To say that Jurassic Island: The Dinosaur Zoo is the game we've all been dreaming of is to imply that there simply aren't anti-psychotic medications strong enough to help us. The only way to get through a night like that is to NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. EVER.
Now, it's worth noting that, going in, I wasn't really expecting the game to be good. It's an early access title after all. And the fact that stylistically it appears to be aping the sort of click and wait base builder drek that clogs up facebook game feeds is also a fairly clear warning sign. However I must confess to a certain fondness for that sort of thing. There is a certain satisfaction to arranging your tiles in an optimum fashion. And the main problem with any free play to game is always going to be the monetization getting in the way of gameplay. So the possibility of a simple little Dinosaur themed builder without any obtrusive microtransaction bullcrap was not entirely unappealing to me. After all the only other option available is the Dinosaur expansion for Wildlife Park 2, and whilst that's fairly enjoyable in it's own way I always get slightly miffed by my inability to get all the fences to line up perfectly square.
If only they'd thought to put in a snap to grid function I could have saved myself a few quid and many fruitless hours spent trying to find out if there was any actual gameplay hidden in the game. SPOILER ALERT: There really isn't.
But since I've wasted so much time on this I feel it only appropriate to waste EVEN MORE TIME moaning about it, as hopefully then I can get some sort of closure on the experience and never look at it again. So, where to start?
Obviously the game is a clunky mess, but I think probably the greatest problem is that mechanically it just doesn't work. The basic systems are broken. You need money to build stuff. So you build fences to make enclosures for your Dinosaurs, roads to connect them to the entrance, cars for people to travel in and stop off areas outside the enclosures for the guests to visit and look at the Dinosaurs. Sounds okay, right? But here's the thing: You get your coins when a vehicle exits the park. And whilst you get more money if they've visited more places and seen different Dinosaurs, that also means they're taking a lot longer to exit the park, and thus limiting your cash flow. If you actually want to earn enough money to do any real building then you build ONE rest area. Get the jeeps you have moving through as quickly as possible, use the funds to buy more jeeps and just sort of hang around until you hit the max amount of vehicles.
Whether or not you actually put down a Dinosaur for them to look at is more or less optional. I didn't realize this at first of course. Working as I was under the assumption that a Dinosaur zoo would actually need some Dinosaurs in it. But the game has a curious feature where, every now and again, all your resource production will randomly shut down for no readily apparent reason. The first you will know about this is when the Dinosaurs you have all start dying of dehydration because there's not enough electricity to power the water towers or something.
No, I don't know how that's even supposed to work.
The point is that here we have a Dinosaur Zoo game where actually having any sort of variety of exhibits is actually detrimental. In my experience having more than 3 stops slowed money production down to such a crawl that you were basically stuck waiting with nothing to do for large stretches of time.
Now, if there was some sort of limit to how many jeeps can visit a stop at any one time then things might make more sense. You'd need the extra areas to get more people into the park and thus it would actually make sense to expand the area. But that's not what happens. No matter how careful you are in trying to time when you buy jeeps to try and get some sort of constant flow through, eventually you'll have to renumber the stops when you want to put in a new area. And then ALL twenty vehicles will form up in one gigantic swarm and all that hard work will be for naught. Are you beginning to see why a minimal amount of stops is the way to go? Once the swarm hits the exit you get a bunch of money, so getting them there as quickly as possible is the main priority. Especially once you try to use an egg mine.
Fairly early on in what we shall laughingly describe as the tutorial you are instructed to build an egg mine. This is the structure which, shockingly, produces eggs which you can then hatch into new dinosaurs. Even though there's very little point in doing so. It generates eggs by depleting your bank balance at a rate that is only sustainable once you've twigged onto the whole "don't have Dinosaurs" exploit. If you actually try to follow the barely legible and somewhat cryptic tutorial prompts you'll just be left wondering what the cock is going on and why you can't actually do anything. Turn that fucker off until you've built everything else. Then, when you want to start getting eggs, feel free to turn it back on and wait.
And wait....
And wait some more.
