Tacaño Research Facility, lit by the light of the full moon by default.
  • The Isla Nublar sandbox mode also gives the option of allowing the player to set a day/night cycle, or keep it permanently day or night if they so choose.
  • If the player gets a five star rating on every single base game island from the main campaign (Isla Nublar doesn't need to be 5 starred), they get the Isla Nublar lighting options available across the Five Deaths, allowing them to enforce this trope on levels that are normally locked to daytime or sunset.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing each island with a five star rating in the Challenge Mode allows the player to apply any of the available skins to a dinosaur that didn’t have it in the vanilla game. The reward also depends on the island in question as well as the selected difficulty; for example, five starring Isla Pena on Jurassic Difficulty grants the player both the Savannah skin for the Gallimimus and Woodland for the T-Rex, but doing so on Easy Difficulty only unlocks the Savannah Skin for the Galli.
• Animal Gender-Bender: Your velociraptors will always be female, but you can give them skins based off male velociraptors from both The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III. The male Pteranodon model from JPIII and Evolution 1 is back in the sequel, as well as new pterosaur Geosternbergia being based on one of the large-crested male fossils.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In order to give you a head start on getting a viable genome, you have a greater chance of finding amber whenever you go to a new dig site. Furthermore, the first time you extract a new genome, the amount of DNA you obtain is almost comically large. Normally, amber gives 10-12% of a genome. If, say, you have no Ankylosaurus' genome and decide to get your first bit of DNA from Ankylosaurus amber, you can get up to 34% genome from a single piece of amber.
    • There is a bit of logic to this: the percentage decreases because you're trying to find new DNA in the genome sequence, thus it gets harder for your excavation team to find fossils with new DNA to help complete the genome.
  • Unlike Operation Genesis, where you wouldn't know what DNA you would get from an amber until you extracted it, here you know what it is ahead of time, saving time and money from extracting DNA you don't need.
  • The amount of genome that is extracted is completely set in stone. The game won't let you queue another fossil when the extraction beforehand would fully complete the specimen's genome, allowing you to sell the fossil for money instead.
  • If you haven't already made a specimen of a particular species, the chance of getting the dinosaur to incubate successfully is higher than average: 60 percentage ones almost always survive if they're the first one you've made. This is so that when first starting out you don't blow half your available money when you have no other form of income. Conversely if your chances are not 100 percent you will probably lose a specimen before the odds of it happening. For example, losing your fourth specimen on a 94% viability rating.
  • The visitors' dino requirements became a lot more simplified in comparison to Operation Genesis. In JPOG, visitors are divided into four categories, each with their own needs of what they want to see in your exhibits. For example, Dino Nerds want realism, Thrill Seekers want to see dinosaurs fight, etc. In JWE, all this is reduced to just 'Authenticity' rating, which is only based on how complete your dinosaur genomes are. The higher the genome percentage, the higher the rating, which means if all your dinosaurs have 100 percent genomes then the visitors wouldn't mind if you jammed dinosaurs from different eras into the same exhibit, as long as you manage to keep them happy, healthy, and contained.
  • Several missions involve keeping dinosaurs contained for a set amount of time. If they do escape, though, you won’t fail or have the clock reset. It just stops until you get the dinos back into containment. Although this is almost offset by its own set of problems—see Cycle of Hurting below.
  • Once the Incubation process goes above 50%, the dinosaur is guaranteed to be successful in being hatched, this saves a lot of frustration of the incubation gauge being almost finished only for the egg to suddenly fail and time to replace any failed dinousaurs.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Guests are known to wander into paddocks if you don't fix broken down walls quick enough. Since the paddocks that break open most often tend to house the more volatile carnivores, this tends to end badly for them.
  • Guests will also rush over to watch a dinosaur attack a fence, instead of realizing they should proceed in the opposite direction of an angry multi-ton animal.
  • Dinosaurs only detect paddock conditions a certain radius around them, which can result in animals that need a certain number of the same species together wandering away from its group, or an animal that prefers forest wandering into an open meadow, and then suddenly going on a rampage because these things aren't in its radius anymore, despite having them in its enclosure. Fortunately, this is issue is fixed in a patch.
  • It's possible for dinosaurs to starve despite easy access to food, or dehydrate despite easy access to water. You can try tranquilizing them and transporting them to the feeder manually, or even placing a new feeder or pond right next to them, and they'll still refuse to eat or drink.
    • Sometimes, the dinosaurs actually stop moving entirely, and thus cannot get food or water unless they're tranquilized.
  • The rangers are terrible at getting their Jeeps around obstacles and can really get slowed down unless you take manual control of the jeep and get it past the obstacle yourself.
    • This can get particularly bothersome after the release of the Return to Jurassic Park DLC. As the patch that came with it makes it so that jeeps can now take damage from dinosaurs capable of combat if they get sufficiently disturbed. If you don't take manual control when refilling feeders, it's possible for the aforementioned pathfinding troubles to lead to the rangers just sitting there and letting the dinosaurs destroy it.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: You can expect all the inaccuracies from the series to be implemented here as the game strives for authenticity with the movies (lack of feathers on certain genera, pronated hands on theropods, oversized Velociraptor, frilled Dilophosaurus that spit venom, long-legged and wrong sail shape for Spinosaurus, quadrupeds with elephantine feet, Ankylosaurus with spiky armor on the sides, Pteranodon with teeth, etc.). As always, the series has the built-in excuse that the dinosaurs were technically never authentic recreations, but in Evolution it's more prominent due to the gameplay emphasizing trying to get 100% of their genome.
  • Aside from the series' standard pronated hands and lack of feathers, the game's version of Deinonychus possesses a flap of skin on its head and down its tail to differentiate it from Velociraptor (the Velociraptor in the Jurassic Park franchise are actually based on Deinonychus). The Deinonychus also has a shorter skull similar to older reconstructions of the animal, probably to further differentiate it from Velociraptor.
