You are doomed to failure from the start in this educational business sim.
What we have here is yet another business tycoon game that puts players in the role of an owner of a dinosaur park. You are given only $5k as starting capital and must spend nearly all of it just to set up your facilities. Dinosaurs require land, fencing, and food. You are given three different region types to choose and dinosaurs each have their preferred region. Desert is the cheapest. Dinosaurs are not cheap, also, and staff require a great deal of money to keep around.
As you progress through the game trying to stay afloat, a number of awful things can happen regardless of any preparation you may have done. The most annoying and frequent are dinosaur escapes. You could have the best wall and have it electrified and your dinosaur will escape as if it didn't matter in the least. When this happens, you must buy your wall and dinosaur and take a hefty financial hit. Each time this happened to me, my park was finished. Even having every staffer, it did not matter. At all. Bye-bye dinosaur.
In the beginning, it's pointless to hire any staff except a tour guide, because there is no way you would be able to pay their salary. You would simply cannonball into debt. The tour guide helps bring in some revenue in the start and the rest aren't really needed until stuff happens. The best strategy I found was to expand my car park as soon as possible to allow more visitors until I was getting decent cash flow to hire more staff or take a chance on a secondary dinosaur. Life is full of rage when all your dinosaurs escape.
In handling with your inevitable financial crisis, you could always try and take out another loan. Don't expect this number to ever be higher than a few hundred dollars, because it won't. It is worthless. It is non-negotiable and not of any use to what you really need in order to keep going. If you need a loan, your park is finished. You either ride it out, or sell it and see how red your number is.
Another annoying aspect is that these events do not seem so random at all. Despite saving at points where things appear stable, if a dinosaur escaped and I reloaded my save, it would simply escape again at that same moment despite anything I did to try and prevent it. This really gives a hit to motivation and whatever enjoyability this game may have.
Another issue I've found is that if your dinosaur escaped and you buy a dinosaur at auction without having a pen ready for it, you will never get your dinosaur and your money will be gone.
The game really has it in for you and it seems near impossible to even get to a place where you have multiple dinosaurs with no worries of financial ruin. Would $20k from the education version make a difference? That's hard to say. I think ultimately your descent to ruin would take a bit longer.
Moving onto the look and sound of the game, the visuals are very DOS and pleasant enough with things that would greately appear to children. When you are navigating the pages of the store catalogue, buzzing flies can be squashed in the pages. There are various cartoon dinosaurs that will move around the shop screen, and the names of the locations have that similiar childish cuteness to them.
In terms of what your actual park looks like, there are a number of disappointments, the strongest being that only one dinosaur is represented in a pen. You may buy multiple dinosaurs of the same kind and even attempt to breed them, but you will only ever see one in the pen. The park also doesn't look to be the same quality as the park you are shown on the title screen. It's kind of disheartening. I viewed that as something ot aspire to, but you get into the game and your park looks like dirt.
In terms of sound quality, it's pretty terrible. There are a lot of crackles and popping when viewing your park, but things are smooth and normal when you're doing anything else. It's as if it takes a hit from the processing of all those people wandering around. At least, that's the sort of audio lag I experienced. I'm not sure if the original version suffers this issue, but I tend to lean that way considering the only time there are any problems is when I'm viewing my park.
I want to like this game, but it's very difficult when after so many brutal failures you're left feeling as if all your efforts are irrelevant. The fact that this is an educational game that children could play at schools to learn management just frightens me, as the only thing it seems to be teaching me is what Sisyphus must feel like, and to be honest, repeatedly trying to roll a boulder uphill sounds far more entertaining than trying to run a dinosaur park.
If managing a dinosaur park sounds enjoyable to you, this is not the game. The Jurassic Park one would be a better choice, heck, any of those mobile social games would be better than this. It just really missed the mark.