From building your own ride to managing the livelihood of your very own theme park comes the desire to run a successful tourist trap. Now the same creators of Planet Coaster, Frontier Developments, have expanded the selection over to a more animal-lover focused title with Planet Zoo. Prepare the living habitats, check on your animals, and maintain a functioning attraction filled park rather than purely focusing on the entertainment value of a theme park.

Story

After the previous zoo manager retires, you are hired to step in and complete his work. You start at The Goodwin House, a respected zoo since the 1980s, while it's in the middle of enhancing renovations. This is your opportunity to show what you can do and prove yourself to be a zookeeper worth hiring. From here, you can let your experience expand further and own a zoo, or few, of your own!

Gameplay

From the start of the game, you follow a step-by-step tutorial that teaches you all the various functions made available to you. This includes checking on animals, improving their habitat, and running the park itself. While this may seem pretty straight forward, things can easily get a bit tricky as you manage a lot of aspects at once, but the game provides multiple user capable ways to handle it.

Even the on-screen menus are easy to navigate through and see all the different options available. Ranging from customizations and park management options to an actual task list to pick missions from, it’s all there for you. Each aspect is even given a quick rundown, which can be disabled like most options and functions in the game, so that you can be very aware of what it is you are to do.

The educational value is in the gameplay as well as there are accurate animal information details provided including facts, environment, and needs. These tidbits help you better understand the animal so you can build them a proper habitat, but they are also real animals and real facts so it is an easy way to learn while you play.

As with real-life parks, you will find yourself facing a few unique troubles along the way. Not only will customers constantly provide feedback so that you can adjust the zoo’s set up to appease both your customers and your park stats, but the animals have their own struggles to overcome as well. Animal issues can range from a variety of things, but my favorite is when the animal escapes and you have to find somewhere in the zoo. Brings me back to the good ole days when I would play with the “I Spy” books as I searched the park for any sign of my fluffy escapee.

Graphics and Sounds

Even with the cartoony design of the graphics, I never had much issue with performance thanks to their adjustment setting options. It lets me adjust them to what fits my PC best while still providing great graphics. I liked that they had accurate descriptions of the animal noises and light, carefree style music. Nothing seemed overpowering and provided a good balance regardless of what I was doing at the time.

Replayability

As a continuation simulation there is always something to come back too. Whether it's to start or continue a new zoo in campaign or go to sandbox mode and create your own zoo from scratch. After completing all of the main tasks in each zoo, there is still upkeep, expansion and side quests to be done. There are even a few different modes, including Career (campaign), Franchise (build zoos around the world and trade animals online), Challenge (build your zoo offline with a full economy with challenges you can choose and customize), and Sandbox (Freeplay) which lets you build a dream zoo from scratch with no limitations.

What Could Be Better

While the overall game is pretty great, there were a few glitches that got in the way but nothing major. If there was one thing worth mentioning, it would be the lag when building in the park. There should be options to speed the process up in some way.

Conclusion

Planet Zoo is the most entertaining educational simulation I’ve played in a long time! With a bunch of different modes that give it plenty of replayability, lots of quests to complete, and a nigh limitless amount of zoo’s to create, the sandbox aspect is very freeing. I can see many being hooked to the screen for hours.