YMMV / Jurassic World: Evolution

• Breather Level: Once you realize you can sell your fossils at an unestablished park but do the actual research and expeditions on another with tons of money (see Game Breaker below), Isla Tacaño turns into this because you circumvented its major hurdle: debt. You won't need to sell any of the buildings you want to keep, and Tacaño is otherwise a partially cramped Isla Matanceros as it has no storms to worry about. Isla Tacaño comes between Isla Muerta, where you first deal with storms, and Isla Pena, which has tornado storms and a very cramped layout.
• Contested Sequel: If considered one to Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, it has several issues, such as very constrained building space outside of Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar, no guests with unique behavior, and limited dinosaur selection for the first 4/5ths of the game. Even acknowledging said issues, though, there are some players who prefer Evolution for its broader customization capabilities, more diverse selection of dinosaurs overall, and more complex behaviour for the dinosaurs.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Iguanodon has quickly become a fan favorite for its unique design and animations as well as the fact that it's the only medium herbivore capable of defending itself against carnivores.
  • Before the Iguanodon, the Struthiomimus was often adored by fans for being such an easy dinosaur to manage. So easy, in fact, that they're known to ignore holes in their enclosure, or leave it for a while before walking right back in. Its cheap price, cute design and being the first dinosaur available definitely adds to this.
  • The Spinoraptor is the most well liked of the hybrids both due to the fact it's not psychotically aggressive without modified social genes like the Indominus and Indoraptor and its appearance, which many think could belong to a potentially real dinosaur.
  • From the original human characters, Cabot Finch became popular for his corny yet oddly endearing sense of humor and his refreshing lack of pretense about the reason why everyone's really here: to make money.
• Fan Nickname: "Nanonotosaurus" for the Giganotosaurus on account of the Tyrannosaurus rex sized predator being, on release, realistically sized, and thus noticeably smaller than its supposed rival. Further patchwork brought the two dinosaurs to a closer size, yet both remain slightly larger than their real life counterparts.
• Game-Breaker: Sauropods are a whole Difficult, but Awesome dinosaurs where despite their expenses and their difficulty in meeting their needs, they offer an insane amount of ratings per dinos and can be housed together with other carnivores since the latter knows better than to pick a fight with someone bigger than themselves. Well, with the exception of the Indominus Rex anyway. No dinosaur however, manifest this more than Diplodocus where they offer an insane amount of rating for the cost required to incubate them, don't need much space compared to other sauropods and furthermore, you can have up to eight of them in a single exhibit. Pretty much anyone experienced in Challenge mode would recommend that you incubate them for as much as possible if you can.
• Good Bad Bugs: The physics for jeeps can be a little...jumpy...at times.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Dracorex is designed to challenge the player in the early game to learn how to meet the social needs of gregarious species. Consequentially, it has a poor reputation among many players for being a nuisance to contain in an exhibit until you figure out that you need to house at least two of them at all times.
  • The Ankylosaur groups in general tend to be looked down by many players due to their low social and population tolerance threshold while not even giving as high ratings compared to other herbivores that can be housed with greater social and population tolerance. This is however subverted with the Euoplocephalus, which by default has a social limit of 2-6 and a population limit of 2-15. Using the Cross Species Adaption DNA, the latter stat will be increased to 7-20, making it much more useful for a mixed herbivore exhibit. This however, comes with the cost of high incubation failure, as this gene reduces viability by a whopping 60%. On the flipside, all of the ankylosaurs and nodosaurs require very little space and forest to be comfortable (Polacanthis and Sauropelta don't even need forest at all) and can be housed together with no problems (mind their population limits and remember that Euoplocephalus needs two specimens), allowing you to have them in two small enclosures anywhere in your park.
• Memetic Badass:
  • This early gameplay video showing a Tyrannosaurus rex getting taken down by a smaller Ceratosaurus instantly catapulted the horned carnivore into this territory on the reddit page.
