Planet Zoo is at its finest when issues are going nicely. Some park constructing video games thrive after they flip into catastrophe administration sims and also you’re pressured to frantically resolve crises earlier than the entire thing comes crashing down like a home of playing cards. Planet Zoo ain’t that.
Certain, issues can and can go flawed within the zoo you’ve got constructed. Animals would possibly escape. A generator would possibly break down. However it is a nice sport at its core, and one that’s most gratifying once you’ve received your ft up with a pleasant cup of espresso subsequent to you, ensuring that your cute wittle lion cubs have gotten loads of dinner.
When you’ve performed a few of Frontier’s different park constructing video games like Jurassic World Evolution or Planet Coaster then you need to really feel at residence right here. It controls equally, and in some circumstances identically to Planet Coaster, and whereas it is clearly by no means going to compete with a mouse and keyboard, the transition to PlayStation and a typical controller is about as nicely carried out because it could possibly be.
Constructing your zoo is comparatively pain-free. Animals have to be housed in enclosures which suggests placing up partitions, and as soon as they’re in there they’re going to want meals, water, and toys. You additionally have to be aware of the type of habitat that every animal is used to in order that they’ll be as comfy as doable.
Thankfully, even in case you had been tempted to place a camel into an enclosure filled with snow there’s some useful meters to elucidate why that is a foul concept, and terrain and foliage is simple to change to make it possible for your new visitor stays as joyful as doable of their abode. Every animal has totally different necessities from the kinds of vegetation they wish to the scale of group they’d favor to be in and you may learn all about it by opening the Zoopedia — a cute encyclopedia with pages devoted to each creature within the sport.
In fact, zoos are a controversial topic, and it will maybe be unwise to disregard the apparent moral implications of housing wild animals in walled enclosures to be gawped at by bumbag sporting vacationers, even in a sport as good-natured as this one. Planet Zoo deftly acknowledges the inherent ethical quandaries of zoos and weaves conservationism into a few of its core mechanics in a approach that feels each earnest and rewarding.
When you’ll discover a few of the animals you may place in your zoo out there for buy with chilly laborious money on the open market, others can solely be purchased utilizing a particular foreign money that you simply accrue by way of conservationist actions. Releasing animals again into the wild as soon as they’re mature or nursing sick creatures again to well being helps increase this foreign money permitting you to herald extra unique points of interest and thus increase the profile of your zoo.
The system works nicely, actively rewarding you for good deeds. There’s an schooling system, too, which is a neat concept however in apply is underwhelming. You may train the folks that go to your zoo in regards to the varied animals housed there and lift the schooling stage of your park, however whereas that is a noble aim, in actuality it quantities to little greater than hiring educators that cease and chat to vacationers, and placing indicators up exterior every enclosure that specify a bit about every animal.
For as charming and breezy as the sport is, it is not all plain crusing. There’s some unlucky bugs to fret about and a few odd management and UI quirks that take some getting used to. On loads of events we had employees members not doing what they had been alleged to be doing, buildings floating in mid-air, and alerts on the HUD staying in place in perpetuity even after the difficulty they had been referring to had been resolved. Most of those can simply be remedied by exiting to the primary menu and reloading nevertheless it’s not perfect.
You need to begin your Planet Zoo journey in profession mode, which serves as an honest tutorial for a lot of the mechanics you may be utilizing in different modes and it should not take you any greater than eight to 10 hours to see off the dozen or so missions. The marketing campaign has a narrative involving unscrupulous money-men joyful to use animals to show a revenue and a pleasant zookeeper that is in it for all the appropriate causes. It is advantageous.
As you progress by way of the marketing campaign you may go up in opposition to more and more bothersome obstacles, akin to taking up a zoo with poisoned water provides that want cleansing up, or making an attempt to make the very best of a park that has been constructed on a dumping floor for barrels of poisonous waste. However past these hurdles the marketing campaign is basically only a collection of classes instructing you construct habitats for varied creatures, conduct analysis, earn a living utilizing donations, and peruse the market to buy new animals to accommodate in your park.
As soon as you have to grips with the mechanics of construct your zoo and hold it functioning as a enterprise, the Franchise and Sandbox modes are the place the sport shines finest. Sandbox is self-explanatory — you are given a giant house to construct a zoo with out guidelines or restrictions or any set aim in thoughts past having enjoyable.
Franchise is like Sandbox, solely you can also make a couple of zoo with some shared assets throughout the globe, and it additionally options some on-line performance permitting you to commerce animals with different gamers however the servers would not allow us to join for greater than a minute at a time to check these out. Franchise mode additionally options some challenges that seem as you play, and in case you select to finish them you’ll acquire varied rewards.
Conclusion
Planet Zoo is, satirically, a comparatively toothless park constructing sport. It does not have the scrumptious chaos of the Jurassic World Evolution video games or the thrills of constructing your individual rollercoaster after which hoping it’s going to keep on the tracks in Planet Coaster. However it’s a pleasing and charming sport. There’s an ethereal pleasure in making a peaceable residence for animals to stay in, and the earnest conservationist slant of Planet Zoo is difficult to fault.
