Author Archives: Dan Stapleton

You could’ve tracked me down in any given year of my life and gotten me excited about the idea of running my own dinosaur park, and Jurassic World Evolution 2 makes good on a lot of the important parts of that promise. While it lacks the customization and management depth of Frontier’s other recent, excellent park-builders, Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, getting to see these prehistoric beasts at eye-level from one of those stylish ‘90s tour Jeeps has never looked more enticing. At least until you lightly bump into a goat and the physics engine sends several tons of steel hurtling into the air like a Looney Tunes gag. Yeah, there are still some rough bits.

The stars of the show are, of course, the over 70 species of unlockable dinosaurs, aquatic reptiles, and flying pterosaurs you can put on display. And they are fantastic replicas of the models used in the movies, with lifelike animations and spot-on sound for everything from the iconic T. rex to more obscure, but equally cool, species like the Baryonyx. The armchair paleontologist in me is a bit disappointed that they don’t reflect newer research on dinosaurs that has come along since 1994 – there’s nary a feathered velociraptor in sight – but on the other hand it’s a Jurassic Park game, so I can understand why they wouldn’t want to diverge from the look of the films.

Caring for them involves creating enclosures with food, water, and appropriate terrain, much like in Planet Zoo, but here their needs are quite a bit simplified and sometimes counter-intuitive. Raptors don’t need trees or tall grass? What? Climate doesn’t seem to play a role at all either, as any species can live perfectly comfortably in the Canadian wilderness just as easily as the baking Arizona desert with no heating or cooling facilities. It’s cool that there are so many different terrain types this time around, but the fact that they don’t present any unique challenges is a let-down. It’s a trade-off, I guess, because the loose set of rules also gives you a bit more freedom with the overall look of your habitats.

I wasn’t that impressed with the other park management aspects, either. You can’t even set basic costs like ticket and snack prices, and while I didn’t miss that micromanagement too much, the park feels less alive when you don’t have to hire or take care of souvenir shop cashiers or janitors.

Rangers, who are responsible for repairs, feeding, and capturing escapees, are nameless, faceless grunts whom you apparently have an unlimited supply of. Likewise, you can’t click on individual guests to learn about them, so the simulation of their wants and needs is as deep as a puddle. So is all the water in the park, by the way, outside of special enclosures specifically for aquatic species. Your scientists, who bring back fossils, hatch dinosaurs, heal sick or injured specimens, and research new buildings, are the only hires you’ll care about, and they can now sabotage your park if you don’t allow them regular vacation time, which adds at least a little bit of tension to staff management.

Spare No Expense

Maximizing income is a simple minigame of adding modules to your amenities to appeal to specific guest types, which boils down to mousing over the list, seeing which ones will add the most profit, and then building those. Streamlining the busywork so you can focus on the dinosaurs makes sense to a certain degree, but I feel like Evolution 2 takes it a dino-sized step too far. Even if it is a much richer experience than the first game, the gap between this and most other park sims is significant. The ability to speed up time is a really welcome addition, though, especially when you’re just waiting to have enough money to hatch a new species or repair a critical facility. The absence of this feature created huge chunks of boring downtime in the original, especially when a storm knocked out power and your dinos ran up a huge bill by eating guests and you had to pay it off by just waiting it out; this lets you mostly skip over all of that.

Visual customization is also fairly lacking. While some buildings, like food and beverage stands, let you choose the style and color of every single piece individually, others have only one or two pre-made appearances. There’s a terrain sculpting tool that works decently, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as the one in Planet Zoo, and paths built along slopes don’t even level themselves off, so you can end up with something like a sidewalk canted at a 30 degree angle with guests merrily strolling along when they should be tumbling to their doom.

Breeding your own dinosaurs is at least a bit more strategic and meaningful this time around. Most species will come with genetic problems, like short lifespans or aggressive tendencies, and those have to be compensated for by your scientists by adding DNA from other species. It also provides an incentive to complete the genome of species you already have the ability to clone, since that allows you more room to add genetic modifications.

The personality of each dinosaur really matters, and when my star raptor, Victoria, kept getting into fights, I was left with a tough choice. Putting her with other raptors resulted in frequent, expensive vet bills for both her and whichever other member of the pack she had decided to bully. But raptors can’t live comfortably in isolation, so I couldn’t just place her in her own, separate enclosure, either. Ultimately, I just had to let nature run its course: she kept getting in fights, and I withheld treatment until she died of her injuries. As Ian Malcolm might say, “F- around, find out.” In the next batch of eggs, I made sure to throw out the ones with that trait.