  • The sauropods have wrongly shaped feet with too many claws, which is jarring with Apatosaurus since the film version got it right. Taking after the Brachiosaurus from the first film, they all also chew their food like mammals do instead of stripping or snipping then swallowing their mouthful whole.
  • Pachycephalosaurus has an upright stance rather than a horizontal one (somewhat baffling considering the movies got this right, and the other three pachycephalosaurs in the game also sport the correct horizontal posture).
  • The crested hadrosaurids are depicted walking mainly bipedally rather than quadrupedally. And yet, Edmontosaurus and Maiasaura are properly depicted as facultative bipeds. Conversely, Muttaburrasaurus is also depicted as a facultative biped when in real life it was most likely completely bipedal.
  • Downplayed example, but the inclusions of Dracorex and Stygimoloch as distinct genera may be questionable, as there is a theory that they both merely represent stages of growth in the life cycle of Pachycephalosaurus. This is actually something that Jack Horner, the science advisor for the movies, pointed out when reviewing the Fallen Kingdom script; the Stygimoloch was included against his advisement.
  • Another downplayed example, the Nodosaurus is In Name Only; it's very obvious that it's actually based on Borealopelta. Although its pale brown colour is different from the theorized reddish-brown of Borealopelta.
  • Yet another downplayed example, the inclusion of Troodon in a DLC, as the genus has now been reclassified as dubious due to being only known from teeth, and as such the animal in the game formally speaking is more likely to be Stenonychosaurus or Pectinodon.
  • Dilophosaurus can be found in a Chinese fossil formation, however, Dilophosaurus is only known from North America. There was a supposed Chinese species of Dilophosaurus, but it is now known as Sinosaurus and seen as not closely related to Dilophosaurus.
  • Carcharodontosaurus has a Megalosaurus-like skull rather than a Giganotosaurus-like one (for that matter, Giganotosaurus itself is given an outdated skull structure based on obsolete restorations of the animal. And it's in no way helped by the inclusion of the Dominion Giga, either).
  • Acrocanthosaurus is given a wide tyrannosaur-like skull rather than a thin carnosaurian skull and is also lacking the snout ridges the real animal had.
  • Many of the dinosaurs are noticeably oversized. As an example the Nasutoceratops in real life was 14.8 feet in length and just around 6 feet tall, but in the game is the same size as the Triceratops which is 29.5 feet long and 9.8 feet tall. The Sinoceratops, which was 19.7 feet long and 6.6 feet tall, is larger than the Triceratops.
  • Allosaurus and Albertosaurus are both portrayed as solitary when there is good evidence that they lived and hunted gregariously.
  • The Pteranodon introduced in the Return to Jurassic Park DLC is based on the Jurassic Park III design, which of course means teeth, grasping talons, naked skin, and Animal Gender-Bender crest. On the bright side, though, they launch into flight by vaulting off with their wings like real pterosaurs (which is a detail that the films have never gotten right).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • It is almost inconceivable to not feature the Tyrannosaurus in your park, being the series mascot and all. The star carnivore has incredibly high ratings and overall powerful stats that would allow it to further increase its ratings by winning fights with ease. Same goes for the Indominus rex and Indoraptor, which boosts even greater ratings and stats. However, compared with the rest of the large carnivores, they are impractical if you're aiming for 5-star parks (especially in Isla Pena and Tacaño Research Facility) due to one reason only: They are solitary dinosaurs.
    • They cannot coexist with another of their kind without a fight to the death taking place. Worse still, if one survives (or both), the dinosaur will likely rampage due to its deteriorated comfort stat. Furthermore, a single high rating loss is a severe blow to your overall ratings without another keeping it aloft.
    • Due to their solitary preference, a single star carnivore does not have as much potential for overall ratings compared to other large carnivores with similar ratings that can live in pairs, like the Spinosaurus and Giganotosaurus. A pair of Spinosaurus with 400+ ratings has a much larger impact on your park's ratings than a single Tyrannosaurus with 500+ ratings would. And with the numbers advantage, the Spinosaurus pair can fight two dinosaurs simultaneously, increasing their combat infamy rating twice as fast as a lone Tyrannosaurus could.
    • In addition, like other large carnivores, they need a large amount of space for their enclosure to meet their comfort needs. Since space is a very real problem for those seeking to maintain a large park, it is better off being used for other non-solitary dinosaurs. This, however, can be circumvented by sharing their enclosures with small carnivores like the Dilophosaurus (the Indoraptor is an exception. It will kill all the small carnivores rather than just bullying them, except for Compsognathus, which it will ignore).
    • The release of the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC has shaken things up a little. Now social genes exist, increasing the number of their own species that dinosaurs are willing to tolerate. Add the maxed gene, and you can have up to four Tyrannosaurs or five Spinosaurus...but it makes incubation failure far more likely, reduces the number of ratings-booster genes you can add (by extension), makes the incubation more expensive, and also raises the minimum population threshold meaning even one loss of the group will spell big trouble for you and the guests.
    • The large carnivores do have a very important use in Challenge Mode, however, especially in the Jurassic difficulty setting. Once you reach the four-star rank using herbivores, pumping out high-rating theropods will let you quickly reach the final fifth star and unlock the skin color rewards.
    • The Indominus rex and Indoraptor have problems unique to them. Both take a ludicrous amount of time and money to incubate, making it more difficult to recover from the loss of one unlike the Tyrannosaurus. In addition, the hybrids have a nasty habit of trying to escape their enclosures at random, even when their comfort needs are met. Those boosted stats would backfire spectacularly when you made it much easier for them to break through your electrified concrete walls. Furthermore, the former can't even be housed together with the Saurupods as they will kill them if you do unlike all other carnivores that can be housed safely together. Fortunately, the hybrids in the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC aren't nearly as problematic.
  • Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC introduces Global Operation research are global upgrades that allows the player to gain more money, reduces the money spent on building or refilling feeders, allow players to get a portion of the money back if the dinosaur incubation fails and increase helicopter transport speed. However, aside from the helicopter transport speed, they're extremely expensive, with each tier of research costing 4, 8 and 12 Million dollars respectively. Special mentions goes to Improved Lawyers, Improved Construction and Feeder Cost Reduction where they're already cheap at the stage that you can research them and certainly isn't worth all the money spent. In higher difficulties, if you manage to reach enough money to be able to afford any of them, you're probably financially stable anyway that you don't need such researches and those money are better of being spent on either hatching more dinosaurs or to recoup your losses in the event of a potential twister, disease outbreak or dinosaur rampage as Hammond Foundation Fee will never decrease, potentially getting you into negative income.
• Behemoth Battle: All of the large carnivores ^note Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Carnotaurus, Metriacanthosaurus, Majungasaurus, Suchomimus, Baryonyx, Allosaurus, Indominus rex, Indoraptor, Spinoraptor, Carcharodontosaurus, Acrocanthosaurus, and Albertosaurus can fight each other as well as armored large herbivores ^note Triceratops, Torosaurus, Pentaceratops, Chasmosaurus, Styracosaurus, Sinoceratops, Nasutoceratops, Nodosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Polacanthus, Sauropelta, Crichtonsaurus, Stegosaurus, Kentrosaurus, Chungkingosaurus, Gigantspinosaurus, Huayangosaurus, Stegoceratops, Iguanodon, and Euoplocephalus.
• Bloodless Carnage: Subverted with the dinosaurs, who gain very noticeable bleeding wounds when attacked by other dinosaurs, but played straight when they attack human guests, who remain visibly unharmed even after being chomped and swung around by a T. rex.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Once you achieved enough of the respective division ratings, you are able to build facilities that gives you a steady income of money based on how much reputation you have with them. But the problem is, whatever income these buildings give you is far overshadowed by the ticket income you receive just by owning a couple of dinosaurs. Furthermore, these buildings take up huge amounts of space and power that could be used to please the guests such as Hotels and Monorails.
• Boring, but Practical: Maintaining a 5-star rating is possible with any dinosaur combinations, especially when taking gene modifications into account, but some are far more practical options than others:
  • Ornithomimids (like the humble Struthiomimus) aren't much to look at initially, but due to being ridiculously cheap and fast to incubate (even after heavy modifications), they make great starter herbivores when tight on money. Their high social and population threshold makes up for their abysmal rating and it also means that they can live in a huge group and still get along with any other herbivores.
    • And as mentioned under Video Game Cruelty Potential below, they also make very good prey for your carnivores to increase their combat infamy ratings and as an alternative food source when tight on money, especially the Struthiomimus.
  • The Dilophosaurus is easily the least impressive of the three base game small carnivores, having weaker stats and lower ratings than both the Velociraptor and the Deinonychus. However, they have the largest social group, allowing you to keep far more of them than the other two, which means a much greater potential in ratings and you also don't need to hatch another Dilophosaurus to keep them happy as they don't another kin to meet its social needs. Their weaker attack stat and lower comfort threshold (though it's still relatively high at 70%) before rampaging also makes them less of a nuisance during a storm. Because of this, they tend to be more practical to keep in Isla Muerta instead of the Velociraptor (though if they DO escape, usually when a twister appears, their larger numbers would be harder to contain).
    • Ditto for the Troodon, in the Cretaceous Dinosaur Pack DLC. They have a larger social group minimum at 4 and the same comfort threshold as the Dilophosaurus. They are much smaller, however, so they're much harder to deal with when they escape.
  • Among the large carnivores, the Carnotaurus tends to be a more practical option than the rest. It can live in pairs and it has decent stats that can be increased significantly due to having more modification slots than most. Its lower comfort threshold also makes it less likely to rampage during a storm, and it has a high population limit. Only the Albertosaurus, Suchomimus and Spinosaurus, rivals it in these regards.
  • The Ceratosaurus is the only large carnivore that can live in trios. It is relatively cheap, fast to incubate and has a fairly low comfort threshold for a large carnivore, making it less of a problem during a storm. Though its ratings aren't that impressive, its attack and defense stats give them a surprising amount of potential through combat infamy.
    • The Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC adds social genes into the game, which can further increase their social groups to six. It also adds the hybrid Spinoraptor, the only large carnivore that can have packs of four (seven with modifications), though they need a minimum of two to be comfortable. They're also relatively cheap as far as hybrids go.
  • The Allosaurus is a solitary carnivore and the least impressive among them. However, it has just as much modification slots as the hybrids, allowing you to increase its stats by a significant margin. Because of this, it is possible to make an Allosaurus be strong enough to consistently win fights against a Tyrannosaurus, greatly increasing its combat infamy. And unlike the hybrids, it is cheaper and takes less time to incubate.
  • And of course, herbivores. Compared to carnivores, they're arguably more boring to keep but they're nonetheless simpler to handle. Aside from being safer and cheaper, most herbivores can live in large groups, with only a few exceptions, compensating for their lower ratings. Furthermore, herbivores that can defend themselves could increase their ratings by winning fights, just like all carnivores.
• Camera Abuse:
  • Both the Nodosaurus and Pachycephalosaurus ram the camera in their species profiles, in the Pachycephalosaurus's case this just causes it to glitch out, but the Nodosaurus outright destroys it.
  • The Dilophosaurus spits at the camera in its species profile.
  • The Indominus rex's species profile has her break the fourth wall — causing her profile to glitch out — to eyeball the camera before eating it.
