They mostly just wander around aimlessly, very occasionally attacking each other if they're not of the same species.īored of my own park, I wanted to give the crowds something amazing to watch - a clash of the titans, with huge alpha lizards battering each other for my visitors' amusement. Dinosaurs start off tiny and within about 10 minutes are fully grown, and it happens automatically. While the Steam store page advertises things like managing a dinosaur’s needs and watching it go through its life cycle, that’s currently a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe Mesozoica is a meta-commentary on game development. And yet, I’m still pretty chuffed that I was able to do something as dumb as using a real chunk of meat that’s meant to be used as food for the carnivorous dinosaurs as a food stall sign. Looking at the screenshot above, you’re probably thinking that it was a lot of fun to create this incredibly inspired design for a ‘meat’ restaurant. Everything takes three more clicks than is necessary, and god forbid you try to tweak the scale of something just a little - chances are you’ll turn a pebble into a mountain. If you can select it, enjoy deleting other nearby objects along with it. If you need to delete an object, you might not be able to select it, even if you’re in the building mode. Sometimes things snap to an invisible, inconsistent grid, or they snap to other objects, but then sometimes they don’t.
Mesozoica’s UI, tools and controls are so bad that they're almost adversarial. I was making progress but even slapping together a few walls and props to create a simple food stall is as frustrating as trying to herd T-Rexes. This meant that fresh dinosaurs appeared under the rock, but simply lifting it up allowed them to wander to safety. Wee ones, but I tweaked the size and dropped them on top of the hatchery, hiding it while giving my dinosaurs a nice rock feature to stare at all day. Unfortunately, the hatchery that they spawn from is just an ugly box, entirely ruining the Eden-like paradise I wanted to create for my lizard pals.
After sending out dig teams and spending some cash on the black market, I had enough dinosaur DNA to make my first attraction (science really is remarkable), a pen for a pair of Argentinosauruses. If you want to break something in the service of making your park look cooler, the game’s absolutely fine with that. Everything’s modular, and you can change the colour, texture and even the size of every object. Like Planet Coaster, Mesozoica immediately lets you go wild, combining props, building pieces and scenery to make everything from hotels and restaurants to tropical dinosaur enclosures and big safari plots. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Visitors have no needs, nothing seems to break down, there are no staff - essentially both modes are creative modes. Placing buildings and other assets generally costs money, but maintaining the park is free, so there’s no real management side to Mesozoica at all right now. People were coming from all over the world to gasp in awe at my very large grassy field and single short path. There’s no budget menu, and visitors don’t seem to spend money in the park itself, but they do buy a ticket at the entrance. They're walking right through a brick wall because it wasn’t particularly obvious which side was the entrance and which was the exit. Maybe they’ll even learn a thing or two about extinct beasties along the way.Īfter slapping down a path and my first building, the park entrance, visitors immediately started pouring into the newly opened Dr. The sole objective is to put together attractions and facilities that bring in the tourists and their fat wallets. Mesozoica is less a management sim and more a selection of assets that can be plonked down in one of the game’s two modes: a ‘main’ park mode and a sandbox mode, both of which are effectively identical. This early launch is not likely to have the effect they intended. and Squadron Interactive might be keen to beat Frontier to the punch.
Absent a big license like Jurassic Park, developers DreamInCode B.V. I can almost understand, then, why I’m already playing Mesozoica, another dinosaur-themed management sim. This summer, Frontier plans to launch Jurassic World Evolution, a licensed dino-park sim. This week, Fraser’s doing his best John Hammond impersonation by caging up dinosaurs and displaying them in exchange for tourist cash in dino theme park sim Mesozoica. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access.