TLDR: Jurassic Park Evolution: 8/10 would make dinosaurs eat people again.
Managed to spend about 2 hours with it the night before last, and honestly can’t wait to go back to Isla Matanceros - hopefully tonight. In those 2 hours, I didn’t manage to do very much in terms of progressing through the Career mode. It’s just too damn pretty! I actually spent more time messing around with the built-in Nvidia Ansel tool than playing the game, to be honest 
There are 5 islands in Career mode (they make up the Las Cinco Muertes Archipelago - the Five Deaths!), each with progressively harder challenges for you to overcome. The basic aim in Career mode is to get the park on each island built up and profitable. Islands are rated out of 5 stars and you need a minimum of 3 stars before you can move onto the next island. Once you’ve unlocked an island, it remains available for you to go back to and improve on whenever you like.
Visually, it’s pretty as heck, and the dinos (at least the 3 or 4 I’ve unlocked so far) are the best-looking and most well animated I’ve ever seen in a game. Frontier got a lot of visual assets and assistance from Universal, and the dinosaurs are pretty accurate in terms of similarity to their big screen originals.
That’s nice and all Greg, but what about the game?!? The game is solid, even very good, as a business management sim. And if you enjoy management sims (and I do) then there’s a ton of stuff that you should really like in JWE. You can’t just drag and drop a bunch of Raptors and a T-Rex or two into your park and enjoy the spectacle of them smashing through your puny fences and helping themselves to an all-you-can-eat buffet of park visitors. You need to make sure you have the funds to spend, send out fossil hunting expeditions, spend time analysing and extracting dino DNA, build suitable enclosures, incubate your dinosaur - hopefully successfully, provide power supplies to keep the electric fences working, ensure the dinosaurs are properly feed and medicated, build visitor facilities, monitor and adjust selling prices in your stores and hotels, keep an eye on the frequent storms and tornadoes that damage your facilities and get repairs done as quickly as possible, all while juggling the demands and expectations of three different department managers - Science, Security and Entertainment - who each think their department should be your area of priority, and still make a profit and satisfy visitors.
If the management aspect of things phases you a little - yeah, I really just wanna watch Rexy munch on a bunch of tourists and then do some donuts in the Jurassic Park Jeep - then the Sandbox mode is for you. You need to at least have 4 starred the starter island in Career mode to unlock Isla Nublar (the island in the Jurassic movies) which is where you can sandbox to your hearts content with unlimited funds, and weather and time of day settings of your choice. The only shortcoming of the Sandbox mode is that only the basic facilities and dinos are available to you initially. You have to unlock the big daddy dinos and the fancy facilities and upgrades in Career mode at least once before they are made available in the sandbox. Other than that, you can go mad with the Dino vs. Man - Who Wins? scenarios
JWE may definitely not be a game everyone will enjoy. If you were hoping for a theme-park builder you’re probably going to be a little disappointed. There are at the moment very limited park specific features - decorations, side-attractions, variety of facilities, etc. Park visitors can’t be indivdually tracked and monitored - you just get given a broad park visitor satisfaction rating without being able to see what they liked and disliked, or what their current needs are.
Dino AI is also a little iffy on occassion. Some species that you may expect to herd together don’t, some that you’d assume would rip each other apart if they were in the same enclosure seem to tolerate each other a little too easily. That sort of thing.
To a degree I think the games shortcomings are somewhat understandable. Frontier were required by Universal to get a functioning game out to coincide with the Jurassic Park 25th anniversary events and the release of Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, the new movie. Also, consider that they only had around two years to put it together. They’ve already commited to a large performance and content quality patch to be put out with the release of the free Fallen Kingdom DLC in “the near future”, so hopefully that’ll address some of the issues.
And now that the game is out, the pressure is off the devs and they can slowly, as is Frontiers’ norm, add and improve on the solid base they have. A lot of the same people who created Planet Coaster worked on JWE, and that game has gone from strenght to strength with each of its patches and DLC packs. I see the same happening for this one.
Is it worth the price? To me it was. But I am a Frontier fan, was a pledge backer for both Elite: Dangerous and Planet Coaster, and would have been for Jurassic World Evolution too if given the option. I have faith that what is already, in my opinion, the best Jurassic Park and dinosaur related game ever, will only get better over time.
For others, that cost of fanboyism may be a little too pricey, and they would be making a fair decision to possibly hold off until at least that first content and performance patch gets released to revisit it then. Or to wait a few months for it to go on sale and pick it up later.
Alternatively, if you really just like dinosaurs, get it already! You won’t be disappointed.
[Okay, that was a heck of a lot longer than I planned. Sorry.]
