Jurassic World Evolution 2 review – the closest we’re going to get to a real Jurassic Park

PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S; Frontier Developments
Though there are moments of bloody mayhem, the focus in this beautiful game is on wondrous natural history

Like its hulking, tourist-gulping attractions, Jurassic World Evolution 2 has both a silly name and DNA that has been stitched together from several different animals to create something improbably beautiful. A bridge between the spiritually bereft Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the forthcoming Jurassic World: Dominion, this could so easily have been another cash-grab movie tie-in. Instead it's a beautiful game predominantly about finding the wonder in the creatures you're looking after (or chasing around in Jeeps). And where John Hammond failed, this is a park experience I can thoroughly endorse, even if people do get eaten with distressing regularity.

Thanks to the events of the most recent film, in which a plot device dressed as an eight-year-old girl causes dinosaurs to be released into the wild, there has never been a better time to open one's own Jurassic Park. All of the busy work from the first film (finding a mosquito trapped in amber, sucking out its prehistoric meal of dino blood, and hoping like a kid with a new pack of trading cards that it's not one you've already got) can be dispensed with. Instead we have the faintly Metal Gear Solid V experience of sneaking up on confused dinosaurs, hitting them with a tranquilliser dart and then watching a cargo chopper swoop down and snatch them up and away to begin a happier life in the paddock you've just built for them. Later you'll recruit scientists, who can be sent on longer-range kidnappings to return rarer species.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is out now (9 November); 49.99