You Didn’t Say The Magic Word

This sim is also packed with unlockables, which can be nice if you want help setting goals, but frustrating if you merely want to jump into sandbox mode and build the park of your dreams. There is, astoundingly, only one map available in sandbox at first, and all of the rest must be unlocked either in frustrating timed challenges or story-based “Chaos Theory” scenarios, which mostly follow the plots of the various Jurassic films. This is probably the place you’ll want to start, since they give you a reasonable amount of freedom to play how you want and feature cameos from major series characters, including some of the original actors like Jeff Goldblum.

You’ll also have to unlock the vast majority of the available dinosaur species, but I didn’t mind this as much. Most of the important ones from the original film are available very early on, and it was nice to still be discovering new species to mix things up even more than 30 hours in. Pterosaurs and aquatic species especially got a lot more love this time around (they weren’t included at all when the first game launched), with more customizable enclosures that let you focus your entire park on them more easily, if that’s your thing.

There is also a campaign mode which changes up the formula in some interesting ways: after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service – and the CIA for some reason? – have recruited Claire Dearing and Owen Grady to help them capture wild dinosaurs and place them into non-profit sanctuaries. The former is voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard reprising her role, but Chris Pratt must’ve been too busy voicing literally every animated character and is nowhere to be found. It’s only a few hours long and feels more like a tutorial than anything, because disabling the already meager economic aspects of Evolution 2 leaves you with even less to do. But the scenarios themselves are fairly novel, giving us our first look into a world where humans and dinosaurs have to coexist.

Having finished Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition, it’s hard to fathom why this excellent action role-playing game was quite so controversial when it came out in 2012. Granted, the endings were revised to be both clearer and a bit more nuanced since – and they still aren’t all that good. But the bulk of its 50+ hours are the same, and on the whole it’s as much of a gut-punching, head-scratching continuation of the trilogy as ever. Is it the best Mass Effect? No, not quite – as I said the first time I played it, Mass Effect has followed the same pattern as Star Wars: the original trilogy’s second episode was the high point and the third. While still very strong and visually impressive, didn’t quite stack up (and everything after was questionable at best). Its final moments may not quite stick the landing, but just about everything up to that point is stellar.

As far as the remastering goes, Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition has seen the fewest changes of the Legendary trilogy. It looks roughly the same as Mass Effect 2’s Legendary version, holding up nicely thanks to its improved textures and more detailed models. I still remember being taken aback by the horribly smeared textures on uniforms in the opening scene when I first played on PC in 2012, but here they’re sharp as can be in 4K, right down to the medals on chests. Only a few things stand out as stiffly animated or chunkily low resolution (like Admiral Anderson’s weird armored baseball cap, for instance), and although you can still expect a fair number of animation glitches, I never hit anything more severe than that. Rest assured, watching numerous full-blown Reapers strut their high-definition stuff as they wreak havoc across a battlefield does feel like a great payoff to two games’ worth of buildup for this race of sentient war machines.

Also, the Legendary Edition is strictly single-player; the entire co-op multiplayer horde mode has been removed. You’ll still get to run through a few of its missions with your AI squadmates at least once as side missions, but otherwise it’s entirely gone. Granted, I never did like how I felt obligated to grind out points in multiplayer to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything in my single-player campaign – that felt like a coercive means of making people participate in a mode they might not be interested in – and the multiplayer was always a sideshow to the huge RPG. However, it does seem to go against the spirit of the “Legendary Edition” to leave out such a significant chunk of what Mass Effect 3 originally was.

The only other notable change to the Legendary Edition (among a handful of minor tweaks) is that BioWare has toned down the cutscene camera’s gratuitous focus on womens’ butts a bit. There’s still quite a bit of cheek on display, but this time around the camera just knows when to use it more appropriately: it’s one thing to linger on some nigh-impossible curves when we’re in a flirtatious scene with one of Mass Effect 3’s multiple romance options, but quite another when we’re supposed to be taking someone seriously as they discuss the dire state of the galaxy. It’s more in line with what we saw in the previous two games, and that improved dignity didn’t come at the expense of the more intimate moments between characters.

