Close to the end of 2019, Frontier Developments released a new tycoon-style game and let players take care of a large variety of animals in Planet Zoo. After release, they continued to work on the game to improve it even further, despite already getting positive reviews, and they made a great tycoon even better with this update. Launching simultaneously with the South America DLC, I took some time to check it all out.
Update Improvements
This update was no small change, but rather large improvement in running the zoo. So much was added for players that weren’t looking for new challenges, but rather ways to better improve their park and maintain their animals. They didn’t forget those that do enjoy the challenge though and gave plenty for them as well.
The best aspect that I enjoyed was knowing the lineage of the animals in my care. You can use this knowledge to pair animals up with their direct families rather than just having random herds. I prefer to make multiple zones for some of my animals, especially when I tend to have more than a typical zoo would really have, so it made it easy for me to group them by family rather than just putting half here and half there. Things like this give the game an extra touch of care for the player to use in various ways, just like my set up.
I did give the difficulty options a test run as well and I can say that I don’t recommend the hard difficulty to a first-time player, even if you come from Planet Coaster. Running a zoo and running a theme park have their similarities, but the caretaking side of things isn’t the same at all. Keeping a balance to maintain customer and animal happiness can easily become a challenge if you let one or two things slip, so make sure you have played the game on a lighter difficulty to get the groundwork solidified. If you insist on going into Hard mode though, they do let you customize the difficulty in a few different ways to help you out. This can be used to ease into it.
Not only did we get updates to the difficulties, animal maintenance, customer maintenance, and general park upkeep, but we got some free new landscape items to check out. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t really go through these items much myself, as I mostly set my parks up with the gear from the South America DLC and the stuff I was using initially, but this new list of items gives players more options to use even if they don’t get the DLC. This was a nice inclusion for those who aren’t going to be getting the DLC’s.
South America DLC
I’ll start this section off with the positive and say that I do love how the colorful items really pop in the parks! It does seem like there are a lot of them just recolored, but this does give a good opportunity to make different areas blend in different ways. The new foliage and building pieces are definitely a positive note in this update that I used to pretty up my parks while giving a more culture-driven style to the overall design.
Now, easily the most excitable part of this DLC is also a slight upset. The new animals they included are ones I am happy to see included, but I just feel that so many were left out. It was the Jaguars and Llamas that caught my attention the quickest and then I checked out the other options only to be disappointed. We are given a Tree Frog and Anteater, but not a Sloth, Capybaras, or Ocelots? Why limit these animal types from the DLC when these are some of the main animals you think of when you think South America.
Don’t get me wrong, Jaguars are one of my favorite big cats and I love getting them set up in the habitat. The Llamas make good exhibit animals that I enjoy seeing how the customers interact with them. But it just feels like we are cut short by not having the Sloth, which is a very popular animal for zoological based locations to have, the Capybaras, which have been recently popularized in the last few years, and the Ocelots, which rival Cheetas and Jaguars in their wild cat popularity. I’m sure there are countless other animals I’m not even considering and there isn’t any way to include all of them, but after including the 5 new animals in the parks it just didn’t feel like much of an expansion.
Conclusion
While the South America DLC does give some new aspects to the game and brings a culture-based color style that will pop in design, the real hero of this addition is the update that players got free. I am happy to have the animals that the DLC includes, especially the Jaguars and Llamas, but it does feel that the focus was on the enrichment building items rather than the animals. For a game focused around creating a Zoo, I hope their future DLC’s will also focus on the Zoo aspect rather than the building aspect.
