Jurassic World Evolution 2 Complete Edition Switch 2 Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
From the moment I saw Jurassic Park at the cinema, I dreamed of running my own dinosaur theme park. Now, as a middle-aged man, I’ve realised I seem to be missing the billions of dollars in capital, and investors needed to make that dream a reality. Thankfully, the Jurassic World Evolution series lets me live out that fantasy without taking out a loan. After learning the ropes on the original Nintendo Switch with the first game, Jurassic World Evolution 2 continues the legacy of building the ultimate dinosaur park… and watching everything inevitably go horribly wrong. What’s It Like? Pack some road flares, study your blueprints, and hold on to your butts as we review Jurassic World Evolution 2 Complete Edition on Nintendo Switch 2.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 follows on from the events of the first two Jurassic World films. With the park destroyed and dinosaurs now attempting to coexist with humans, you join Owen and Claire as part of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, helping capture, conserve, and contain dinosaurs across the United States. Being the Complete Edition, however, the game doesn’t stop there. Alongside the DFW campaign are two additional story campaigns. The first is the Dominion: Biosyn campaign, where you follow Lewis Dodgson’s rise from humble beginnings to becoming a world leader in genetics. It felt bittersweet to revisit this story, as it also features Laura Dern and the late Sam Neill reprising their iconic roles as Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant. Finally, there’s the Malta campaign, which introduces some interesting mechanics as you balance dinosaur conservation with making a profit by dealing with both government authorities and the underground dinosaur trade.
Each campaign takes a unique approach to gameplay, keeping things fresh from beginning to end. There are traditional game mechanics like ensuring Dinosaurs needs are met with balancing environments, cohabitation, and herd size. At first, I missed the spectacle of building a traditional theme park during the DFW campaign, but the further I progressed, the more I appreciated its bold departure from the series formula. My building style shifted from flashy attractions to purely functional facilities, ensuring my dinosaurs had everything they needed while constructing viewing platforms for scientists, who replace guests, to study them and generate funding. The Dominion: Biosyn campaign introduces new mechanics centred around a Hyperloop facility while constructing the Biosyn headquarters seen in the film. Meanwhile, the Malta campaign feels like a blend of the DFW missions and the original park-building gameplay, creating a satisfying mix that keeps each campaign feeling distinct.
Now, for those who miss the classic park-building experience, I’m pleased to report that a Chaos Theory mode is here. This mode lets you rewrite the events of the films by building and managing six iconic parks from both the original Jurassic Park trilogy and the Jurassic World trilogy. These different parks also managed to mix up gameplay mechanics, from classic park building to protecting your Dinosaur ranch from poachers. I tried my hand at recreating the original Jurassic World, and after sinking around six hours into my park, my dinosaurs started dying of old age. Because I’d developed such tunnel vision chasing profits, I hadn’t funded enough expeditions to discover new species and replace my ageing attractions. Then, just as things couldn’t get any worse, a hurricane tore through my park, leaving me bankrupt. Much like John Hammond reflecting with Ellie Sattler about how “next time it’ll be different,” all I wanted to do was start over, learn from my mistakes, and build the ultimate dinosaur park.
And that’s really where Jurassic World Evolution 2 shines. I feel like I could play this game indefinitely. With aviary species, marine reptiles, and around 150 dinosaur species to discover, I never grew tired of expanding my park, carefully managing every detail, expanding new sections of my park, and doing it all over again. For players who love park builders, there’s an incredible amount of depth here, right down to customising individual shops with photo booths, fossil displays, as well as external visual styles to maximise guest satisfaction and profits. There’s simply so much to do. The only feature I was genuinely surprised to see missing on Nintendo Switch 2 was mouse mode support. After enjoying it so much in games like Civilization VII, I expected it to be included here. That said, I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. The controller implementation is intuitive, the menus are easy to navigate, and I felt right at home despite not having played the original game since revisiting it for the Switch 2 backwards compatibility tests. It would certainly be a welcome addition in a future update, but in my opinion, its absence isn’t a deal-breaker.
Visually, Jurassic World Evolution 2 brings its dinosaurs to life in incredible detail. Every species is animated exceptionally well, from Ankylosaurus peacefully grazing to a Tyrannosaurus rex chasing down your ranger team after a containment breach. They all have unique behaviours and interactions, with some species playfully socialising while others battle for dominance. Meanwhile, crowds swarm through your park like ants, moving from attraction to attraction, and watching ranger teams patrol while your park operates around the clock never ceased to amaze me. Sure, there have been some compromises to get the game running on hybrid hardware compared to its console counterparts, most noticeably in the lower resolution and occasional asset and level of detail pop-in. Thankfully, these rarely detract from the overall immersion, and once you’re focused on managing your park, they’re easy to overlook.
What does detract from the immersion, however, is the performance, particularly when you’re zoomed in or managing a larger park. While the campaign generally manages to stay on top of things, Chaos Theory mode can really begin to struggle. At one stage, I was desperately piloting my Ranger’s Jeep to safety from a Tyrannosaurus rex when the framerate dropped to what felt like around 15 frames per second. Zoomed out, the game generally maintains its 30fps target, although you’ll still notice the occasional hitch as new sections of your park stream into view. I experienced these issues in both docked and handheld, and while these performance issues are certainly noticeable when you stop to admire your park up close, they never reached the point where I wanted to put the controller… or console down. Hopefully, Frontier can squeeze out a little more performance through future patches, but even in its current state, I found the occasional slowdown to be more of an annoyance than a deal-breaker.
For my park engineers looking into accessibility options, there’s an incredible amount on offer here… far too many to cover individually. Many of them are also really thoughtful, rather than simply ticking boxes. Features like muting environmental sounds while characters are speaking make dialogue much easier to follow, while the ability to customise the controls for every vehicle, including the tour vehicles, gives players a fantastic level of flexibility. On top of that, you’ll find colourblind modes, options to highlight dinosaurs, extensive HUD customisation, and a wealth of other settings designed to tailor the experience to your needs. It’s fantastic to see such a comprehensive suite of accessibility options, making Jurassic World Evolution 2 welcoming to a wide range of players. Kudos to the team at Frontier for the care and attention that’s gone into making the game as accessible as possible.
At $90 AUD, Jurassic World Evolution 2: Complete Edition on Nintendo Switch 2 surprisingly comes in cheaper than its console counterparts, which average around $120 AUD for similar bundles. Better still, the Switch 2 version includes additional content packs that players on other platforms would need to purchase separately on top of the retail price. When you combine that with three story campaigns, 6 Chaos Theory modes, Challenge mode, and Sandbox mode, there’s an enormous amount of content here. Whether you want to recreate iconic parks from the films or spend hundreds of hours building your own dinosaur empire, Jurassic World Evolution 2 offers exceptional value.
It’s clear the Jurassic World Evolution franchise is in safe hands with Frontier. Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a lovingly crafted tribute to the Jurassic Park films that lets you live out your wildest park-building dreams. The level of customisation, from the dinosaurs themselves to individual shopfronts, will keep detail-oriented players engaged, while the near-endless amount of content means it’ll most likely stay installed on your Switch 2 for quite some time. Sure, there are some compromises in terms of visual fidelity and performance, but that does little to dull the spectacle of enjoying this adventure 65 million years in the making.
So, What’s it Like? Jurassic World Evolution 2 is like Theme Park crossed with the Jurassic World Franchise.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.
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