Planet Zoo – A tremendous park sim with an excellent list of animals, good management tools and great creative freedom.
You get those games every so often that really do encapsulate the relaxing element of gaming. Planet Zoo is certainly it.
Well, as long as the animals are cared for, people aren’t being pickpocketed, the guests aren’t complaining at the lack of facilities and the grizzly bear hasn’t tried to break out of the enclosure again.
There have been times I’ve had to retreat to the calm paddling of otters and capybaras as the zoo is falling apart around me, but it’s okay, because that capybara is running around under the sprinkler.
All is right with the world; visitors in danger be damned. I’m quite happy here.
Sprinklers are a favourite among many of the animals.
So, this is the console version of the game that’s been out for over four years on PC, and I’m chuffed its finally here:
This one’s a delight and I’ve had a nice time with it.
The premise is quite simple and if you’ve played a tycoon or park/zoo builder before, you’ll feel right at home.
Build a park, fill it with animals, deal with droves of visitors, keep both animals and people happy and make money to keep doing it.
Where Planet Zoo stands apart is in the animal conservation elements, the detail of the animals and the different problems people can face.
The key aspect of animals in this game is their conservation. Every animal’s profile highlights their endangerment; this encourages you to bring in families of endangered animals, cultivate a growing population and occasionally release them back into the wild.
Each animal has its own page with information about its level of endangerment, habitat preferences and such.
The animals themselves are, obviously, the main attraction here. Both for the gamers themselves and the park visitors. And they’ve done a great job.
The animal list itself is extensive and there’s a year’s worth of DLC due with an array of others coming. Even at base there’s plenty here to mix and match to your heart’s content; keep it within climates if you want or spread them out and micromanage the temperature in enclosures to each animal’s needs.
From otters and beavers to grizzlies and moose. Bison and red deer to tarantulas and snakes. There is a myriad of potential candidates to fill your enclosures and they are great fun to watch.
Feeding time at the zoo. Sandbox mode makes this incredibly expensive venture possible thankfully.
The animations team have outdone themselves; monkeys leap and swing, lions tear across their enclosures, otters glide through the water and a pygmy hippos walks around the bottom of pools whilst the flamingos and cranes peck at food on the banks.
With each animal having the option to watch them specifically on a close-up camera, you can keep tabs on them as they go about their time in the zoo.
Close ups help you see what your animal is feeling, what it needs and what items it wants inside its enclosure.
Truly just watching the animals is a really great time and there’s a lot of options to put into the enclosures that mix up what animals do. They all need certain requirements and things to entertain them; from huge tree houses and climbing frames to huge beach balls and ice blocks with food in. And they interact with whatever they prefer to have in their enclosure.
The enclosures themselves can be made to pretty much whatever idea you have. Adjust the terrain with a really simple and easy terrain editor. You can create hills, gulleys, rivers, pools, lakes, waterfalls and cliffs – Basically whatever terrain idea comes to mind.
A very basic example of what you can do with the terrain editor.
Then, make the ground rocky, snowy, open plains or dense grass, fill it with a wide variety of vegetation and trees and then construct your own habitats for animals or use several pre-built ones – circle it all with a fence and voila. Ready for all your guests.
I spent many hours happily building different enclosures, looking forward every moment to seeing the animals go in.
Genuinely couldn’t tell you how long I spent watching red pandas scale this.
As for the guests, as mentioned earlier, if you’ve played some sort of park simulator before this won’t be far afield from what you know. Make it easy for them to get around, make the animals easy to see, keep them fed and watered, amenities aplenty, educational areas and you’ll meet the requirements pretty easily.
An aspect of this I hadn’t expected was security for the guests. Not just from animals that may escape, but from things like pickpockets. Happily minding my own business watching some gorillas and there’s staff telling me I’ve got a pickpocket problem. Fine, here’s ten security guards, now leave me alone. That chimpanzee is picking termites out of a mound with a stick, and he won’t watch himself.
Like their cousins, orangutans also like taking a stick to get food out of places.
There’s the swathe of usual suspect game types here. Sandbox, of course (and thankfully; putting forty lions into a park was going to be expensive without infinite money), scenarios, timed challenges, that sort of thing. There’s plenty of stuff to do to mix it up.
Another mode is “Franchise” where you save up enough credits for a zoo of your own, select a biome and then build up a zoo as usual. Now, however, there’s an active trading market with other players for their own animals – this then enables you expand your zoo over time.
I didn’t have much to do with this beyond a cursory look around but know that it’s an option if you go for that sort of thing.
There are plenty of game modes with different circumstances to keep you going, or sandbox to let your imagination run wild.
There are also mods. Here you can find prebuilt assets for your park in the form of buildings or enclosures that other players have created and some of them are stellar. In particular one I saw was a beautifully made clouded leopard enclosure; but there were many that were excellently done and can save you a lot of time whilst making your park look a lot more “professional.”
The various categories of mods can really expand your in-game assets.
I honestly don’t have much negative to say here. I found the controls with a gaming pad to be pretty easy to use, but there’s full mouse and keyboard support and its as easy as plug and play if the controls feel a bit clumsy for you.
I’d have liked to see more done with the smaller animals – the aforementioned spiders, snakes, giant snails, other such things – they aren’t nearly as engaging to watch as their enclosure counterparts but they’re there and they draw crowds.
Other than that, this game has been a blast and I’ve had a thoroughly relaxing time playing it. It can be as simple and easy-going as you want, or you can ramp up the difficulty to the point of unleashing chaos.
Planet Zoo is a great fun management game, and the animals are the bright stars of the show. If this genre is up your street, Planet Zoo will absolutely tick those boxes and if you’re a gamer who wants more to do with animals, this game has that in spades, and it can be made as easy as you like so you can get to enjoying seeing them.
Highly recommended.
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