  • The Struthiomimus, as the first dinosaur you get in the game, has gained a reputation as being the ultimate creature you can get and that they are constantly scheming on how to escape. The let's player Gaming Beaver gave them the nickname Becky.
• Memetic Mutation: Quite a few.
  • The Deinonychus odd jaw shape making it look like it was making a "Troll Face" when snarling.
  • Before it was eventually fixed in a patch, the Spinosaurus getting shrunk down to the point the infamous "Spino vs. T. rex" battle is now a David Versus Goliath battle.
  • The first-person gyrosphere reveal getting more attention than the species profiles.
  • "Giga Confirmed!", which became Hilarious in Hindsight when it really was confirmed.
  • The Ceratosaurus being a gamebreaking juggernaut, often with images of it's face pasted onto the likes of Godzilla or Thanos.
  • The Dilophosaurus being referred to as a log, due to it accidentally being leaked early on and one of the developers calling it as such.
  • "Jedi Knight Ceratopsian" due to a graphical glitch where all ceratopsian dinosaurs like Chasmosaurus share a hitbox with the much larger Pentaceratops. This means when they try to stab or gore a predator, their smaller horns seem to whiff the air and yet still hit, looking like they were using the telekinetic "Force". The finishing move can even make it look like they're "Force Choking" the enemy.
  • The Iguanodon having a distinct finishing move against small carnivores by punting them away lead to a lot of comparisons to 300 and the infamous "Sparta Kick".
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Indominus Rex's species profile is this.
  • The music whenever nearly any medium or large carnivore is released is grandiose but tense as if to say 'hope you're prepared for what's coming'. Malcolm basically saying that for T. rex and I. rex helps the feeling of dread when bringing prehistory's most powerful predators back from the dead.
  • The Indoraptor is a nasty piece of work. He spends most of his time prowling on all fours and makes a bizarre hissing sound. His animation for killing a goat is also unnerving — he slams it on the ground with his jaws, slowly pins it to the ground with his hand and then swiftly tears its throat out.
  • During the Secrets of Dr. Wu DLC, the player's first cloned Spinoraptor will immediately and unexpectedly break out of containment regardless of what the player does, and raise hell in the facility. Oh, and the usual tranq darts won't work on it. The only thing you can do is clone a bigger, badder dinosaur to take it down. Worse, the Stegoceratops you've been sending up against several other dinosaurs, making it apparently your best option at this point, will run away at top speed upon seeing the Spinoraptor, meaning you'll almost certainly have to clone your chosen dinosaur from scratch while the Spinoraptor is still rampaging.
  • The fact that in one mission, three meat eaters including a T. rex, return from being on loan with rabies. It’s frightening to imagine giant rabid animals breaking out of their pens if you hadn’t healed them.
  • Depending on your POV, some carcass removals can either be this or funny as seen here.
  • The animations for killing and eating humans like the Albertosaurs.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In a very roundabout way, the Tyrannosaurus ended up being unlikable to any players who liked the other large Theropods. Given it was drastically oversized whereas comparable predators like Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus were shrunk caused many fans of the latter to accuse Universal or Frontier to be "Rexy Fanboys". However, this died down when it and the other two large predators got resized to be more accurate.
• The Scrappy:
  • On the human side, the heads of Science, Entertainment and Security are almost universally disliked for having a smug and demanding attitude, as well has having barely passable voice acting.
  • Unlike his generally well-liked film counterpart, Owen is despised by players for having no other role other than to pop in every few minutes and ramble inarticulately about how you should let your dinosaurs out to kill people. The fact that he's played by an AJ Loscascio making no effort to sound like Chris Pratt doesn't help.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In a lot of tycoon games, you're given the option to stop time and then build your facilities. No such luck here, and its exclusion is sure to make some veteran players (especially those coming off of Operation Genesis) a case of Damn You, Muscle Memory!.
  • Also the lack of speed option present in a lot of tycoon/sim games can made early game pacing slower than intended.
