• Price: $24.99 USD (currently on sale for $22.49 until May 11th)
• Developer/Publisher: Washbear Studio
• Release Date: April 28, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Washbear Studio. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Washbear Studio recently held an AMA on Reddit – check it out here!

I grew up with Zoo Tycoon and The Land Before Time series, and I loved the more recent Fossil Fighters series on DS/3DS as well. Given my tastes in entertainment, I instantly loved the cover art for Parkasaurus on the eShop, with cute and colorful dinosaurs to take care of in this park-management simulation game.

The game’s campaign mode has you start with a tutorial. Some of it, like zooming in/out or rotating the screen may seem fairly basic, but there are other neat things for you to learn about in order to have a successful dinosaur park. I thought that it was cool to have donation boxes to place outside of the exhibits. That money supplements what you earn from park admissions.

In the campaigns you play, you start out with only a few dinosaurs unlocked, as well as a small number of facilities related to the park. Your only fence options in the beginning are a more flimsy wooden fence that also offers less privacy to the dinosaurs, or a concrete fence option that provides zero visibility to visitors but gives much more privacy to the dinosaurs. You can mix fence types for the same exhibit. Privacy is an important stat to keep your dinosaurs happy – different kinds of fencing will have their own levels of strength and privacy levels. You wouldn’t want to use the wooden fence type for the T-rex, as the dinosaurs will sometimes attack the fencing and escape. Besides fencing, there are also shelters and “privacy tiles” consisting of taller grass to make the dinosaurs feel more secure.

When building an exhibit, those are only some of the considerations you’ll need to take into account. Changing the exhibit biomes to suit their residents is a huge part of keeping the dinosaurs happy, from plain forest exhibits to the grass/water combo that results in a rainforest to the elevated taiga biome. What biome you end up with depends on the combination of biome tiles, the elevation, and the amount of water in the exhibit. There are also different plants, rocks, and trees that must correspond to the biome in each exhibit, and some of the plants will need to be placed next to water.

Double clicking the inside of an exhibit will show you what you need to do to change the biome, as well as how many more plants and rocks you need to add. I did think that changing the elevation of an exhibit could be a bit wonky in terms of the execution, and sometimes adding water was made difficult by the different elevations.

Once you’ve finished building the exhibit (adding the correct feeder as well), it’s time to add some dinosaurs to live there! You start with ~2 options in the campaigns. Making those initial dinosaurs happy with their exhibits will result in them “giving you hearts” every day, which can then be used in conjunction with science credits to help unlock new dinosaurs.

The park has a portal for you to travel back in time and acquire parts for the newly unlocked dinosaurs! Select the dinosaur you want to dig for (they have to be unlocked first), choose manual or automatic (automatic digs cost money), and then you have to wait for your employees to explore. Manually digging has you and your employees engaging in Minesweeper-esque grid-based gameplay; each employee has their own “Tetris block” shaped drill option with limited uses for that dig. Click on an area in the grid, and eventually you’ll hit pay dirt, finding dinosaur skulls and footprints needed to exchange for dinosaur eggs.

To acquire eggs, you’ll need some gems in addition to the skulls and footprints. Gems can be purchased in town, and the “Egg Store” is where you exchange all 3 items for new dinosaur eggs. The town also includes stores that sell food and cute little hats for your dinosaurs, and a bank where you can exchange money, science, or hearts for one of the other two options. Money is used to build exhibits and other buildings like concession stands. Hearts are used to unlock different plants and rocks, shelters, and other exhibit related items. Science is mainly used to unlock buildings and rest area items like benches. Hearts and science, as stated above, unlock new dinosaurs.

I liked that I was able to trade in one of the game’s three “currencies” when I was running low on one I needed. Keep your dinosaurs happy and you should earn several hearts a day, and you only need 6 to trade for 5,000 coins. Once you’ve unlocked everything in the heart and science “trees,” you can then exchange any surplus hearts or science credits for money when you get them.

Taking care of the dinosaurs and the park overall will require you to look at resumes and choose employees whose skill, speed, and “personality” levels are higher than the other candidates. I made sure to hire multiple veterinarians, scientists, janitors, and security guards so I wouldn’t be short staffed. As they level up, you can choose to increase their speed, ability, and/or personalities using the points earned from leveling up. I didn’t really see the point in leveling up their personalities, which affected their interactions with guests.