  • The Acrocanthosaurus headbutts the camera in the Carnivore Dinosaur Pack DLC trailer, causing it to glitch out.
• Carnivores Are Mean: Carnivores will actively hunt down and kill not only any herbivores within their reach, but also any guests, regardless of whether their Hunger meter is filled of not, making them more like movie monsters than actual animals. Additionally, carnivores of different species within the same size range (for example, Velociraptor and Dilophosaurus, or Tyrannosaurus rex and Spinosaurus) will never tolerate one another and will fight to the death should they meet. The single-minded viciousness towards herbivores has fortunately been adjusted in a patch, which changes the theropods to only eat and hunt when they actually become hungry, allowing them to be housed with herbivores more easily (though they will prioritize the herbivores over feeders and goats).
  • There are subversions, however. A number of carnivores have a Social rating large enough to accept multiple members of their own kind within the same space, and as long as they're not exceeded, you can comfortably have a pack of six Velociraptor, a trio of Ceratosaurus or a pair of Spinosaurus living happily within their own enclosures. Additionally, carnivores of different sizes will not (and seemingly cannot) attack one another (with their encounters essentially being the bigger one bullying the smaller one away), allowing you to potentially house multiple carnivore species together in the same enclosure, with one notable exception: A Tyrannosaurus will attack and kill any Velociraptor it is housed with, in a possible nod to the two species' deadly clash at the end of the first movie.
  • Played predictably straight with the Indominus rex and the Indoraptor, who have the highest Comfort demand of all dinosaurs and are quick to enrage, though at the same time also subverted due to them following the same mechanics mentioned above, allowing you to potentially have an Indominus rex sharing its enclosure with a pack of Velociraptor without much consequence.
    • The Indoraptor however takes it even further than the Indominus Rex does as it will kill any creature it's put with (except sauropods and Compsognathus) regardless of size.
  • All of the theropods except Indominus rex can also be housed with the sauropods safely, as even the Tyrannosaurus rex won't try to attack even the smallest of the sauropods, Apatosaurus. The small theropods can also be housed with the armored herbivores and Nigersaurus, they'll sometimes get into confrontations with the armored herbivores but never actually fight.
  • Update 1.60 added options for the sandbox mode that completely turn off carnivore and armored herbivore aggression, allowing all of the dinosaurs to be housed together in any way and combination you choose. The Small theropods and all of the non-sauropod herbivores will still run around in a panic when a Medium/Large theropod is in their vicinity, however.
• Celebrity Paradox: One of the dinosaurs you can grow in your park is a Crichtonsaurus, named for Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. This raises the question of why, in the Jurassic Park universe, Michael Crichton (who would probably not have written the Jurassic Park novel) would have a dinosaur named after him.
• Challenge Run: Update 1.4 saw the addition of a Challenge Mode with four different difficulties, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Jurassic. Each functioned in a similar vein to the game's story mode and requires the player to unlock all of the dinosaurs and research items as they progress by pursuing a higher star rating for the island being played on. The requirements to successfully reach a five starred park obviously increase with each difficulty, but despite the "par time" for each island, there's no time limit to achieving it and acquiring a new skin for one of your dinosaurs, and each island offers two new skins as rewards (one for getting 5 stars on any difficulty, and another for getting 5 stars for Jurassic Difficulty. Successfully achieving the five star rating within the par time does, however, reward the player with an Achievement as well as one or both of the skins.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Or rather, Chekhov's Dinosaurs. In the first mission of Return to Jurassic Park, one of your objectives is to capture the three roaming Velociraptors and put them into the Raptor Pen. They're promptly forgotten for a long while before they come back with a vengeance in the final mission, where saboteurs from BioSyn modified their genetics to make them immune to tranquilizers and released them from their pen in order to bring down the park, forcing you to unleash your newly-created T.rex to take them down the old-fashined way in a shout-out to the climax of the first film.
• Continuity Nod: All of the achievement names are quotes from the movies.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The three division heads all qualify to some degree. Some of their goals and methods are ethically questionable, (Security head George Lambert is interested in using Dinosaurs as combatants and Entertainment head Isaac Clement is willing to take safety risks for the sake of Rule of Cool, for example) they don't get along well, (more often than not, completing a contract with one will improve your reputation with them while worsening your reputation with the others) and will occasionally perform acts of sabotage if they don't like the way you're doing things.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: One of the first mandatory tutorial objective is to let a dinosaur escape its containment toward a populated park, to demonstrate the next step of containing such accident. Later you may have to deliberately agitate dinosaurs with uncomfortable living space, letting dinosaurs escape, or making them fight.
• Cycle of Hurting: In missions where the objective requires you to keep dinosaurs contained for a period of time, the game will force some of the dinosaurs to become 'agitated' and attempt to break out of their enclosures even if their comfort meter is high. Should you let them break out, the countdown will stop and you have to tranquilize and bring them back to their enclosures in order to continue the countdown. This can be a nasty problem when multiple dinosaurs break out at the same time (and they often do) and you have to put all of them back to where they belong so you can continue with the objective. Worse, transporting the dinos takes a lot of time. By the time you get one dino back into their enclosure and is working to transport another, the first dino might attempt to break out again, forcing you to recapture it again while the same thing could happen to the other dinos you have sent back in the meantime. Not only that, you have to fix up those fences and keep visitors inside shelters while all this is going down, which means a sharp drop in ratings and income, not to mention a myriad of other problems like sabotages or storms as well, which most likely leads to even more break outs. Unless you micromanage like crazy and your ACU and Ranger teams are good at their jobs, you're gonna have a hard time getting through these missions.
• David Versus Goliath: Smaller dinosaurs will sometimes stand their ground and fight back in duels against larger ones. Sometimes, they might even win.