Setting out into the Milky Way, the structure of Mass Effect 3 immediately feels more linear than that of ME2. That’s a natural consequence of the story being much more about winning a war for survival against the Reapers than it is about meandering around the galaxy, exploring and building a team at your own pace. BioWare also did away with scanning planets for mineral upgrade currencies almost entirely… and yet, as sick of that as I was by the time I finished ME2, going directly into ME3 I did miss some of that freedom and the sense that any planet might contain some valuable resource worth searching for. In hindsight, the incentive to just wander the stars that it and the clumsy Mako created were… probably worth it? That’s hard to say after having disliked those mechanics but now there’s a hole left where they were.

The accelerated pace and focus on guns-blazing action does work just fine, though, because Mass Effect 3 has an enormous pile of stuff to do – and I did just about all of it. That’s especially true with the impressively meaty Leviathan, Citadel, and Omega DLC expansions integrated into the campaign, making it feel bottomless while I was in the midst of it.

How much did I do? Hard to say. For some notoriously buggy reason, the “Time Played” game clock on my completed Mass Effect 3 save says I’ve been at it for 287 hours. I’m pretty sure that’s a wild exaggeration – our friends at HowLongtoBeat.com list an average completionist run of Mass Effect 3 at about 51 hours, and I might’ve been a tad slower than that because I played on Hardcore difficulty. But after playing through the entire expanded trilogy in succession over a period of months, that number doesn’t feel as wrong as it should. And Mass Effect 3 is the biggest of the three.

When it came to my new playthrough, though, I learned a lot. Because of EA’s extremely questionable decision to carve him out as launch-day DLC back when it first came out, this was my first time playing with the prothean companion, Javvik. His presence adds so much background and insight into the previous cycle’s ancient war with the Reapers and the true nature of the prothean culture that it’s mind boggling to think that he just… wasn’t there for my first playthrough. It’s a relief that no one who picks up Mass Effect 3 going forward will have that incomplete story experience. Also, Javvik’s cold, dispassionate demeanor is especially welcome considering how little of Thane Krios we get in this game, so I took Javvik with me on nearly every mission.

Though we have fewer available companions this time (a max of seven, down from ME2’s 12), just about everybody who survived ME2 will show up in some way during the story, and pretty much everything gets wrapped up one way or another. A whole lot of ground is covered, even as the threat of the Reaper invasion looms large: The Illusive Man gets a conclusion; the krogan genophage is resolved; the war between the geth and the quarians ends; a battle is fought for the future of the Omega space station; we learn who first created the Reapers; and we have a party which, naturally, is crashed by bad guys. All of these and more have significant decisions to make that determine their outcomes and who lives and dies, which is the key part of what makes a Mass Effect game shine.

In fact, there are so many characters in play that it feels gratuitous to introduce more, which may be why, outside of Javvik, there aren’t a lot of new standouts to add to the star-studded voice cast ensemble.

One terrible choice that BioWare made was to introduce, out of the blue, a new enemy: Kai Leng is a generic space ninja assassin with no meaningful impact on the story or interesting background to motivate him. He’s about as deep an antagonist as Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace; unless you read up on his story outside of Mass Effect 3, there’s not much to him other than blindly following the evil orders he’s given. The fact that he can be responsible for the deaths of major characters if you fail to stop him feels like a cheap way to end their stories. Thankfully, he doesn’t show up all that often.

Speaking of deaths, having played through as a Paragon back in 2012 I was impressed at how dirty I could get Shepard’s hands when choosing the Renegade options. More than one former squadmate died as a direct result of my ruthless actions, which gave satisfying heft to my choices. I’d have loved to have seen a bit more fallout from those decisions, especially since this was the final game of the trilogy and nothing had to be carried forward, but there was still plenty to think about as I threw as many people under the bus as I could in order to save Earth.

I have to say, though, with Mass Effect 3’s co-op multiplayer component removed in the Legendary Edition, I especially dislike the vestigial “war points” system that was likely made with it in mind. It tallies up your progress in building an anti-Reaper alliance with cold, hard numbers in a way that feels reductive and game-y, arbitrarily putting a point value on whatever soldiers or starships you recruit to your cause. That demystifies the outcome of the war for survival and turns it into a series of equations with right and wrong answers. This kind of thing has been there all along, but Mass Effect has been good about hiding the raw calculations from us until now.