One of the campaigns has you do some security training – as the tutorial describes it: “Nothing has ever gone wrong in a dinosaur park. Especially movies about dinosaur parks. Trust me. Just in case, how about we give our security some practice in case one of your dinosaur best friends decide to…adventure outside their exhibit.” 😂 Learning how to tranquilize your dinosaurs is just another part of the job. The dinosaurs will go into kennels until you are ready to put them back in the park.

There are many campaigns for you to complete. One will have you build exhibits on the canals of Toronto. Another will have you take custody of dinosaurs from an abandoned dinosaur farm, and you’ll receive donations from a horrified public to help you build proper exhibits. The campaigns mainly seemed to serve as tutorial missions to prepare you for the custom mode. They each had several levels of missions consisting of tasks such as having several different kinds of dinosaurs, making a certain amount of money, having employees complete specific tasks, and more. You earn a point for each completed task, and these points can then be used on the world map to purchase benefits such as an increase in donations, extra dinosaur eggs at the start of campaigns, more experience earned by staff, etc. The benefits purchased on the world map then impact all of the campaigns on the map.

It’s possible to continue campaign missions even after finishing its tasks if you’d like, but it didn’t seem like there was much more you could really do past the tasks there. The campaign maps were fairly small and only allowed for a few exhibits. Each kind of dinosaur has its own specified space requirements, which I would quickly get close to exceeding in each campaign.

After going through the world map campaigns, I started a custom game. Here, I had more room to build exhibits. You can start with a custom game from the start, but I would recommend going through the campaign stages first. The custom mode provides you with options to have all dinosaur eggs available for free, and you can choose to have research unlocked from the start. There’s also an option for unlimited funding. Personally, I think that the custom mode is where the game really shines because you can do a lot more.

The maps in the custom mode seemed a lot bigger to me. So I was a little disappointed that we can only have 40 dinosaurs total in our parks regardless of species. Most – if not all – of the species require at least a mate in the exhibit with them but others need 2-3 of their species there to be happy. I was only able to have about 16 out of the ~40 species in my park due to the socialization requirements, so I only really filled three-fourths of the space in the park with exhibits.

I did also wish that there was a little more variation in the dinosaur species, as there were many from the same “suborder” in the scientific classification system. I would have liked the frightening Deinosuchus, an alligator/crocodile dinosaur, to be in the game. But I understand that DLC is planned, and aquatic dinosaurs should be added eventually.

I did really like that we can place dinosaurs of different species in the same enclosure as long as they are all herbivores and they require the same biome. However, for those wanting to put dinosaurs together regardless of the restrictions, there are hats for that. 🎩 Each hat has a different effect; some will add to their visitor appeal, but others make it seem like a dinosaur is in the correct biome when it’s really not. There’s a hat that will tame a carnivore’s violent tendencies, one that allows you to use a smaller exhibit size for a dinosaur than they’d usually require, and more! You just have to wait until a dinosaur is old enough to wear a hat, then you can put one on them! (There’s a function that allows you to speed up time that can help a little with that.)

I really loved the cute customization in Parkasaurus – there are also toys for you to place in exhibits. Dinosaurs require a certain amount of toys to keep them happy. I liked the tetherball toy, as well as the water tower that the dinosaurs can use to cool down. There’s a lot of creativity that was put into the game – the names for the concession stands (“Soda AND Pop”) and food suppliers for your dinosaurs (“Kale them with kindness”) were funny and inspired me to use names with puns for my park, dinosaurs, and exhibits. Overall, the game is sure…“fang-tastic”! 😉

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? Parkasaurus provides players with an entertaining dinosaur park-management experience. Although there are some limits to the game in terms of park space, dinosaur species, and the permitted number of dinosaurs, what’s there is more than enough to make any fan of dinosaurs and simulation games happy. Watching hat-wearing dinosaurs play with toys and swim around should definitely make you smile. I hope to see the planned aquatic DLC make it to Switch – I’d love to “dive” back into the game! 8/10