Playing this on XboxOne.
Ploughed (not in a Witcher 3 way) about 5 hours into this now.
As expected, it’s Theme Park with dinosaurs. There are several islands to play, but as far as I can tell, you’re limited in the order you can play them.
You start off with the basic outline of a park. It’s important to get money flowing straight away. This is best achieved by sending dig teams to various sites in order to excavate fossils and amber. The fossil facility studies them to extract more of the genome of a dinosaur. Other times your scientists come back with a mineral deposit you can flog for cash. Once your genome is above a certain percentage, you can incubate an egg. The higher the genome percentage, the higher the chance of success. The second island presents the difficulty that you don’t start with a research, fossil or expedition centre, so you don’t have access to that income immediately.
Once you have your first dinosaur, the visitors begin to arrive. Various shops are worth constructing to raise income. Your enclosures need viewing areas and watchtowers in order to raise customer satisfaction.
The animals themselves need care. They need food (requiring regular restocking by despatched ranger teams), medication when ill (researchable in the lab and implemented by ranger teams) and comfort. The latter can be achieved by expanding the enclosure area, adding similar dinosaurs and adding shelter.
Dinosaurs can eat other dinosaurs. The starting area has them all in one area, resulting in a massacre when my ceratosaurus went berserk, before being felled by a pair of plucky triceratops. Consequently, my first park consists only of herbivores. The second has separate paddocks.
Security is important. I installed electric fences to prevent bored animals from breaking out (which results in a costly waste of time, switching on the alarms to get the public to shelters while you get your ACU chopper to tranquilise and transport the escapee). I’ve since installed tougher fences after a Ceratosaurus terrified by a tropical storm smashed its way out of the compound and ate several visitors. You can see this in relative close up. It’s both hilarious and wince-inducing.
One nice touch is the ability to control the chopper and ranger jeep. The jeep handles well and you can get really up close to the animals, bombing around the paddocks taking photos for cash. It really gets you up close and personal to the action in your own park. You can set the rangers to restock food and repair fences manually, or drive round to the problem yourself.
Challenge is issued through contracts from the security, entertainment and science divisions of your park. You need to balance these out to be successful. I’ve had to reload twice due to leaning too far towards one aspect, and haemorrhaging money during storms, or when animals started to die during a disease outbreak that I hadn’t researched a cure for.
Contracts can be things like researching a genome about 60%, or making sure you don’t allow any members of the public to be eaten for 10 minutes, or securing a certain profit margin in your shops, or getting two dinosaurs to have a fight. I figure they’ll get tired and samey rather quickly, but I find the construction and maintenance of the Park compelling enough anyway, so it’s just added interest for someone like me.
Research is useful for developing new dinosaurs. It seems that you can splice genes in the creation department. I’d like to think you can create a new species, but I don’t know yet. I’ve just researched a monorail, so I hope to build that soon. The hamster balls aren’t available yet, but they’re alluded to.
I’ve really enjoyed it so far. It’s quite unforgiving insofar as that you’re punished severely if you’ve neglected something for too long, which makes the reload and success all the sweeter. Lessons learned and all that. The weather effects are atmospheric and visuals generally good. The animals are fascinating to watch and I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow.
Ploughed (not in a Witcher 3 way) about 5 hours into this now.
As expected, it’s Theme Park with dinosaurs. There are several islands to play, but as far as I can tell, you’re limited in the order you can play them.
You start off with the basic outline of a park. It’s important to get money flowing straight away. This is best achieved by sending dig teams to various sites in order to excavate fossils and amber. The fossil facility studies them to extract more of the genome of a dinosaur. Other times your scientists come back with a mineral deposit you can flog for cash. Once your genome is above a certain percentage, you can incubate an egg. The higher the genome percentage, the higher the chance of success. The second island presents the difficulty that you don’t start with a research, fossil or expedition centre, so you don’t have access to that income immediately.
Once you have your first dinosaur, the visitors begin to arrive. Various shops are worth constructing to raise income. Your enclosures need viewing areas and watchtowers in order to raise customer satisfaction.
The animals themselves need care. They need food (requiring regular restocking by despatched ranger teams), medication when ill (researchable in the lab and implemented by ranger teams) and comfort. The latter can be achieved by expanding the enclosure area, adding similar dinosaurs and adding shelter.
Dinosaurs can eat other dinosaurs. The starting area has them all in one area, resulting in a massacre when my ceratosaurus went berserk, before being felled by a pair of plucky triceratops. Consequently, my first park consists only of herbivores. The second has separate paddocks.
Security is important. I installed electric fences to prevent bored animals from breaking out (which results in a costly waste of time, switching on the alarms to get the public to shelters while you get your ACU chopper to tranquilise and transport the escapee). I’ve since installed tougher fences after a Ceratosaurus terrified by a tropical storm smashed its way out of the compound and ate several visitors. You can see this in relative close up. It’s both hilarious and wince-inducing.
One nice touch is the ability to control the chopper and ranger jeep. The jeep handles well and you can get really up close to the animals, bombing around the paddocks taking photos for cash. It really gets you up close and personal to the action in your own park. You can set the rangers to restock food and repair fences manually, or drive round to the problem yourself.
Challenge is issued through contracts from the security, entertainment and science divisions of your park. You need to balance these out to be successful. I’ve had to reload twice due to leaning too far towards one aspect, and haemorrhaging money during storms, or when animals started to die during a disease outbreak that I hadn’t researched a cure for.
Contracts can be things like researching a genome about 60%, or making sure you don’t allow any members of the public to be eaten for 10 minutes, or securing a certain profit margin in your shops, or getting two dinosaurs to have a fight. I figure they’ll get tired and samey rather quickly, but I find the construction and maintenance of the Park compelling enough anyway, so it’s just added interest for someone like me.
Research is useful for developing new dinosaurs. It seems that you can splice genes in the creation department. I’d like to think you can create a new species, but I don’t know yet. I’ve just researched a monorail, so I hope to build that soon. The hamster balls aren’t available yet, but they’re alluded to.
I’ve really enjoyed it so far. It’s quite unforgiving insofar as that you’re punished severely if you’ve neglected something for too long, which makes the reload and success all the sweeter. Lessons learned and all that. The weather effects are atmospheric and visuals generally good. The animals are fascinating to watch and I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow.
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