  • The "social" meter when it comes to hadrosaurs like Maiasaura. If you have any less than four hadrosaurs of the same species in the same enclosure, their comfort level will go down, which will lead to them rampaging, and they are built like tanks. Even worse, this can result in an endless loop of rampaging hadrosaurs as one escapes, then as it's being recaptured, the other hadrosaurs get angry that there are no longer the necessary number of them together, rinse and repeat. Also applies to some ceratopsians, pachycephslosaurs, and definitely to raptors as well. Edmontosaurus seems to be the only exception to the hadrosaurs, which is a good thing, because it's the first one you encounter in the game. Sinoceratops and Triceratops are better than other ceratopsians, being content with two. And you can do social alterations as of the Dr Wu DLC, which helps as well.
  • Likewise, the "Grassland" and "Forest" meters are equally troublesome, as they seem to be based not on what's in the entire enclosure, but a certain radius around the dinosaur— having too little of either Grassland or Forest means the dinosaur's comfort level will drop, meaning that it'll try to break out. This mechanic alone makes sauropods like Brachiosaurus, Mamenchisaurus and Camarasaurus—which all seem to have a very different "comfort" radius compared to other dinosaurs— more difficult to contain than a T.Rex, who will, for the most part, happily stay in their enclosures provided they have enough space and trees. Fortunately this was mostly fixed in a patch, with the animals' detecting of their surroundings redone in a much better way.
  • The fact that one has to build not one but three buildings in order to find fossils, extract DNA, and research new tech. In any other game, these would be relegated to menu buttons, but you have to spend a total of $1,200,000 of these at least on each most new islands after the first. Not only that, but they take up valuable real estate that could be used for a restaurant or for dinosaur paddocks. Fortunately, by the time you've unlocked everything for those respective buildings, you can sell them, but it takes a while to get there.
  • Terrain alteration and obstruction. If you're trying to put up something but need to change the elevation of the ground, hope you're ready to spend minutes on end trying to coax the engine into making it acceptable. It doesn't help that the ground is a uniform, unchanging shade of color that makes it difficult to see exactly how you've changed the terrain.
  • Play through the whole campaign and you'll lose count of all the times you were unable to place a building in a space it reasonably should've fit into because of "building constraints".
  • Using the ranger vehicle, you can take photographs of dinosaurs. They just serve as a way to let you make money or complete contracts, and the camera is very inconsistent about what counts as a dinosaur being in the photograph— you can have five dinosaurs from two species in a single picture, but the game may only acknowledge the existence of one or two of them. It wouldn't be too bad on its own— except that the game doesn't let you save the pictures in any capacity. Not on your hard drive, not within the game's files, nothing. Fortunately this was also addressed by adding a dedicated Photo Mode, allowing you to take screenshots with various types of image setups and styles.
  • Raptors and their tendency to go nuts during storms. It’s easy to get large carnivores tranquilized with one or two per paddock, but trying to get 4 or more raptors sedated before the storm hits is a huge pain. So you’ll likely be stuck recapturing raptors after it’s over.
  • Facility ratings. Because of how park ratings are calculated, your park's dinosaur rating eventually stops mattering because your park's services aren't good enough. While maxing the facility rating usually just involves placing blocks of hotels with nearby amenities and monorail stations across every major area of the map (guests hate walking too far), the massive footprint of these objects (especially the hotels) means you might need to remodel your entire park to accommodate them. Just try getting this right on Isla Pena.
  • While certain kinds of dinosaurs can be housed together, smaller species are designed to "panic" in the presence of bigger and scarier ones. This can often result in the panicking species never eating because the other one keeps scaring it away from the feeders.
  • Angry dinosaurs will break every fence, meaning that the strength of the fence you used actually matters little. It only affects how long it takes for them to break out.
• Tear Jerker:
  • A beloved dinosaur dying. Even worse if it's from something you could have prevented, such as disease, but couldn't because of something like lack of funds or research. It's a Tear Jerker that largely comes with the genre.
  • Occasionally, members of social species will start socializing around the corpse, making it look like they're mourning a fallen sister.
