Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a business simulator based on the Jurassic Park franchise. It is the third installment in the Jurassic World Evolution series that began with 2018's Jurassic World: Evolution, and continued with 2021's Jurassic World: Evolution 2, again developed and published by Frontier Developments.
Welcome back! The world has only gotten more, well, JURASSIC since we last saw you. Dinosaurs continue to roam the world and believe us, they are everywhere and they're not exactly getting along with modern society. That's why we're recruiting you and some of your old buddies from InGen and the DFW to work with us at DIN (Dinosaur Integration Network), so you can do what you do best: build Dinosaur Theme parks (preferably ones that also serve as suitable reserves where the dinosaurs can live safe, happy lives). However, this time, not only will you be playing the role of park manager (and not "The Next John Hammond", we hope), you'll also be playing matchmaker! Dinosaurs have begun breeding in earnest around the world, so your franchises will have you step in to ensure the dinosaurs have what they need to breed and raise their young, as well as find their mates. Speaking of finding mates, that rascal among rascals Cabot Finch (who probably needs some money to pay for his latest divorce, the old card) will be along for the ride too, eager to soak up whatever loose change you can send his way and in return for helping manage your franchises!
Oh, by the way, you may want to keep a closer eye on your park this time. Not everybody is happy with DIN's work...
You'll be fine.
Jurassic World Evolution 3 was released on October 21, 2025 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S.
The game has received the following paid DLC packs so far:
- Badlands Set (October 21, 2025): Scenery items and other pieces from the Montana Badlands seen near the beginning of "Jurassic Park (1993)".
- Deluxe Upgrade Pack (October 21, 2025): Features "Concavenator", "Guanlong", "Protoceratops", "Thanatosdrakon", three new ATV skins for the maintenance team, a new bioluminescent Mosasaurus skin, and Clark County scenery items.
- Wetlands (December 9th, 2025): Features Irritator, Austroraptor, Hypsilophodon and multiple scenery items focused on wetland environments.
This game provides examples of:
- Animal Gender-Bender: Zig-zagged with the Geosternbergia. The female is shown with a headcrest (which would've been a mere stump
◊ in real life), though it's still smaller than that of the male. - Animals Not to Scale: The female Pteranodon are the same size as the males when they should be shorter. Averted on the game's website, which shows the male Pteranodon is larger.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- If your dinosaurs are capable of breeding, they'll automatically stop laying eggs when no more dinosaurs of their species can comfortably inhabit their territory, preventing endless waves of hatchlings from throwing your carefully-balanced exhibits out of whack without having to constantly fiddle with nests or the in-game contraceptive settings.
- Scientists no longer need to be paid any money to get rested, averting a good portion of Early Game Hell in both campaign and challenge mode as previously, they had to be paid each at most 75,000 dollars to get rested for 3 minutes. As a caveat, scientists now have a default rest time of 4 minutes instead. The amount of money needed to recruit scientists as well as their salaries have also been greatly reduced overall.
- In campaign mode, as you travel through the various sites you research and dino genomes follow with you. Not only does this mean you don't have to keep re-researching the basics, if you're on a map where you're strapped for cash you can take on a contract that involves researching a new item or raising a dinosaur's genome and then complete that objective at a site with more funds. On top of that, fossil sites will actually refresh later on in the campaign even if you'd already gotten everything out of them, meaning that you can set up a completely superfluous expedition to one you've already "completed" in order to get additional funds by selling everything you bring back if you're low on cash.
- Altering terrain by raising, lowering, flattening it and more no longer costs any money (adding/removing forest and water still does). This is hugely important for the Japan Challenge mode map, were one of the criteria is that you have very limited fencing to use and is encouraged to use natural barriers as a fencing instead.
- Besides the Paleomedical Facility, all buildings that require scientists to be assigned to for a given task now has a default max capacity of 5, which greatly increases the speed rate of when tasks get finished in general, and it also allows scientists with cost reduction perks to add up even higher.
- Research requirements are simplified to ensure a smooth gameplay flow, which is handy if you're playing Sandbox Mode with Standard settings. For example, to unlock a cure for Avian Pox, you simply need to take a picture of the sick animal rather than build a separate quarantine pen and move all the afflicted animals like in Jurassic World: Evolution 2. Likewise, you no longer need to release dinosaurs with certain genetic traits to unlock further dig sites in a tech-tree fashion, as all of them can be unlocked if you have the right amount of skills from the onset.
- The Artifact: The building upgrade for reduced staff training and rest cost's text description went unchanged, in spite of the aforementioned staff change.
- Aquatic Hadrosaurs: Defied. None of the hadrosaurs can swim in deep water in the game. Some, like Parasaurolophus, do prefer wetlands in their habitat, but even they do not swim in deeper water.
