First Jurassic World Evolution in-game footage plus details of theme park disasters

Over the weekend Frontier Developments released the first in-game footage from dinosaur theme park sim Jurassic Park Evolution, as well as details about how you'll build up your park and the kind of disasters you'll have to overcome.

You can watch the footage, shown at the Frontier Expo, above. To be honest it's not all that revealing—it looks impressive but there's no gameplay on show. However, a panel discussion about the game did surface some tasty tidbits.

At the start of the game you'll send dig teams around the world to look for fossils, and then use those fossils to bio-engineer dinosaurs for your park. You'll start on a single island and then expand to a total of five islands as the game goes on, with each one granting access to new resources.

While building your park you'll be following three development paths, the team said. 'Entertainment' is about giving visitors as much enjoyment as possible, 'Security' is linked to creating the most deadly dinosaurs you can (and keeping visitors safe from them), while the 'Science' path will let you study the creatures and their way of life.

You can follow all three simultaneously or focus on one if you prefer. To progress you hire experts, who will offer up contracts that advance one of the three paths. A science expert might want to create a complete genome for a given dinosaur, for example.

It's not all proactive management, though, because you'll have to deal with frequent disasters: the team described a tropical storm that damages the infrastructure of your park and upsets the dinos.

The game is out next summer, and you can watch the full panel presentation at 02:13:00 in the video below. What are your thoughts on what we know so far?

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.