Jurassic World Evolution 3 came out on October 21st, 2025. It’s the third installment in what has been a fantastic run for the series. I’m a huge fan of simulator games in general, and it appears the Evolution games are often made to a high standard.
Personally, I’ve never watched any of the Jurassic World movies. Criminal, I know. I’m just not that interested. I like the Evolution games because I get to build a park that’s filled with attractions and dinosaurs. It’s an element of building, but a constant feeling of being on edge in case something goes wrong.
I pumped over 100 hours into the first game. I didn’t do as much in the second game as I found it to be too rough on the micromanaging elements of the game. The third game has been a tremendous step up, giving me that feeling that the first game did.
It offers a lengthy campaign that isn’t ridiculously difficult but requires, at times, a heavy grind. I enjoy this, though. I love being sunk into a simulator game for hours and getting to a point where I can truly embrace what I’ve built.
There is a lot of fun stuff to do in this game. The guest facilities feel more impactful than ever. Some of the attractions are great, too. I especially love the hot air balloon ride as it feels a bit like a cheat. It doesn’t require a lot of space, and the balloon can add great visibility without taking up too much of the already limited spaces.
A lot of the good stuff, though, is overshadowed by how much of a mess the game is. I’m playing on a PlayStation 5, so I have no idea if the same issues are persistent across Xbox and PC, but on PlayStation, it’s not great.
Here are a few of the bugs I’ve encountered, some of which I’ve encountered multiple times:
1. Hard crashes
This is the most frustrating one. I still call it blue-screening from back in the PS4 days, but the game completely freezes and closes down. I can play for an hour without it happening, or I can play in 15 minutes, and it happens 3 or 4 times.
I even had a crash that completely shut down my PS5 to the point it made a horrible cracking sound as if my PS5 was going to completely break. I had to unplug the entire console. Once it was turned back on, it had to do a rebuild. I understand simulator games can, at times, be fairly buggy, but these crashes are on another level.
I even had a moment where my game went full black and white. I have attached a screenshot of this one below:
My entire PlayStation crashed after roughly a minute of looking at this, which was delightful.
2. Portugal mission
This mission honestly nearly made me stop playing. At a certain point during the mission, you become sabotaged. Now, if you have carnivore dinosaurs in particular, the moment they see an opening, the public is food. Simple as that. Now imagine taking all of the time to resolve it and get everything back in order, only for you to have to do the same thing every single time you load back in.
In the middle of that, whilst suffering hard crashes made this mission unbearable. Thankfully, as I moved to the next step, it stopped happening, but what a nightmare that was.
I also noticed on this particular map that there were occasions I’d place buildings down, and they’d automatically demolish themselves without giving me a refund.
3. Maintenance crews are morons
I’ve played tons of simulator games in my life. The ATV drivers in this game are perhaps the most idiotic AI I’ve encountered. The number of times I have to direct control a driver because he’s stuck… on absolutely nothing.
There is also a frustrating bug where something will show as broken (or nearly broken), but you can’t assign the crew to fix it. You can’t even fix it yourself if you drive over to it. A quick save and reload normally fixes it, but it’s still annoying considering how significantly long the load times are.
Bugs aside, or once they’re fixed, this game becomes the best in the series by a landslide. It’s fun and it’s engaging. It’s just a shame that the games are in the state it is at the moment. I have full faith that the developers will fix all of the issues and the game will be solid moving forward. I’m hoping this happens sooner rather than later. I can’t take another hard close.