My Vanguard-class Shepard relied heavily on pistols, keeping the load light so that my biotic powers recharged faster and I could dish out explosive combos that encourage the use of a variety of attacks for extra damage. I admire how well that equipment system is balanced; choosing instead to take lots of guns would dramatically increase the cooldown timer on my telekinetic blasts and throws, but I’d have a much larger pool of ammunition to work with in a fight. Playing on Hardcore I found it more valuable to have the unlimited ammunition of biotics to wear down tough enemies, but bullets are plentiful enough that it wouldn’t have been impractical to shoot my way through.

Enemy variety is a strong point thanks to the typical soldiers, alien creatures, and robots being joined by Reaperized versions that come at you in droves. They can certainly feel bullet spongey – especially the powerful Banshees and Brutes that are sent out in large numbers toward the end of the campaign, which have layers of shields and armor that must be peeled away with appropriate attacks – but there’s enough nuance to the combat to keep it interesting even for dozens of hours. I did find that it was often difficult to pick my squad on some missions without knowing what enemies I’d face and whose powers would be best suited to taking them down; that feels like something that you optimize for on your next playthrough using your knowledge of what’s to come, and it did lead to a few situations where I found myself poorly equipped for a fight and had to retry multiple times.

One disappointing thing is that no matter what you chose for the rachni queen’s fate in Mass Effect 1, you’ll still run up against Reaperized rachni artillery here. Inconsistencies like that take away from the promise of a contiguous Mass Effect story, and I’d love to have known that I was only facing them because I’d shown the rachni queen mercy and was now dealing with the consequences of being a Paragon (especially given how often they killed me).

Overall, combat is the best it’s been in the trilogy, and a fitting culmination of everything that came before it. I didn’t miss the lack of vehicle sections like the Mako or Hammerhead – Mass Effect 3 works great on foot, and the occasional cutscene showing an epic space battle kept it feeling like the scale was larger than an infantry skirmish.

Without getting into the spoilery nature of the ending itself, I can say that the possible conclusions to the story are certainly more fleshed out now than they were when I originally played. Where I was once left wondering who had survived and who had died, these expanded epilogues spell out the consequences of your final decision clearly and impactfully. However, the fundamental problem with the ending is that virtually nothing you’ve done up to that point matters in the decision or outcomes. You can artificially restrict your own choices if you want to keep your roleplaying consistent, but there was no tangible reward or punishment for my playing two full games as Renegade Shepard; as long as I’d done enough side missions to crank up my War Points I could still choose any ending, including the “good” one, if I wanted to (I didn’t).

Call of Duty’s Zombies mode has circled around the axis again. With Vanguard returning to the gristly frontiers of World War II, we are culling the rotten corpses of the Third Reich on gothic European battlefields for the first time since 2017’s Call of Duty: WW2. And for anyone who spent their high school years boarding up windows when Zombies debuted in Treyarch’s 2008 Call of Duty: World of War, the developer’s latest interpretation had the potential to be both a homecoming and a living testament to how the mode has evolved since. Unfortunately, a stark lack of content upon release squanders that potential, instead making Vanguard’s Zombies mode come across as a total afterthought.

The basics are right in place. You and three friends have been transported into a hellish, phantasmagoric alternative universe — red skies, cursed talismans, eldritch gods — about a million miles removed from the steely realism prioritized by the mainline Call of Duty games and Vanguard’s own campaign and multiplayer modes. I’ve always loved how Zombies lets Call of Duty stretch its legs into a brutal, Doom-y aesthetic, and Treyarch proudly heaps on the gore as waves of hungry enemies keep coming and you to survive as long as possible.

There’s some melodrama around the margins too: the Nazis have wandered too deep into their occult obsession and have unleashed grotesque perdition in the ruins of Stalingrad, and they’ll tell you all about their sins in audio logs that can (and probably should) be easily ignored. After all, we are here to kill hordes of zombies using the same slick first-person shooting mechanics that have preserved Call of Duty’s spot as a mainstay for nearly two decades, and that part still feels great. The weightiness of 1940s firearm engineering was always a natural pairing for our Van Helsing fantasies; you take the front two windows, I’ll take the back door, and we’ll keep firing our Tommy guns until we’re out of bullets.