Eventually an egg MIGHT show up. It probably won't though. Waiting around with nothing to do appears to be one of the core mechanics in this game. Once you have an egg you can incubate it, which involves yet more waiting. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if you had anything else to do in the meantime, but since you can't actually run the mine and have enough money to do anything else at the same time you won't. After this incubating wait time you then finally get to find out what sort of Dinosaur is in the egg, and eventually can release it into an enclosure should you have a burning need to clean up even more poop.
Oh.... We haven't talked about the poop yet have we?
Aside from waiting around with nothing to do the other major feature of the game is clicking on piles of poop. You need to clean these up yourself. If there's a facility for adding auto poop removal to an enclosure I haven't found it. So with frightening regularity whatever Dinosaurs you have will shit EVERYWHERE. And you have to select your poop shovel tool and go and click on each little nugget one by one to remove it. The more Dinosaurs you have, the more poop there is to clean up and the more annoying the process becomes. As if we hadn't already worked out that actually having Dinosaurs is somehow a bad thing in this game. The pooping is also the major reason I turned the sound off after a while. There's only so many times a minute you want to be hearing that bloody noise.
Anyway, where were we?
Now on to the REALLY good part: Unlocking new stuff. You start, as is the custom, with a handful of buildings and decorations and 3 available species of Dinosaur: Ankylosaurus, Stegosaurus and Parasaurolophus. All good animals, but suppose, despite everything the game is teaching us with it's broken mechanics, you want more? To unlock new stuff you seem to need to raise a likes meter. You start off at 400. The next tier of features unlocks at 500.
My play time on the last attempt at a park is going to be somewhere in the region of six hours as a rough minimum. In this time I have managed to raise the likes to 407.
Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute. Trust me, you can't be as horrifyed as me. I actually sat there PLAYING this garbage for that amount of time.
Luckily you can artificially inflate the popularity by just buying likes. 1000 likes for a mere 600000 monies. So, basically an undisclosed amount of time turbo cycling the jeeps until the money counter got high enough. This unlocks some new species, although you'll have wait for the egg mines random number generator to actually assign you one before you can use it. And trust me, that's not super likely. Using the previously described methods of exploitation I built the maximum number of mines, and it made little to no discernible difference as to the rate at which eggs were generated. Although running them all at once certainly hammers your funding at massively increased rate.
You also get some new building options. Although since there's no explanation as to what any of them actually DO I couldn't help but feel somewhat disappointed. I built a Helipad, and it did NOTHING.
And it was around this point that I resolved to please just STOP WASTING MY LIFE ON THIS DREK. My high hopes for maybe something actually happening were quickly dashed by the realisation that even if something actually HAD happened that might make things even slightly interesting the game was simply not going to tell me. I mean, there's a gift shop building, and it won't actually let me build it anywhere. I have no idea why not. Does it need to join up with a road or rest area in some way? I simply don't have the remaining willpower to bother finding out.
I'd spent a large chunk of my weekend treating this piece of crap like a puzzle. That maybe I could work out how to make it fun if only I spent long enough staring at it. I WAS WRONG. I have no idea what the hell they're going with on this game. As the sort of thing you leave running in a window whilst doing something else and occasionally check in on it could almost work. Except of course for the fact it expects you to constantly pick up poop by hand and will randomly shut down your facilities and kill off all your livestock if you get up to make a cup of tea. And even then it still needs to actually put in some sort of cogent explanation as to what the hell anything is or how it's meant to work. And that's not even getting into the weird and buggy controls. I mean, some of that you can forgive as a fact of early access. But for the underlying principles of the game to be so utterly misaligned?
That's beyond an issue of polishing. The fundamental systems DON'T WORK. It's simply not in any way ready for even the earliest of early access. This isn't even an alpha version. This is at best a sketch that needs to be rubbed out and done again. It's not that there isn't at least some potential for making a working game out of this, but you're going to have to go right back down to the basics and start again.
Everyone makes mistakes. That's perfectly normal, and even desirable. It's how we learn. But you don't get to put your mistakes on Steam and charge three quid for the privilege of finding out just how terrible they are.
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