• Deadpan Snarker: Dr. Ian Malcolm. About every other sentence he says is filled with snark. It's very obvious he still thinks the whole "Dinosaur Park" concept is an enormously bad idea. ("The Five Deaths...If only there had been just five.")
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: A sufficiently wounded massive carnivore like a Tyrannosaurus rex can be finished off by a smaller one like a Ceratosaurus. A herbivore given many attack mutations can also give them a run for their money. A prime example is receiving a contract to have Huayangosaurus defeat the Indominus rex in a battle.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Sauropods require a lot of space to be kept happy, are expensive to incubate and they take a really long time to hatch. But they also offer an insane amount of ratings per dinosaur, tolerate huge amounts of other dinosaurs in their enclosure such as other Sauropods, can be given a specific paleo plant they liked without worrying about any other herbivores since they exclusively feed on tall herbivore feeders, and since they're far bigger than the other carnivores, they won't fight each other to the death. If you are given a suitable space and investment for them, then these dinos will pretty much bolster your ratings to the top just through a couple of them.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: Dreadnoughtus appears in a DLC as a new dinosaur, and many references are made to "dreadnought" meaning "fears nothing," and as a sauropod, it's flat-out immune to carnivore attacks. Except the Indominus rex.
• Easy Level Trick: Jurassic Park Era is known among the playerbase for being a sort of easy mode for the Challenge Mode maps, particularly on the hardest difficulties. The dinosaur rating requirement is much lower due to the limited selection of species, the necessary facilities are all in one building (otherwise each being about $400k a pop in Jurassic World era maps), everything is much less expensive, and the contracts Ian Malcolm offers are basically free money. Many players have found it invaluable when taking on the game's most difficult achievements like A New Home and Jurassic Measures.
• Easily Forgiven: Your island's rating will drop if your dinosaurs rampage and start eating the guests, but once you contain the crisis it doesn't take long for your rating to come back up.
• Everyone Has Standards: The three department heads can have some pretty morally questionable missions, but they all feel that Dr. Wu's experiments are going too far.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Somewhat ironically, as revealed during one of the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC missions, even Dr. Wu thinks purposefully injecting the dinosaurs with a potentially fatal disease is going too far, even if his reasons are born out of a sense of pragmatism rather than morality.
• Extinct Animal Park: The premise of the game is centered around building a park on each island of the Los Cincos Muertas archipelago and creating exhibits showcasing the array of over sixty species of dinosaurs, such as Edmontosaurus, Dreadnaughtus, Torosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus rex. Each species has its own unique habitat and diet requirements that must be met to keep the animals happy, and live relatively long and happy lives; failure to maintain these requirements eventually results in the dinosaurs attempting to escape by violently destroying a section of the fence that outlines their habitats and going on a rampage throughout the park. The Return to Jurassic Park DLC also sees the addition of a pterosaur, Pteranodon.
• Foreshadowing: If you breed an Indoraptor, Dr. Wu tells you that, because the Indoraptor is a project of great interest to him, now you are as well, and to consider yourself watched. Come the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC, you've impressed Wu enough that he trusts you to help him with some top secret projects involving new hybrids.
• For Science!: Henry Wu at least claims this is what he’s striving for in the Science missions, no matter how unethical the experiment may be.
• Giant Equals Invincible: Giant sauropods like Brachiosaurus outsize every other animal in the game and are thus safe from the wrath of every animal not named Indominus Rex — even Tyrannosaurus rex and her megatheropod ilk, giving them the rare honor of a species that can be housed with them safely. (The exception is if the sauropods happen to be tranquilized, in which case the big predators won't hesitate to pounce on them in their stupor, so be careful when cohabitating them.)
• Guide Dang It!: With so much happening on Nublar North during Claire’s Sanctuary, it’s easy to overlook the optional photography mission you’re given. If you don’t read it thoroughly or are mashing buttons to get it off the screen, it’s easy to miss that doing it unlocks the T Rex fossil access when you get to the sanctuary island. It’s Permanently Missable Content since you can’t unlock it another way. Getting 5 stars is still possible but much harder.
• Healing Shiv: Rangers deliver medication for dinosaur illnesses and heal combat injuries with their air-powered dart rifles.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Subverted. All the herbivores pose a danger towards humans, since even the smallest ones are bigger than a fully grown man. Plus, many armed herbivores like Triceratops and Stegosaurus can fight and even kill the carnivores, and they will total a jeep for no reason.
  • On the other hand, when it comes to their fellow herbivores, the trope is largely played straight. Most herbivores can peacefully live together in large groups. Zig-zagged in the sequel, however, which has Likes and Dislikes for the dinosaurs and while some groups will get along, others will be antagonistic towards each other (stegosaurids and ceratopsians will battle each other for territory, Triceratops doesn't cotton to other ceratopsians being around, and Struthiomimus doesn't like the Dr. Wu hybrids i.e. Stegoceratops and Ankylodocus).
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the debut trailer, the Tyrannosaurus escapes and nearly eats a helpless worker - until one of his co-workers nobly draws its attention and quickly gets eaten himself to save him.
• Hostile Weather: Twisters return from Operation Genesis and can devastate your park, being first introduced in Isla Pena. Unlike in that game, though, they can only damage buildings and destroy fences, and can't kill dinosaurs.
  • Storms, which are a level beneath twisters, already cause your dinosaurs to slowly lose Comfort until they're over. There's nothing you can do to stop it, so be prepared to deal with the species with particularly high Comfort threshold (tranquilizing the dinosaur while the storm rages will prevent the comfort loss, though then you'll have to go through the rigamarole of picking them up and putting them back down again with a helicopter after it's over. Fortunately this was adjusted in a later patch that allows you to wake a sedated dinosaur by honking at it with a jeep's horn).
