Parkasaurus: Dinoluxe Edition

If you think of sim games about building theme parks or zoos, Frontier's Jurassic World Evolution, Planet Coaster, and Planet Zoo immediately comes to mind. Those games are excellent, but they are also more demanding graphically, are quite complex and, for some people, the 3D graphics that allow for much more photorealism gets in the way of the fun. If you long for the classic top-down sim games from the 1990s, Parkasaurus is a real alternative for you.

Originally released on Steam Early Access in 2018 (the year the first Jurassic World Evolution came out), developer Washbear Studio are releasing this week Parkasaurus: Dinoluxe Edition, marking it the first time the game comes to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, in addition to Nintendo Switch 2 (it launched for the original Switch, as a console exclusive at the time, in 2022), and bundles with it the two DLC released so far, increasing the number of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures to 44.

Parkasaurus is a classical top-down sim builder game, in the vein of the classic Theme Park or Zoo Tycoon games. This means the camera is in a fixed angle: you can of course zoom in and out, but the camera only tilts in four pre-fixed ways, as opposed to most of the modern sim games like Jurassic World Evolution, which allow you to free roam in 3D as if you were a bird overseeing everything.

Sometimes, simplicity is best. While everyone has preferences, I can see why many people would actually prefer the "restrictions" of a top-down sim game like Parkasaurus, which in reality makes the game more agile, more "arcade-y", and often more fun. If you've played those recent Frontier games, you will remember what a pain in the butt it was to build curved paths. You won't find that problem here, in which everything is squared, like the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon games. You can alter the terrain to create hills, mountains, or valleys, but everything fits inside a grid, so it's much easier to build, and with very colourful and high contrast graphics, parks still look very nice.

While the game feels and plays like a classic PC sim game, the graphics are all in low poly 3D, with a very distinctive art style, colourful and cartoony, that reminds us more of the Two Point Studios games like Two Point Campus, Two Point Museum... The graphics suit the more relaxed nature of the game, compared to other games in the genre, although that in no way means the game is simple or lacks depth.

Parkasaurus is structured pretty much as you would expect. After a brief tutorial, you can jump into World Map, which is the campaign mode with 15 levels with a uniquely quirky story: the dinosaurs are actually aliens, who crashed on a spaceship, and you need to build (or fix/rebuild failed parks in the campaign) to unlock parts of your spaceships. As you advance in the campaign you can buy repairs for the ship, that translate into permanent boosts, like 15% more money or experience earned by employees, less money spent on salaries, speed of digs or egg growth... It's a small but nice touch to add some strategy to the story, which otherwise feels very familiar if you have played these types of games.

There are several things you have to take into consideration when building a park: hiring enough employees and training them, building adequate enclosures based on the dinosaur needs (biome, size, food, water, privacy), making sure your guests can see the dinosaurs and spend money on food, drinks, or donations. Sometimes, the dinosaurs escape and you have to send guards to sedate them, rebuild the fences, understand what went wrong (why did the enclosure not fit the needs of the animal), and release the dinosaurs again. Dinos can also fight between each other, but unlike the Jurassic World games, dinosaurs cannot die, and there's no penalty for having a rampaging dinosaur, which makes the game less realistic but more relaxed.

And how do you find the dinosaurs? You need to open portals to get fossils, in a minesweeper type mini-game, and then you can buy the eggs from a store, then wait for them to hatch. There is a big variety of dinosaurs to choose from, including sea creatures as well as other prehistoric animals like mammals. If you are not sold on their cute but sometimes too childish look, you can choose from the options menu (only in the main menu) if you want flat colour skins or more realistic skins (the dinosaur shapes don't change).

It's really praiseworthy what Washbear Studio managed to do with Parkasaurus, a studio only made of two developers. The game has a beefy campaign mode, as well as a sandbox mode where you can impose yourself tougher restrictions, or instead opt for unlimited money and all skill trees and dinosaurs unlocked to build as much as you want. The list of customisation options, decorations, buildings, and terraforming possibilities is naturally smaller than other games, but there is still a lot of room to let your imagination go wild, and the management aspects are solid to have a challenge but not too deep to feel overwhelming or stressful.

This is not a flawless game, however. I found the menus a bit confusing, the choices of colours and shapes made them sometimes difficult to navigate and harder to read what was an actual option and what was part of the background. Texts are sometimes excessively small, and can be very hard to read if you are far from the screen, and even on the huge screen of the Switch 2, it was a bit tiring to read. There is also annoying stuttering when playing on Switch 2, when the game froze for milliseconds when having too many things going on at once or when trying to remove things from the map, like deleting things or rescuing sedated dinosaurs.

Just by the looks of it, it's clear Parkasaurus is not the most intricate and deep sim game, but that's not the point. Parkasaurus feels like a lost PC zoo-tycoon game from the 1990s, with 3D graphics but a comfortable 2D top-down gameplay, and with the right balance between challenge and cosiness to keep you engaged without frustration.

If you are looking for a simulation game that isn't too overly complicated, and obviously if you love dinosaurs, Parkasaurus can be a very good alternative to Jurassic World Evolution or Planet Zoo, especially on Switch 2 where there are less options to choose (although, coincidentally, 2021's Jurassic World Evolution 2 has just been released for Switch 2 only days ago).