Recent reviews by Phoenix

Game has potential but don't try and play this with only one friend. My impression is that the game is scaled in single player mode so that it's doable but as soon as you add one buddy, it goes straight up to four player difficulty. Tried four games in a row, lost all four, switched to single player, won the first one I tried. I'd be happy to change this to a positive review with more granular scaling.

Like everyone else, can't login because no mouse (solved that by fishing around until the button showed a mouse-over, but I've heard Alt-Enter works too), once logged in, took 35 minutes to get to 97%, then got stuck for another half hour, killed the process, tried to re-launch, stuck at zero for 45 minutes, killed it, launched again, "you're in a queue because there are too many users" for half an hour, gave up. Hopefully this becomes playable at some point.

EDIT
Five hours later, still can't get in, just stuck in a queue with no idea of my position. Super disappointing. Would possibly refund if I could while waiting for fixes but now can't because of how much time I've spent trying to get in.

Speaking as someone who very much enjoyed the Jurassic Park/World movies and pretended to prowl around the house as a raptor as a child, this game is the culmination of my enjoyment of Zoo Tycoon and my lifelong fascination with dinosaurs. I'll do this in the standard pros/cons format.

Pros:
-Stunning graphics (the water animations could use a little work when close up, but otherwise amazing, you can zoom right down and see individual faces of your guests as they're devoured by pissed off velociraptors)
-Challenging game mechanics at least until the end game (each island has its own challenges and things can very easily go downhill in a hurry if you mismanage them)
-"Disasters" that are manageable but still create a challenge and a sense of "oh crap" but not the end of the world, assuming you weren't caught with no money (including the one where someone sabotages EVERY gate in the park and lets all your dinos out " Uh...ACU ? Yes, I need cleanup on aisle 7. 5 raptors and a T Rex. Thanks.")
-Real voice-over work by Jeff Goldblum lends a very authentic touch to the narration and the feel of the overall experience
-Lots of work obviously went into designing dino personalities and requirements to lend each a realistic feel (for example, a T. Rex doesn't mind other dinos in its pen, in fact it finds them delectable, but it absolutely hates other T. Rexes)

Cons:
-Some small quality of life things missing, such as no automation of ranger tasks, meaning when you have a fully completed park with 20 some-odd feeders, you still have to select a ranger and click on each one to refill, it becomes very monotonous after awhile.
-A pause function would be nice, but the omission may have been intentional to create a more panicked feeling when things go wrong, as things would be in real life.
-Finding out what a dinosaur needs BEFORE you release it into the pen is very cumbersome, requiring delving into the Ingen Database rather than conditions being described on the dino incubation menu. Nothing worse than your two Deinonychus escaping because you didn't realize they needed three to meet social requirements.

Overall, I very solid game that I enjoy immensely which will get even better after a couple of patches. To give you a sense of the authenticity and humour of this game, let me relate two specific experiences. I removed my Deinonychus from an enclosure to turn it into a herbivore pen. About two hours later, after mindlessly refilling feeders (see above comment about monotony), I realized my entire pen was overrun with goats because I forgot to remove the meat eater feeder.

Second experience involved my raptors getting really mad during a tropical storm and breaking out of their pen. I had ACU tranq them, repaired the pen and put the raptors back in. Here I am thinking everything's hunky dory when I get a "Dinosaurs a danger to guests!" alert. I quickly pan back over to the raptor pen and see three of them running around with red banners over their heads as if they were on the loose. I check the entire fence for holes and find none. The warning goes away for a second and I think it was just a glitch. A few seconds later it comes back and I notice that all the raptors are clustered around one corner of the pen. Upon closer inspection, I realize that two guests have become wedged in a corner created by my poor fence placement and (fortunately for them) can't get out. The raptors are too big to fit in the corner, so they have to be content just standing around the entry keeping the terrified guests cornered. I guess when the raptors escape, it makes a certain amount of sense that the raptor pen itself would be a good place to hide, since by definition they are no longer there.