  • In the Claire's Sanctuary storyline, it looks like things are going to end happily after all, despite the ominous atmosphere on Isla Nublar. The volcano is about to erupt, but everything seems ready to go to evacuate all the animals... and then Cabot Finch drops the bombshell: despite all his efforts, he could only scrape together enough funding to evacuate a handful of dinosaurs off the island... and you, the player, will have to decide which dinosaurs will live or die. It doesn't even pretend to be a What the Hell, Player? moment, as the characters clearly do not envy you having to make the decision.
  • Look closely when you clear away forest for construction and you'll see tropical birds fleeing into the air in your wake. It weaves a painful irony into your activities on the islands — you're destroying the natural habitats of already-threatened modern dinosaurs to construct artificial habitats for long-extinct ones. A subtle You Bastard! and one of the many ways the game characterizes the player as a ruthless, avaricious tycoon.
• That One Achievement:
  • It became easier with later updates that expanded terrain tools, but "Hold onto your butts!" (get 5 seconds of airtime in 20 seconds while driving a Ranger vehicle) was surprisingly difficult simply because of the flat and gently-sloped topography of the islands' terrain. The one good spot to get the trophy was a specific hill on Isla Nublar which nonetheless still had to be adjusted with the terrain tools in order for it to work. It was especially frustrating as this trophy unlocks the much-coveted 1993 tour jeep skin for ranger vehicles.
  • "I read your book": obtain every inGen Database entry. What looks to be a simple if tedious task actually requires you to do everything in the main campaign — including maxing your reputation with every security division on every island and getting 5 stars on all islands, Nublar included — as well as perform some very obscure tasks few players would think to do normally, like open a gift shop that sells Barbasol shaving cream.
  • The Challenge Mode trophies are challenging indeed, but "Jurassic measures" (get 5 stars on the hardest difficulty setting) and "Clocked at 32 miles an hour" (get 5 stars within 3 hours, medium difficulty or higher) stand above the rest. Getting both requires all the careful planning and park design of reaching 5 stars in any kind of park setting, but with extra-harsh restrictions (frequent disasters and extortionate fees in the former, the time limit of the latter).
  • Claire’s Sanctuary DLC has a trophy that can be obtained by medicating all 62 sick dinosaurs manually as opposed to letting the AI do it by assigning tasks.
  • Also in Claire's Sanctuary, Green Thumb requires you to have a palaeobotany welfare score of 1500. Infeasible to achieve in most all-purpose parks, getting the trophy usually requires you to make a herbivore-only sandbox park. Besides the headache of housing different dinosaur families separately so they don't eat the wrong plant and lower your score, what really makes the trophy difficult is the fact that the palaeobotany score is influenced by dinosaur rating. Since most herbivore dinosaurs have lower individual ratings, a park full of the usual species will yield an unimpressive score. Only a park with about fifty high-level sauropods like Mamenchisaurus is going to cut it.
• That One Level:
  • Isla Tacaño, the third island of the five deaths. The previous park on it was mismanaged so poorly that you're hemmoraging money, and you start of at at least -$950,000. You have to delete several facilities — including ones that you don't have access to by that point in the game — in order to even buy a single dinosaur. Mercifully, the contracts you get scale to how well you're doing, so you can always get a little money off of that.
  • Isla Pena makes Isla Tacaño look like a Breather Level in comparison. It's positively tiny, and you'd be lucky if you manage to squeeze three dinosaur enclosures while still supplying your guests with buildings and making sure there's enough power and safety. To make matters worse, it brings back the storms from Isla Muerta, now with a chance for twisters, which will damage any building they come across and worse, destroy any fences they encounter (thankfully, they don't kill dinosaurs like in Operation Genesis). Want a 5-star rank on this island? You're gonna have to fight for it, and hard. Sorna has twisters as well, but they won’t hit the whole island due to its size.
