Jurassic Park
: Operation Genesis is an enjoyable
game that should appeal to dinosaur buffs and park simulation fans alike,
thanks to its attractive graphics engine, unique features, and surprising
gameplay depth.
Amusement park simulations are among the
best-selling games on the PC market today. Their popularity should come as no
surprise, because these simulations can appeal to such a broad audience--men,
women, and children alike. What is surprising is that almost all games based on
the Jurassic Park license to date have been action games, while the premise of
the original movie was the creation of the world's greatest zoological park.Universal Interactive has finally taken the logical step with Jurassic Park: Operation
Genesis, a strategy game that lets players create and manage a dinosaur zoo.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is an enjoyable game that should appeal to dinosaur buffs and park simulation fans alike, thanks to its attractive graphics engine, unique features, and surprising gameplay depth.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is an enjoyable game that should appeal to dinosaur buffs and park simulation fans alike, thanks to its attractive graphics engine, unique features, and surprising gameplay depth.
The game allows a very wide field of view.
Operation Genesis' 3D graphics engine does an
excellent job of rendering the lush terrain of a tropical island. The dinosaur
models are very detailed, allowing players who have even a passing knowledge of
paleontology to immediately spot the differences between similar-looking
dinosaurs such as the brachiosaurus and the camarasaurus (also known as the
brontosaurus). The models are also scaled accurately--small velociraptors are
dwarfed by the much larger tyrannosaurs, for instance. Weather effects like rain,
wind, lightning, and tornadoes add to the overall effect. The engine lets you
rotate your view in any direction and also has a wide range of zoom, so you can
get in close to examine individual dinosaurs, or get a much wider view to
manage your park comfortably. Though Operation Genesis also has special effects
like reflective water, we found that the game had a tendency to lock up with
the more advanced graphics settings turned on. Fortunately, the game still
looks good even at a medium level of detail, though the game's dinosaur
animations still aren't particularly smooth.
Operation Genesis sounds almost as good as it
looks. Each of the game's dinosaurs lets out different types of noises,
depending on whether it's playing, hunting, sick, or frightened. Your park
advisors provide some audio cues, and they even visually resemble the actors
from the original movie (though their voices are provided by stand-ins). The
in-game music is the very same score written by John Williams for the original
Jurassic Park film. Williams' songs do contribute to the game's atmosphere, but
die-hard fans of Mr. Williams' music may be disappointed to find that the game
doesn't use CD-quality recordings of the tracks.
Operation Genesis' interface is probably its
weakest aspect. The game's mouse control is imprecise, so you'll sometimes
click on the wrong button. Also, the game provides no way to cycle between the
different dinosaurs in your zoo, which can make trying to keep track of them
more annoying than it should be. Picking out larger dinosaurs is easy because
they're so large, but some of the smaller ones like velociraptors can be hard
to spot from a zoomed-out view. Thankfully, you can see the location of all
your dinosaurs on the game's minimap, but the game probably could've benefited
from a "cycle to next dinosaur" button. The game's interface also has
no quick buttons to bring up your park map, so if you spend most of your time
controlling the game with your mouse, you'll have to reach back to your
keyboard and hit the Tab key to bring up this important screen.
The gameplay in Operation Genesis revolves
around creating a park full of dinosaurs for your visitors. The game provides
several different kinds of challenges. First, you'll need to create secure
enclosures that provide a safe environment for both dinosaurs and park
visitors. To keep your park secure, you'll need to build electric fences of
varying strength, security cameras, ranger stations, and even sentry guns.
Tornadoes and rampaging dinosaurs can cause breaches in the fencing and also
damage buildings, but thankfully, the game's map interface makes it easy to
spot any holes in your defenses.
Using the viewing towers from the first-person
mode is a great tool.
Secondly, you'll need some dinosaurs--unlike
games such as Zoo Tycoon, in which you simply purchase animals, Operation
Genesis requires you to literally build your menagerie from scratch. You'll
hire fossil-hunting teams in various parts of the world and then place them at
dig sites to seek out dinosaur bones or amber. You'll then send the artifacts
to your genetics lab, where you'll extract DNA until you have enough of one
species' genome to create a dinosaur from a hatchery. Though it's possible to
create a dinosaur with only a 50-percent-completed genome, he won't live
long--the more complete a genome you have, the longer your dinosaur will live.
This contributes to the game's strategy, because it costs you time (and money,
if you choose to buy fossils and amber from the fossil market) to find more pieces
for a particular species of dinosaur. However, the time you put into completing
a genome results in a longer-lived investment, since hatching a dinosaur costs
a lot of money as well.
Even though children will be attracted to
Operation Genesis because it has dinosaurs, parents should take note of the
ESRB "T for Teen" rating on the box. There's some blood in the
game--carnivores can kill livestock, other dinosaurs, or park visitors if they
get loose. You'll also need to put down rogue dinosaurs from time to time by
shooting them. The violence is never gratuitous, but parents may want to
consider these facts before getting this game for a young child. For dinosaur
fans who are mature enough, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis provides an
enjoyable experience, with attractive graphics, strategic gameplay, and unique
features that provide up-close looks at the dinosaurs in action.
System Requirements:
Processor= 550MHz
RAM= 128MB
Graphics= 16MB
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