Jurassic World Evolution is going back to where in all began in its next DLC on 10th December, transplanting its dinosaur theme park management action to the original Jurassic Park.

According to developer Frontier, Return to Jurassic Park, as the new paid DLC will be known, features locations, park designs, dinosaurs, and characters from the original film.

The DLC's seven new story missions, which play out across both Isla Nublar (the location of Jurassic Park itself) and Isla Sorna (better known as Site B), will, for instance, task players with restoring John Hammond's park following its destruction in the 1993 movie.

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Frontier Developments has unveiled Claire's Sanctuary, another helping of paid DLC for its dinosaur park management sim Jurassic World Evolution, which comes to PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on 18th June.

Claire's Sanctuary, as you may have already surmised, depending on the extend of your Jurassic Park knowledge, focusses on former park operations manager Claire Dearing, now a "prominent campaigner and advocate for dinosaur wellbeing".

The bulk of the DLC takes the form of a new standalone campaign, unfolding on familiar Jurassic Park haunt, Isla Nublar. Picking up immediately after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, players are charged with saving the island's remaining dinosaurs from the erupting Mount Sibo, then establishing a new home on Sanctuary Island, with Dearing - once again portrayed by Bryce Dallas Howard - offering guidance.

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Frontier Developments has announced its prehistoric park sim Jurassic World Evolution will be getting a new chunk of paid DLC, known as Secrets of Dr. Wu, on November 20th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Secrets of Dr. Wu takes its name from the InGen geneticist responsible for recreating the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (as played by BD Wong), and who later appears in Jurassic World. Wong reprises his role in Evolution, and lends his voice to a selection of new campaign missions set on two hidden research facilities on Isla Muerta and Isla Taca o.

"Players will confront an elevated level of chaos and threat caused by Wu's machinations as they work alongside the doctor and discover new dig sites, facility upgrades and research opportunities," explains Frontier of the new missions.

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I need to keep 900+ guests in my park for three consecutive minutes.

This is a doddle, I reckon. I'm making $350,000 a minute here. Everyone seems pretty happy. They're lapping up the new gift shop which boasts a "fun" rating of two whole stars. Like a lot of the challenges to date - some of which I've completed by simply removing an upgrade and putting it back again - this seems pretty straightforward.

I watch the counter as it creeps up... and then a dinosaur unexpectedly karks it. I yelp, hit the shortcut to the ACU - the team that removes the deceased - and hope I can get it out of the park before any guests clock it. Apparently not. Numbers plummet. I hover over the corpse of my recently departed Triceratops and discover he's died of old age. Unfortunately, there's no way to convey this to the guests bolting for the exit.

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Back in 2016 Frontier Developments launched Planet Coaster, a very well-received simulator about building the best theme park you can and then making sure it runs as smoothly as possible, ironing out minor problems in design while making sure the guests are well catered for.

Two years on, Frontier is preparing to release Jurassic World Evolution - it will launch digitally for PC, PS4 and Xbox One on the 12th of June 2018, with a physical release following on the 3rd of July. Evolution is a game based on running a park in a world where such endeavours are always spectacularly ill-fated, mostly on account of the attractions' fondness for escaping their designated areas and killing people. At first these two elements - theme park design and inevitable, catastrophic failure - might seem like odd bedfellows, but it's in that tension between the ability to design a wonderful park and life's tendency to find a way, as it were, that Jurassic World Evolution really stands out.

Aoife and I got a couple of hours' worth of hands on time with Jurassic World Evolution earlier this month and what we played was very promising. As you might expect, the game is built on the foundations laid by Planet Coaster, so the actual mechanics of putting a park together should feel very familiar. The main difference, of course, is that you're not building rides but engineering living, breathing dinosaurs - there are whole layers of strategy built around fossil acquisition and research that open up new species of dinosaur with differing advantages (such as a longer lifespan or defensive stats) as you sequence more of each dinosaur's genome. Strange though it may sound to be doing DNA research in order to unlock what are, effectively, upgrades, it all hangs together very well. The park feels as much like a scientific facility as it does a tourist attraction and, with new systems such as power distribution to take care of, there's more for you to think about in the day-to-day running of your own Jurassic World.

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