- Aquatic Sauropods: Downplayed. All adult sauropods in the game can traverse through deep water thanks to their massive bulk allowing their necks to stay above the waterline to breathe. However, juvenile sauropods are too small to wade through deep water, and they cannot swim like other specialized aquatic species such as Spinosaurus.
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- The big new feature of 3 is the addition of baby dinosaurs, all of which are cared for by their parents until they grow up. However, the likelihood of extended multi-year parental care varies across the species included in the game. It's more likely for hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, which have fossil evidence of behaviors such as nesting and herding, but less so for theropods (whose young probably wandered off after a few months, like baby ducks) and sauropods (who lived in age-segregated herds and seem to have abandoned their nests entirely after laying their eggs). Additionally, they're all shown producing (at most) a handful of proportionately large young rather than the large clutches of small offspring fossil evidence shows they had (though this may be an intentional liberty to make dinosaur breeding more manageable for the player and to not strain the game's performance, and could also be explained in-universe by the low fertility of the animals due to being clones). Altogether, the dinosaurs' reproductive behavior is closer to mammals than real dinosaurs.
- Giant sauropods like Diplodocus are stated to reach full size in just 10 years. While previous studies on sauropod growth seemed to suggest that this was the case, it's now known that they took many decades to grow up — as many as 20 or even 30 years.
- The juveniles of Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch have only slightly smaller domes than the adults. Even if Dracorex doesn't represent a juvenile form of one (or both) of these animals, discoveries of immature specimens of Prenocephale and Zavacephale show that juvenile pachycephalosaurs were born with flat heads and grew in their domes gradually.
- This game still doesn't get the pterosaurs' diets right. The Tapejarids (Caiuajara and Tapejara) are once more depicted as piscivores when they should also eat plants and fruit. (Strangely, the website's database for Tapejara states that it might have eaten fruit.) Dimorphodon, Quetzalcoatlus, and Thanatosdrakon are also thought to have been terrestrial hunters instead of fishers, but none of them can use the meat feeders.
- Deinonychus is given a major redesign so that it has feathers now, but its face is still too triangular and the feathers are more a layer of fur-like fuzz (akin to more primitive coelurosaur species) than the thick layers of complex feathers (including wings) the real animal almost certainly had. Ironically, its website description also states it preferred to hunt alone rather than in packs, even though the famous bonebeds of multiple Deinonychus feeding on the ornithopod Tenontosaurus are what inspired depictions of dromaeosaurs as pack hunters in the first place.note
- The website database entry for megalodon states that the genus is "Megalodon". This is incorrect, megalodon's genus is Otodus, while the species name is megalodon (the genus Megalodon refers to a type of extinct bivalve).
- The game depicts only explicitly semi-aquatic dinosaurs such as spinosaurids to be capable of truly swimming in deep water, with the rest either avoiding it entirely or (if they're big enough) merely being able to wade. In real life, it's believed that most if not all dinosaurs were able to swim to some extent, with even those that weren't necessarily talented swimmers still being able to cross bodies of deep water if circumstances required it. Admittedly, this does make it easy for players to use moats as an alternative form of containment for certain animals.
- Ascended Extra: Several species previously introduced to the roster through DLC updates are part of the base game here, including but not limited to Kronosaurus, Styracosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus, and Thanatosdrakon.
- Call-Back: The campaign level set in Nevada centers on reforming a failed paleo-curation venture in (or near) Las Vegas which specifically featured flying animals, which alludes to the stinger from Fallen Kingdom where some of the Pteranodon that escaped from the Lockwood Estate land on the top of the replica of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas.
- Call-Forward: Narration during the Indonesia campaign level remarks that wild dinosaurs which were previously found all over the world are beginning to retreat to the tropics for as-yet unknown reasons. Jurassic World Rebirth, set several years after both Dominion and this game, establishes that the dinosaurs and other cloned species aren't as adapted to the colder parts of the world as previously thought.
- Continuity Nod:
- A map and several items for customization are based on Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler's dig site in the badlands of Montana, where they were introduced back in the first film.
- In the Biosyn Sanctuary map of the campaign, your park is at one point accosted by a trio of T-Rexes wearing the 2022 Rex and Buck and Doe skins. This is a reference to the end of Jurassic World Dominion, Where Rexy is seen meeting with a pair of Rexes confirmed by
Word of God to be the Buck and Doe from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
- Continuity Snarl:
- The sexual dimorphism of Nasutoceratops in the game doesn't resemble the canonical dimorphism of Nasutoceratops seen in other media (the game considers the female form in other media the male form and invents a new female form).
- The male Jurassic World Pteranodon in the game have a smaller crest than what's seen in other media, particularly Jurassic World Dominion. Although this may be because they only appeared in very small cameos.