What’s new this year is an element of randomness on each run. A Treyarch developer told me roguelites like Hades were influential during development, and that touchstone jumps out immediately. A lot of your time in Vanguard’s Zombies will be spent between encounters, dawdling around a war-torn hub zone (a la Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine or Destiny’s The Traveller) where you can juice firearms, craft weaponry, and swap in powerful but generally uninteresting buffs called Covenants that might give you a kickback of health with every melee kill or revive allies faster, and so on. Those options merge nicely with Vanguard’s four ultimate abilities – a devastating energy mine, an invisibility field, a party-wide damage buff, and a speed-dampening vortex – which fit into the usual DPS/Tank/Healer class balance setup, and add a few more thoughtful flourishes to the action. Booby-trapping a spawn point with a screen-filling explosive is just as satisfying as you’d think it’d be, and skulking away from certain death with an invisibility cloak saved my reputation in front of my teammates more than I’d care to admit.

However, most of the Covenant boosts you can buy are pretty uninspiring, and I found myself thirsting for augmentations that provide a bit more color than just speeding up my animations. Part of that is because they pale in comparison to the randomized bonuses you’ll find when you’re out and about on the maps. Case in point: one power-up I found basically gives you the Golden Gun from GoldenEye – every zombie you tag, regardless of location, immediately keels over. It’s so much more fun than all of the expensive stuff available at your headquarters, but of course finding it is all up to the luck of the draw. It’s rare to have one of those loot-based eureka! moments found in many other roguelikes; when all the random upgrades meld together in a sublime miracle run, like catching lightning in a bottle. Alas, Vanguard has little imagination beyond bigger damage numbers sparking out of the heads of its undead.

All of those upgrade stations demand currency you earn out in the killing fields, which means that Zombies follows a rigid formula: take one of the outlying portals to an instanced challenge – survive an onslaught, escort a floating skull, or power up obelisks – and then minmax your build back at basecamp. Those three flavors of mission serve up plenty of undead to kill, but they also grow stale very quickly. The onslaught, in particular, puts you in extremely tight corridors for about two minutes while you fend off the hoard, which is the sort of straightforward design you’d expect back in the primordial World at War days. The unexpected left-hook I was waiting for never came. No bosses, or unexpected cutscenes, or unique trials. In fact, the Zombies community has already made a meme of how often the canned voice acting repeats, ad nauseum, as you stand around Stalingrad waiting for something to do.

Once four objectives are complete, the squad can exfiltrate out of the hotspot and back into safety to start from scratch the next time… or they can push forward, knowing that the difficulty will escalate with every victory. To survive that escalation, Treyarch wants you to bleed over your character sheet; to page through the network of weapons, Covenants, and the remaining miscellaneous accoutrements to create the apex zombie-killing machine. There’s certainly room to experiment with these tools – on one of my runs, I put together a combo of upgrades that slowed my targets to a crawl, which paired nicely with my Covenant that increased damage to impeded corpses. Overall though, Vanguard’s Zombies is pretty mindless. There’s nothing wrong with that, few people play Zombies to demonstrate their peerless tactical acumen, but I don’t think Treyarch has brought that much need for incisive thinkiness to the table. At the end of the day, we’re still holding down left-click over everything else.

That’s the main issue with the latest round of Zombies: the mode is way too thin. Every party I joined cycled through the same three narrow missions over and over again, plodding through a limited suite of upgrades with none of the rising tension of the more traditional horde-mode format. Vanguard possesses no Easter egg storylines, no wonder weapons, and a limited, uninspiring suite of perks. There’s an efficient undead-killing infrastructure here, but everything else in Zombies is weirdly spare.

One of the best things about roguelikes is their ability to surprise you after multiple runs. Remember how awesome it was when you discovered the secret fight against Charon in Hades? Or when you unlocked an increasingly bizarre arsenal in Enter The Gungeon? It’s honestly shocking how much Treyarch’s design lacks that same verve. We’re killing the same herd of zombies, buffered with some vaguely interesting beefier foes that fall into well-hewn archetypes (A zombie with a gun! A zombie that explodes when shot!), with absolutely no dynamism to speak of. I was not surprised a single time after my first trip into Stalingrad, which is pretty damning for what’s supposed to be Call of Duty’s fun, pulpy diversion.

Of course, Treyarch says that a “main quest,” which sounds a lot like the more story-driven, scripted rendition of Zombies we’ve seen in Call of Dutys of yore, won’t arrive until December 2 – nearly a full month after the initial rollout. Until then, we’ll be crunching through a series of disconnected combat arenas, adding up to oodles of viscera, and not much else. It makes you wonder what a release date even means in an era when a significant element of one of the biggest games of the year can arrive openly, flagrantly unfinished.