• Ignored Expert: Dr. Ian Malcom is one of your advisers, but it seems you hired him just to ignore him, much like the original Jurassic Park.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: If a ceratopsian is victorious in a fight against a large theropod, the predator is impaled through its skull and neck by the ceratopsid’s horns.
• Instant Sedation: Almost. It takes a few seconds to work, but it can still drop a dino in an improbably short timespan.
• Just Plane Wrong: Of the helicopter variety. There’s no way a real life chopper could lift the many tons of dead weight of a giant sauropod or probably the larger carnivores either. There do exist models that can lift up to 88,000 lbs but that’s not what the ones in the game appear to be, and even so, your average Brachiosaurus is twice as heavy. Not to mention that it can move a tiny Compsognathus as well and the rotor wash doesn’t seem to harm it at all.
• LEGO Genetics: In keeping with the themes of Jurassic World, you can genetically modify your dinosaurs in a variety of ways - giving them genes from modern species in order enhance their lifespan or combat prowess.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The Indominus rex and Indoraptor make a return from the movies, and thanks to the genetic modification system in place it's possible to make hybrids of your own; for instance, you can cook up a Deinonychus with a shark's immune system, a turtle's brain cells, and zebra's skin.
  • Hybrids are also the main focus of the first paid DLC "The Secrets of Doctor Wu".
• Money for Nothing: While you will initially struggle for finances when you are starting on a new island, after producing a couple of dinosaurs, you will eventually get steady amounts of passive income, significantly greater than whatever expenses you paid since unlike most park simulation games, you get a steady stream income just by owning a couple of dinosaurs as opposed to requiring personal guest admissions to increase it.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Every achievement name is a quote from one of the movies.
  • In the debut trailer, we witness the birth of a Tyrannosaurus rex in a lab. The infant actively pulls the egg shell off of itself and looks directly into the camera, much like the introduction of the Indominus in the prologue of Jurassic World.
  • The Tyrannosaurus in the trailer attacks a herd of Parasaurolophus, echoing separate scenes featuring the two species in the opening cinematic of Operation Genesis. Similarly, a latter scene in the trailer has the ACU responding to the escape, much like how in the Operation Genesis cinematic, some troopers chased down some rampaging raptors.
  • At the start of the tutorial, Cabot Finch tells you, “your job is quite simple, really.” This is the same thing John Hammond told you during the island creation screen in Operation Genesis.
  • In two Species Profiles, we see a Spinosaurus squaring off with a Tyrannosaurus rex, much like how it is depicted in Jurassic Park III.
  • The Indominus rex's trailer shows her killing an Ankylosaurus by snapping its neck, like she did in Jurassic World. Her Socialization stat is rock bottom as well and she's very easily sent into a rampage, reflecting her volatile and violent status in the film as well, though in a bit of a twist having some herbivorous dinosaurs in with Indominus will keep her Comfort stat up, a nod to how she was raised alone and isolated in the film (it also helps keep her from going into a rampage and breaking out).
  • A bit of a meta example, but because JP Velociraptor "stole" Deinonychus' looks, Frontier went back to the old 1980's depiction of◊ Deinonychus, especially the head design.
  • When you breed your first Crichtonsaurus, Cabot Finch mentions he thinks he read about it in a book, and that it has a novel name - very clearly lampshading the animal’s namesake being Michael Crichton, author of the original Jurassic Park novels.
  • In the introductory speech on Isla Sorna, Malcolm makes references to Mandelbrot patterns and dragon curves, two major motifs that were present in the original Jurassic Park novel as ways to explain chaos theory.
  • The gift shop sells three items, in lower of lowest cost to highest cost: lunch boxes^note A reference to Ian Malcolm's "You patented it, you packaged it, slapped it onto a plastic lunch box" speech, Barbasol^note Complete with a registered trademark sign, a reference to the decoy Nedry used to attempt to smuggle out the embryos in Jurassic Park and Night Vision Goggles^note Tim first sees the goat is missing by using a pair he finds in the Ford Explorer.
  • The prevalence of dinosaur illnesses is likely a call-back to the sick Triceratops in the first film (a Stegosaurus in the novel) and the prion-based illness that doomed all the dinosaurs on Site B in The Lost World (1995).
  • One dinosaur you can breed, the Archaeornithomimus, was mentioned by Claire in Jurassic World as an example of how not to name dinosaurs for marketability.
  • Similarly, although they were not actually seen, both Metriacanthosaurus and Proceratosaurus were listed among the frozen embryos in Jurassic Park (1993).
  • The Triceratops has a maximum social number of six, in the original novel it's stated that they can only be kept in herds of six dinosaurs or death duels and infighting start.
  • The Stegoceratops was originally going to be a hybrid that debuted alongside Indominus rex in Jurassic World before being reduced to a cameo on a computer screen. Now it's one of the three new hybrid dinosaurs in the first paid DLC. Similarly, Ankylodocus and Spinoraptor first showed up in the Jurassic World mobile game.
  • While the Troodon doesn't greatly resemble its Telltale iteration, it does share its venomous bite. Its alpine skin shares the same colors and pattern as the original iteration. The Arid skin for the Herrerasaurus resembles the ones seen in that game as well.
  • The variant for the 2001 Tyrannosaurus pattern is a match for the original novel's red coloration for the animal.
  • Additionally, Apatosaurus, Euoplocephalus, Maiasaura, and Styracosaurus being included among the "core" Jurassic Park dinosaurs in Return to Jurassic Park is a clear nod to the novel canon.
• No OSHA Compliance: In classic Jurassic Park fashion. For example, one of the earliest missions is deliberately letting an Edmontosaurus loose in the park to test security protocols while the park has visitors, with several characters even lampshading in-universe how crazy it is. It doesn't get any better from here.
