Its impact isn’t universal: you can tune the busywork in sandbox mode or slightly mitigate it in-game, and storms are more frequent in some scenarios than others. But the one overriding negative is the near-constant, interrupting need to react to short-term emergencies, whether small (a power generator needs refuelling) or large (a catastrophic tornado is ripping up everything I’ve built). Smart changes to the core loop have produced a much better, richer management sim.

There are many more moments like that in Jurassic World Evolution 2 than its predecessor. They are bubbling cauldrons of overlapping systems, which organically produce interesting questions of strategy and priority. But for me, the best management games have never been about putting out fires. It’s understandable that developer Frontier would feel obligated to make horrible things happen to my lovely dinosaur park in order to stay true to the movie, and I get that random calamities have been a thing in this genre since SimCity. But Jurassic World Evolution 2 sometimes makes me wish it didn’t depend so much on things going wrong. Jurassic Park is probably the most perfect disaster movie ever made.

Frontier’s sequel is a much better management game, but still gets in its own way with too many arbitary, if thematic, emergencies and busywork