    • Even worse is that the missions are completely at odds with your space and each other. All of them involve incubating large theropods that need a lot of room. Two of them need Tyrannosaurs that cannot be put together. Three large enclosures are all you can make to begin with so you will probably have to sell some dinosaurs at a loss if you want to do them all.
  • You thought Isla Pena is tiny? Tacaño Research Facility from Secrets of Dr. Wu makes Pena feels spacious in comparison. Sure, you get a decently-sized premade park with one large enclosure ready for your first mission, but it leaves only two just large enough space to build two more enclosures before you run out of places to build. What makes it even harder is that the missions given by Dr. Wu are fairly difficult and requires you to build hybrids that require wide enclosures to keep them satisfied. You don't get to do contracts in this mission so that cuts off one main source of income. Worst of all, this level contained the dreaded Spinoraptor mission: you're tasked to incurbate a beefed-up Spinoraptor as part of the mission, which at one point becomes berserk and breaks out of its pen with nothing that can stop it since it's immune to tranquilizers, leaving you with only one option of creating other dinosaurs that are strong enough to take it down, at which point it becomes a Luck-Based Mission as all you can do is hoping that the Spinoraptor would come across and engage your dinos in battle while you constantly lose money from shutting down the park to prevent those nasty dinos from killing everyone. Really, the only saving grace this level has is that there are no storms or tornadoes for you to worry about.
  • Isla Nublar, the so-called sandbox mode, can be unlocked by getting four stars on the first island... but there's a problem. Yes, you get unlimited funds on Isla Nublar, but you'll find that all of the other features in the game— including research, facilities, and available dinosaurs— don't scale to your progress outside of sandbox mode. So if you've unlocked it by Isla Muerta, hope you like building a park without iconic JP Dinosaurs like Spinosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus, and friggin T. rex. Also: you can't send out new expeditions, sell fossils, or conduct research on Isla Nublar.
    • This has mostly been fixed. While you still can't do any research or send out expedition teams (after all, both cost money and the latter brings in return investments in the forms of gems and fossils to sell and Isla Nublar is a sandbox mode), it does scale to your progress on the other islands, so long as you have the required number of Fossil, Research, and Expedition Centers.
  • The final mission of Return to Jurassic Park. You thought dealing with the dart-proof Spinoraptor in Secrets of Dr. Wu was bad? Now you have three dart-proof Velociraptors breaking out with no prior warning at all. Though it's miltigated by the fact that you just incubated a T.rex prior that so she could be used to take down the raptors at that very moment, it still comes down to the matter of damage control and luck as you patiently wait until your T.rex can eliminate the raptors one by one. Even worse is that you can't trigger an emergency warning, meaning that your staff and visitors are completely at risk of being eaten and your park will suffer a sheer drop in ratings and income.
  • Claire’s Sanctuary can be this if you aren’t careful. If you make the mistake of rescuing a social species like Stygimoloch or Stegosaurus you’ll need to rescue enough individuals to meet their social needs (or else they'll constantly break out, requiring you to keep them sedated until you find all their fossils and breed more). Worse is that doing so lowers your starting species variety, making higher park ratings that much harder to achieve. And three of the four missions at the sanctuary island have a no dino deaths clause. If you get unlucky and have older dinos in the mix, or if someone gets sick before you research what they’re got, they can die and force you to restart the whole island if you don’t save. And it has twisters like Pena and Sorna which can add to the headache.
• That One Sidequest: Getting 5 stars in every island on Jurassic difficulty in Challenge mode is a grueling task, but it's the only way to unlock rare cosmetic skins for several dinosaurs.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The Acrocanthosaurus is a large predatory theropod but its muscular build gives it a somewhat plump look and its face is almost mammalian in appearance.
  • The sleeping behavior can lead to this. Try not to "d'aww" when you see a Velociraptor with her tail twitching against her face as she dreams, or an Indominus rex letting out a massive yawn before she curls up to take a nap.
  • As can the socializing behavior can as well, it can be very adorable watching dinos chirp, click, and roar in a friendly fashion with each other.