My Jurassic Farm has tall tasks for its players.  Placing you on an island with just a single dinosaur and a mere $100, you must essentially build the next (non-deadly) version of Jurassic Park.  Despite the fun dino theme however, this game struggled to hold my interest due to limited gameplay, and its repetitive nature.

Consisting of buying, selling, and cleaning, the tasks in this game aren’t the most exciting to begin with.  To further compound things is that they repeat over and over, with little in the way to spice things up.  Most of the time’s spent navigating touch screen menus to feed the dinos and visit the market sub screens.  Off-TV Play’s not possible, and the setup would be far better for 3DS rather than the Wii U.

The game’s graphics showcase some vivid colors, but they suffer from some clunky, crude, and dated polygons – it looks like a less blurry Nintendo 64 game to me.  As you’ll be looking at the GamePad the bulk of the time (bland menus) these visuals can only be described as nothing less than a letdown.  The music (while fitting) is limited to a repeating loop, and played sporadically.  There are environmental sound effects, though no audio plays through the GamePad.

Allowing you to speed up time is a welcomed feature (and pretty much a necessity) but this game needs better pacing overall.  It’s slow moving from the start, as you try to gradually earn enough money to build up your island.  Some more variety’s needed as well, as doing the same dull working tasks time and again while staring at unexciting touch screen menus can only go so far.  Other farming sims offer a more diverse experience.  BiP Media has published several of these My Farm games across a few Nintendo platforms, so someone obviously keeps buying them – heck even my wife rather enjoyed this game, albeit temporarily.  But I’d like to see the formula reworked.  The dinosaurs ultimately don’t add nearly as much as you might hope, and it feels like their potential is wasted.

I found My Jurassic Farm didn’t make the best first impression, and time hasn’t really helped it much.  It felt more like work than a game, and I found my attention waning.  The structure (challenging but not complex) may appeal to some, but it’s just not for me.  As so many high quality titles are releasing in the eShop lately, I suspect functional but flat games like this won’t find the audience they seek.  With mundane gameplay that’s repeated ad nauseam, My Jurassic Farm could find itself in danger of extinction.