When my sister and I were younger, we put countless hours into Zoo Tycoon. Looking back, we weren’t the best zookeepers. I had a problem with my monkey population, so I curbed it by adding tigers to the exhibit slowly. When a guest complained about my zoo, they were placed with the lions to learn their lesson. When the dinosaur DLC came out, you can bet I had raptors free roaming my zoo to greet the guests in person.

When I first saw the announcement for Planet Zoo, I called my sister screaming that we needed to get it. I hadn’t played any of the other games by Frontier (I never liked Roller Coaster Tycoon enough to rationalize $40 on their updated version), but I was all in for zoo land.

The main artwork for Planet Zoo

Disclaimer: I was provided a review key Planet Zoo from Maverick PR.

Planet Zoo is a zoo simulator with multiple modes for gameplay. The game has an extensive campaign where you work on pre-made zoos (12 different zoos!), a franchise mode where you can create your own zoo system, challenge mode where you complete challenges, and an open-ended sandbox mode where you have unlimited resources to create the zoo of your dream. For most of the modes, you use veterinarians and mechanics to research more about the animals in the zoo or different building themes for the zoo. Through research, you gain more knowledge on what to feed the animals in the zoo and what enrichment items they enjoy. The animals themselves are beautifully made, and I have spent a fair amount of time following individual animals with the cinematic camera to see the detailed animations and actions.

The zoomed camera view of some elephant friends.

The campaign is an excellent way to get in touch with some of the controls of Frontier’s games, which are a bit overwhelming and even after a dozen hours playing I’m not sure if I’ve even scratched the surface of all the controls can do. I think the campaign does a good job of presenting different scenarios to test the user and teach them how to run a zoo in the game. Each scenario has an award system (bronze, silver and gold), giving you higher tier awards as you complete more tasks in the scenario. What I like about this system is that if I don’t particularly enjoy a specific scenario, I only need a bronze award in it to move onto the next one. I think the game focuses what it wants you to learn from each zoo into the bronze award so that if you decide to move on you’ll only be missing some deeper learning on the basic idea. I also really like that I can take the pre-made campaign zoos into the Challenge Mode to work with them further. The designs on the campaign zoos are honestly beautiful and I haven’t been able to replicate anything quite as lovely on my own, so getting to work on the campaign zoos has been really fun in the challenge modes.

The UI while in Challenge Mode of the first campaign zoo, Goodwin House

I’ve spent most of my Planet Zoo experience in the sandbox mode. I tried to get into the franchise mode, but I found the conservation point system quite frustrating for starting a zoo on day one. Every day, you earn 100 ‘conservation points’ for logging into Planet Zoo. Conservation points are used to purchase animals off of the zoo market and also to start new franchise zoos. I unfortunately found this to be a frustrating mechanic. I don’t log into games daily due to grad school and other life events, so I struggled with collecting enough conservation points to buy the animals I wanted. If you’re looking for some of the rarer animals, like the African lion or the Asian elephant, you need to buy them basically only through conservation points. Since you usually want more than one animal in your exhibit, it can get pretty pricey. You can also get conservation points by releasing animals back into the wild, but it can take frustratingly long in franchise mode to reach a point where you get enough conservation points from releasing animals back. I think these frustrations are personal (I’m currently in grad school and have limited time to game, so I like fast feedback), but if the waiting game isn’t for you then franchise mode may seem overwhelming. Some of the users on the subreddit have mentioned some tips for getting conservation points:

Breeding spiders and releasing them to the wild is a good and cheap way to get conservation points

Find two breeding animals and then release their babies (once adults) back into the wild

The animals you get from the points and from in-game money are also found on the Zoo Market, which is a marketplace used by you and all the other players in the game. Sometimes, you see a good deal to get the animal you like but you don’t click fast enough and another user beats you to it. The Zoo Market definitely feels much better than it did in the beta, and I’ve had more luck getting the animals I was looking for for my zoo without being beaten by the competition too often.

In the end, the conservation point idea pushed me toward sandbox mode and honestly I think it’s for the best. The sandbox mode is SO fun. You have unlimited resources and have fully researched all the different themes for your zoo, so you’re really free to create whatever zoo you want. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with all the different items, and I’ve learned the most about the game just through free experimentation with all the resources at my fingers. I’ve also gotten to try out some of the items created by other users in the Community Market on Steam and I’m super impressed by what everyone else is able to do. The designs they’ve made for buildings, exhibits and displays are absolutely unreal and if you haven’t checked those out yet I highly recommend them.

This beautiful reptile house in my zoo is by bucko415 on steam

So, should you get this game? If you were a fan of Zoo Tycoon back in the day like my sister and I were I highly recommend this one. I also recommend it if you’re a fan of games like the Sims, since the building customization is really quite fun and can tap into your creativity. The game is priced slightly under your typical AAA title ($44.99) and I think it’s a fair price based on the sheer amount of animals, objects and experiences within the game. If you do make a zoo, please share your pictures because my favorite part of playing this game so far has been seeing what everyone is capable of as zookeepers!

iLuffhomer

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iluffhomer