The new content is threaded nicely into the original game. There are six new scenarios and a tutorial specific to Dinosaur Digs. There are new filters to remove guests, foliage, or buildings, making it easier to pick animals and staff members out of a crowd. A new screen on the main zoo status display lets you track the profitability of commercial buildings like restaurants, theaters, and gift shops. Although you can't use any of the dinosaur stuff in the original Zoo Tycoon scenarios, you can load saved free-form zoos and add dinosaurs.
Less-than-optimal cage-mates.
One disappointing aspect of the game is how escapes are handled. Dinosaurs will eat people, but only behind Zoo Tycoon's family-friendly puffs of smoke. You'd also think a dinosaur might accomplish some Godzilla-level damage on buildings and landscaping, but instead they can just smash a few of the smaller decorative items and structures around your zoo (there's a nice nod to Jurassic Park when a dinosaur knocks over a rest room). You can build a dinosaur recovery team that sets out in a helicopter, carrying a sniper with a tranquilizer gun. But these guys seem superfluous considering that you can also just pause the game, fix whatever fence was broken, and then pick up the errant beast and drop him back in his cage. Rather than the catastrophe you'd expect, escaped dinosaurs are more of an inconvenience.
Finally, Dinosaur Digs isn't nearly as visually or audibly rewarding as it could have been. Some of the new decorations, such as dinosaur skeletons, erupting volcanoes, and steam geysers, look great. The sound effects include some suitably menacing snarling, huffing, and roaring. But the dinosaurs themselves aren't that interesting to watch. The spinosaurus, the huge dinosaur from Jurassic Park III with a sail fin on its back, is an imposing fellow, as are the stegosaurus and brontosaurus. The tyrannosaurus is a little anticlimactic since he's so similar to the allosaurus. The problem with these dinosaurs is that they just don't do very much. The caudipteryx, a distant relative of the peacock, makes a nice show when flashing its colorful tail fan and arm feathers, but the expansion doesn't offer anything as charming or lively as the tumbling pandas or rolling tigers from the original Zoo Tycoon. Big lumbering beasts only provide so much visual excitement, which is perhaps why many of the dinosaur exhibits aren't as attractive to the crowds as you might expect, not to mention the gamers who shell out 20 bucks hoping to turn Zoo Tycoon into a lively Jurassic Park sim. Instead, they'll find what essentially amounts to a prehistoric face-lift.
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