• No-Sell: One of the achievements asks you to manipulate comfort genes to incubate a dinosaur that's impossible to keep calm. The best candidate for this is the Indominus, which is only barely containable in the best conditions. The result is an animal that will always break out of its exhibit no matter how many times you tranquilize it and plop it back in there, meaning your only real options are to sell it or surrender the park to its rampage.
  • One of the missions in the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC involves a hyperaggresive Spinoraptor that completely smashes through any type of fencing it comes across and is immune to the tranquillizer darts. The only way to put it down is to pit one of the other highly modified dinosaurs against it in a fight to the death.
• Oh, Crap!: For the player going through the campaign missions or Challenge Mode, anytime a dinosaur breaks out due to low comfort, which can spell disaster for any park with low funds to begin with, usually results in this. Storms (especially those with a twister) also invoke this reaction.
  • In the Return to Jurassic Park DLC, Ellie, Alan, and Ian collectively react this way when the Velociraptors break out of their pen and prove immune to the tranq darts. Ian quickly follows up with a second Oh, Crap! when Ellie seriously suggests sending the T. rex to kill the three Velociraptors.
• Popularity Power: Subverted for the most part, rarer dinosaurs have higher ratings than common ones.
  • The latter can still be subverted should the player choose to modify the ratings of other, less popular dinosaurs while ignoring theirs. Furthermore, the Velociraptor and the T. rex both have the smallest social groups of their categories (small and large carnivore respectively) so as a group, they can still be overshadowed by the Dilophosaurus and the Ceratosaurus respectively.^* An unmodded Raptor has 74 ratings and can live in a pack of 6 comfortably, meaning 444 ratings total. Compared to Dilopho: 69x12=828 and Dein: 75x8=600. Similarly, T. rex: 234x1=234, compared to Giganoto: 216x2=432 and Cerato: 102x3=306
• Primal Stance: The Indoraptor spends most of the time crawling on all fours, but it can also stand on its hind legs to run.
• Raptor Attack: Velociraptor as per the franchise's usual. Deinonychus is also in the game, sporting a different head, rooster-like comb, and tail ridge to distinguish it from the Velociraptor. The hybrid Indoraptor is able to fight giant carnivores head-on. The first paid DLC adds the Troodon and the hybrid Spinoraptor to the mix.
• Sandbox Mode: A sandbox mode can be unlocked on any island which has 4 stars earned. It lets you customise parameters like cash available and dinosaur escapes. The standard preset is meant to be like island management with unlimited money, while the creative preset removes most restrictions and management requirements. Each new dinosaur, building, or research item that has been unlocked through the campaign will subsequently be available for use in this mode.
• Shop Fodder: Expeditions for fossils will frequently return, in addition to extricable dinosaur DNA, a number of items not useful to you, including rare minerals like gold and platinum as well as fossils with no dinosaur DNA, like plants and mammals. You can sell these for money, along with fossils for which you already have a complete genome. This is an excellent source of funds when starting on a new island (run expeditions from an island that probably has tens of millions in profit, sell the trash on the new island that is barely profitable or losing money to buy badly-needed facilities and dinosaurs). They are also very essential in Challenge Mode, especially on higher difficulties where the Hammond Foundation's fees are higher (the fee only covers money made from the park itself, allowing the vendor trash material to give you much-needed cash without penalty).
• Shout-Out:
  • Several to Walking with Dinosaurs: the Diplodocus looks almost exactly like it does in the series (with a few Park / World alterations), and the head of the DLC Iguanadon is identical to its appearance in the Giant of the Skies episode. Several skin colours also directly evoke their appearances in that series.
  • The announcement trailer for the Cretaceous Dinosaurs DLC includes a fight between an Iguanodon and Carnotaurus.
  • Cabot Finch remarks about the people who found Majungasaurus in Madagascar having to "move it", a reference to the song "I Like To Move It, Move It" in Madagascar.
• Shown Their Work: Generally, obscure species and ones not seen in any of the films will have a much more accurate design.
  • In contrast to its portrayal in Jurassic Park III, the game's version of Ceratosaurus looks more like the real animal, being thinner and having a more accurately shaped skull.
  • Edmontosaurus is depicted with a fleshy crest-like comb on its head.
  • Majungasaurus is depicted with proportionally shorter hindlegs. It also mirrors the real animal's apparent cannibalism by attacking its own kind when there are too many of them in the exhibit, but all the large carnivores do this anyway.
  • Muttaburrasaurus lacks thumb spikes.
  • Tsintaosaurus has a hatchet-like crest like Olorotitan instead of a horn-like one.
  • Unlike in Operation Genesis where there was no explanation as to why dinosaurs could get rabies, Evolution's in-game encyclopedia takes care to explain (correctly) that rabies normally only infects mammals, but that InGen's dinosaurs are susceptible to it due to an unspecified kink in their immune system.
  • Proceratosaurus is given a Guanlong-like crest that it is currently believed have had rather than the small triangular spike that it was traditionally resorted with (including in other Jurassic Park media).
  • An update provides fish-feeders specifically for the spinosaurids (and Spinoraptor), due to the fact that spinosaurids were primarily piscivores in real life. Fittingly, they will prioritize these feeders over regular carnivore feeders and goats.
  • Ouranosaurus has a thick and fleshy "sail" similar to a buffalo's hump, rather than a Spinosaurus-like sail similar to in most depictions.
  • Albertosaurus is notable for being the first theropod in the game to be depicted with non-pronated hands.
  • Unlike the other ankylosaurids, Euoplocephalus is depicted with the correct body shape and armor, with the osteoderms set into very thick skin and no spikes along its sides.
  • Pteranodon takes off by vaulting with its wings just like real-life pterosaurs. This is very commendable as the films got this wrong.
