Manage dinosaurs (and expectations) in this theme park sim

Build a park filled with dinosaurs in this ho-hum game for iOS based on the famous movie series.

Bring back the dinosaurs!

The goal of Jurassic Park Builder is to construct a large theme park filled with Jurassic creatures. While playing, you’ll have the opportunity to expand the park and fill it with a variety of dinosaurs. The game also makes liberal use of characters from the Jurassic Park movies that give you missions to complete. The missions themselves are fairly standard: collect x amount of gold or build x amount of buildings, but it’s slightly entertaining when Ian Malcom (bearing resemblance to Jeff Goldblum) pops up on screen with a smarmy remark. More dinosaurs are added to the by collecting fossilized amber found when jungle is cleared. If you have at least five carnivores, you can activate an optional mode called “Red Alert” which starts a mini-game. In Red Alert, your dinosaurs break out of their pens and race off to the jungle where you goal is to catch them by tapping on their location.. Gold is awarded for each dinosaur recaptured.

Most of the game is spent collecting gold and ordering food for your dinosaurs. As your progress further in Jurassic Park Builder, your park expands and your dinosaurs level up. Later in the game, a battle mode is available where you can use your dinosaurs to face off against other players online.

If you avoid inapp purchases, you’ll spend most of the game waiting for buildings to be constructed, forests to be cleared, and food to be imported. The game encourages you to return consistently for very little reward; There’s very little satisfaction in continually returning every 5 minutes to save a small amount of leafy food to feed your herbivore.

So easy to play that even a T-Rex could do it

The controls for Jurassic Park aren’t complicated: most of it involves tapping various points on the screen in a manner that’s very similar to Simpsons: Tapped Out. Missions  For the most part, there are no problems with the controls except for some issues when building roads: make sure to use the pinch and stretch gestures to zoom in and out to avoid building a road in the wrong place. 

How it looks and sounds

The graphics in Jurassic Park Builder are nothing revolutionary and in some cases subpar. The dinosaurs look nice and their animations are fluid. Conversely, the cars which roam around the park look disappointingly low-quality.   The sound for the game features dinosaurs roaring, jungle sounds, and music based on the popular Jurassic Park movie theme. 

No bones about it: a dinoBORE

Outside of a battle mode, Jurassic Park brings nothing new to the build-em-up genre other than an official movie license.