- Mythology Gag:
- The trailer opens with a shot of Brachiosaurus and Parasaurolophus walking together, alluding to the iconic "Welcome to Jurassic Park" shot of the two species at the lake in the original film.
- The trailer has several focus shots on families of Tyrannosaurus rex, referencing the Isla Sorna family from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
- Two features from Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, the Balloon Tour and the security camera, make their return here. Two weeks before the game released, Frontier confirmed in an official announcement that random island generation would also be making a return from Operation Genesis.
- One of the new locations where you can build a park is the Azores, which was almost certainly chosen as a reference to background material from the first film which indicated that (riffing on Disneyland Paris) Hammond was already planning to build a second park in the Azores, which would have been called Jurassic Park: Europe—the mission description for the respective campaign level set there even alludes to the idea of that. Likewise, the featured location in the game's promos is Japan, which is a reference to Hammond's plan to create Jurassic Park: Japan.
- The male Atrociraptor has quills on its head like the male JPIII Velociraptors. This is a reference to the Strike Attack Atrociraptor figure which also has quills.
- One of the things Luis Balderra might say when dinosaurs start fighting is that it's normal for animals to show aggression and that it can even show up in plants, calling it "nature, green in leaf and stem." This comes from Crichton's Lost World when the adaptations that plants have evolved against their "predators" (e.g., herbivorous animals) comes up in discussion, and is a deliberate parallel to the better known "nature, red in tooth and claw" with regards to predator and prey relations.
- Put on a Bus:
- The game features a smaller roster than the final roster for Evolution 2 with many species not returning for the base game. Shortly before the game's release, Frontier announced on their social media pages that they would gradually reintroduce the cut base game species to the base game's roster at no extra chargenote (with plans for the Evolution 2 DLC creatures unknown until Frontier released a video on November 27th about the free update coming December 9th, with Deinocheirus being teased at the end of it and later confirmed to be added for free).
- On the human side of things, Malcolm is the only character from the films who shows up for the third game; Owen, Claire, Dr. Wu, Alan Grant, and all the other movie characters from the first two games don't return.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: All of the baby animals in the game.
- Sequel Goes Foreign: Downplayed, since Evolution 2 already expanded the scope of the games beyond the Five Deaths, but one of the new maps is Japan, a first for the series.
- Shown Their Work:
- The baby Triceratops have upwards-pointing horns.
- Male Triceratops have longer, more curving horns than the females, similar to the "Yoshi's Trike" (MOR 3027) specimennote .
- Protoceratops is depicted with quills on its tail similar to Psittacosaurus, which is also in the game.
- Along with quills, Psittacosaurus has skin and patterns based on the well-preserved Frankfurt specimen, as well as large cheek horns. The juveniles are also portrayed as quadrupeds while the adults are bipeds, which fits with the animal's morphology.
- The game has pterosaurs walking on land, a departure from the ones in the previous games who could only land and take off.
- Juvenile pterosaurs are shown to be fairly precocial and capable of flight from a very young age, though with many species still receiving some level of parental care; all of which is in line with current theories of pterosaur ontogeny.
- The male Pteranodon have longer crests (albeit less pronounced than in reality), in contrast with the short-crested females.
- Guanlong, Ornithomimus, Austroraptor, and the new default Deinonychus are covered in feathers, not unlike other nine feathered dinosaurs that have debuted in the previous game (those being Therizinosaurus, Pyroraptor, Moros, Oviraptor, Yutyrannus, Deinocheirus, Sinosauropteryx, Utahraptor, and Gigantoraptor). Ornithomimus and Austroraptor even have wing and pygostyle feathers.
- Lokiceratops has the correct feet of a ceratopsian, complete with two outer toes on the front foot lacking claws.
- Patagotitan has a pseudo-beak, pebbly skin, and no elephant-like feet, a first for sauropods in the games. It also lacks the thumb-claws common in sauropods, due to advanced titanosaurs having no fingers.
- The juvenile Pachycephalosaurus have flatter skulls, even if still having the head dome and lacking spikes since Dracorex is presented as a separate adult taxon.
- Juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex have more gracile, long-legged builds than the adults, which was thought to be accurate during the game's development (though their head shape was subject to some Artistic License, with a shorter and deeper snout than a real T. rex juvenile in order to more closely resemble the infant from The Lost World: Jurassic Park). However, this may be subverted with Nanotyrannus being confirmed to be its own genus in a paper published after the game's release.
- The website's profiles depict the hybrids with only one specimen. This implies that they cannot breed, similar to many real-life hybrids.
- Caiuajara has a coat of pycnofibres, like the other fuzzy pterosaurs debuted in the previous game (namely Quetzalcoatlus, Jeholopterus, and Thanatosdrakon).
- The male Coelophysis and Herrerasaurus are shown to have quills on their heads, likely based on the new theories that filaments were basal to dinosaurs.