  • While there's no direct fossil evidence for waterfowl-style keratin tomia in the mouths of ornithomimosaurs, it's still an interesting speculative detail that suggests more than a cursory k
• Summon Bigger Fish: Two storyline missions from the DLCs Secrets of Dr.Wu and Return to Jurassic Park deals with this. In the former, your beefed-up Spinoraptor was set loose upon the Tacaño Research Facility, while in the latter, the three Velociraptors you captured earlier was released from their pen by BioSyn saboteurs to bring down Jurassic Park (again). In both scenarios, the dinosaurs are genetically-modified to be immune to tranquilizers, meaning you can't take them down conventionally. The only viable means for you is to unleash a stronger dinosaur to take them down. In the latter case, the 'Bigger Fish' is none other than the T.rex itself.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Occasionally. The game has numerous calming or upbeat soundtracks… that tend to play when a Parasaurolophus is being brutally murdered by a T. Rex
• Take That!: In the Species Profile for Tyrannosaurus rex, it is shown killing a Spinosaurus with minimal effort. An obvious nod to that one scene in Jurassic Park III.
• This Is Unforgivable!: During the missions for the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC, Dr. Wu discovers that some currently unknown agent had injected your dinosaurs with a potentially fatal disease early in their embryonic stage. He rather calmly states that he fully intends to uncover the perpetrator and destroy them.
• Toothy Bird:
  • Subverted. At first glance the ornithomimids seem to be depicted with teeth, but closer inspection suggests they are teeth-like serrations similar to modern-day geese.
  • Played straight with the Pteranodon, which is based on its toothed design from Jurassic Park III.
• Victorious Roar: All of the carnivorous dinosaurs, and sometimes the herbivores as well, will roar after scaring off or killing another dinosaur.
• Video Game Caring Potential: In addition to meeting each dinosaurs' habitual, social and population requirements, Claire's Sanctuary introduced scenery items, paleofeeders, and a Greenhouse for the player to utilize in their exhibits. The scenery items (rocks and trees in this case) make the exhibits more aesthetically pleasing and more natural in appearance, while the Greenhouse allows the player to grow a variety of plants that make up a part of the herbivores' natural diet. Both grant the dinosaurs additional points in their overall rating, but stocking the paleofeeders with the right flora also extends their livespans.
  • However, only on Isla Nublar can the player build more than one Greenhouse, and each Greenhouse has only up to five slots. This means on the other islands, the player must choose which herbivores they want to have the additional rating, and thus extended lifespan. Unless of course, they're willing to pay nearly half a million to switch the plants in and out of each slot.
  • The Indominus rex and Indoraptor were abused creatures in the films, deliberately kept alone in cramped quarters to amplify their rage and desire to kill to make them better bioweapons. You can give them spacious open enclosures, plenty of food and water, and other dinosaurs or even other members of their kind (though gene manipulation) as companions, letting them have the peace and freedom they likely desired above all else.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Perhaps knowing their audience, Frontier made sure there would be no penalties for allowing dinosaurs to kill each other; on the contrary, wonton dinosaur cage fights only increase the appeal of your victors to the guests.
  • The first dinosaur you unlock, Struthiomimus, is cheap enough to incubate that once you have a stable income stream you can produce them solely as live prey for carnivores (refilling an empty carnivore feeder costs $200,000, an unmodified Struthy costs $30,000, do the math). Additionally, this counts towards the Combat Infamy for your carnivores, which will increase their overall rating, which in turn will positively affect your park’s overall dinosaur rating. If you're worried about the Struthi carcasses, any dinosaurs that have been killed by predation and fed upon will despawn after a short time when the predator (or predators, if you fed a live dinosaur to your pack of raptors or other small carnivores, they will take turns feeding on the body until the nutritional amount has been depleted) has finished eating.
  • This applies to the Huyangosaurus as well. They're relatively cheap ($210,000), they incubate quickly, they don't have social needs, and because of their rather decent combat rating, they pay out a LOT more Combat Infamy than the Struthiomimus. Ergo, they make great carnivore food. And on the off-chance the Huyangosaurus wins the fight against the carnivore, their Combat Infamy and Dinosaur Rating skyrocket. And, it's easy enough to modify their stats so they can win against weaker carnivores, so a beefed up Huyangosaurus can be "fed" Ceratosaurs.
  • The Isla Tacaño Science mission deliberately invokes this as the player must hatch a Diplodocus and Velociraptor, then place them in exhibits that don't meet their respective requirements, just so Wu can see how they react under stress.
  • Though this is completely optional, occasionally one of the contracts needed to increase your standing with any one of the divisions (usually Security in this case) will ask you to pit one of your dinosaurs against another in a fight to the death.
  • You can also feel free to put incompatible dinosaurs in pens together so they can fight it out, breed dinosaurs just to sell them (though this is a net loss of money), sell old dinosaurs to make room for new, "cooler" ones, or just open gates manually and let your dinosaurs run amok amongst your guests. The key to a good island rating is keeping your guests and animals happy, but if you want to embrace the disasters Malcolm's Chaos Theory predicts, absolutely nothing is stopping you.
  • Additionally, the game does not stop you from putting guest attractions inside your dino-pens. This can go about as poorly as you might expect.
• With This Herring: As the new park manager, Hammond Foundation expects you to swoop in and resolve the problems their operations in Muertes Archipelago are going through. Starting from the second island, this means they just dumped you into a broken park in the aftermath of a disaster, low or even negative funding (meaning you have to sell some buildings just to get the operation going), or even loose dinosaurs, and expect you to sort this mess out on your own, with only the occasional contracts to supply you with funding from time to time (and that's assuming you could accomplish the tasks they set you up to do, which is difficult early in the game where you have a very tight budget to spend). So much for "spared no expense".
• What the Hell, Player?: Dr. Ian Malcolm calls you out the first time you breed and release an Indominus rex, noting how dangerous and unnatural it is.

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