Planet Zoo Review

I love animals. Our house contains many of them, and I’m constantly covered in hay, fur, and various scratches from a beastie that didn’t want to take medicine or have their claws trimmed. But whilst it’s fine to keep cats and bunnies, there tends to be a fairly large element of risk in having grizzly bears and lions knocking around, so I’ve always left the care of these slightly more dangerous animals to the professionals. With Planet Zoo though, there’s an opportunity to get myself a taste of what it’s like to be one of those professionals, so when a review copy came in, it’s safe to say that I jumped at the chance quicker than a hippo that’s just spotted a plastic marble.

Coming from Frontier Developments, who gave us the excellent Planet Coaster, this is a simulation of what it’s like to run a zoo, and it’s just as ambitious as their similarly name theme park simulation game. The fact that it took me about 12 hours to complete all of the tutorials gives you a good idea of the scope that Frontier has put into this game. In fact, I’m about 40 hours deep at the time of writing this review and I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible. 

This isn’t just a case of putting a few animals on show and selling merch, but a full-blown ecosystem management game, where the welfare of your animals and education of your guests is just as important as getting everyone to exit through the gift shop. When building an environment for your animals, you’ll need to take into account not just the size and terrain, but how much enrichment they have through toys and interactive feeders, what sort of group sizes those animals need, gender mixing, and interspecies socialisation. Get any of these wrong and the animals won’t be happy, which leads to the zoo performing worse than it otherwise would. Zoo visitors want to see happy and healthy animals after all. 

And with health in mind, there’s a very in-depth health system as well. Your vets aren’t just there to treat injured animals, but they have to research their health and welfare needs, as well as the various diseases that can strike. The health of your animals isn’t just down to the vets though, as their habitat conditions and genetics also play a role. You’ll be breeding animals, and the quality of parents defines the quality of offsprings, with menus dedicated to life expectancy, change of illness etc. all to consider. Left to their own devices and animals will interbreed, and those four peafowl you started with can quickly become 50-odd, many of which are both brother and uncle simultaneously. 

This realism does pose a bit of a problem for the game however. Interbreeding produces poor quality animals. Either they will have genetic mutations and will be disliked by guests, or they will have short life expectancies or propensity for illness. This has led to a lot of players putting these animals up for sale in the game’s marketplace (the main source of new animals in the sandbox modes), which means that you’ll need to make good use of the filters included when buying, so as not to end up with a whole load of animals more interrelated than the Eastenders cast.

Those above mentioned currencies are what keeps you going through the game. Money is pretty self explanatory and generally comes from your guests donating money or buying merch, drinks etc. Conservation credits are given for visiting other player zoos, having players visit you, or by helping conservation efforts. If you breed rare animals, you can release them into the wild. The better their chances of survival and further breeding in the wild, the more credits you get. There’s reams of detailed information on the conservation status of these animals in the real world too, with some quite heartbreaking information like the fact that there are more ring-tailed lemurs in zoos than in the wild now thanks to poachers and habitat destruction. 

But if you are in the more challenging Franchise or Challenge modes, then you have to be careful with funds. This means that you’ll be playing for a long time before you have earned enough money or conservation credits to purchase the more endangered animals, as their scarcity makes them expensive on the marketplace. If you just want to play around with all the things that you can make, the game does have a sandbox mode, and it’s fantastic. The crafting tools, like in Planet Coaster, and second-to-none, and there’s almost no limit to what can be achieved with the tools provided if you have an artistic mind. Like its roller coaster based equivalent though, sometimes things are a little fiddly to place in full 3D, with physics not always being fully adhered to. Floating objects were a common occurrence as I wrestled with the game’s rather rigid controls initially. Once you get the hang of it, it’s less frustrating, but there’s something of a touch learning curve that needs a bit of perseverance. 

It’s a graphically stunning game, with tonnes of things going on all at once. It does mean that even with a relatively high powered PC (Ryzen 7 1800x, 48GB RAM, 8GB RTX 2080) There was a fair bit of popup when zoomed out. I also had a few video driver crashes whilst playing. There is also a very weird bug that a lot of people have reported whereby the game freezes the first time you launch it, needing to be killed in Task Manager and reopened, whereupon it works fine. I had this almost every time I launched the game, although at the time of publication a small patch has been launched which seems to have fixed it. I’ve launched the game about four times since it and not seen a freeze. 

Aside from stability, there are also a few bugs and glitches in gameplay. Things like animals clipping through certain types of enclosures on occasion, and keepers unable to clean under certain structures leading to dirty habitats and eventual illness. A quick look at the Steam community forums shows that Frontier is well aware that some issues that need to be worked out and they are patching bugs, but it’s quite disappointing to see such a high-profile game launch with so many issues.

None of the technical issues stopped me playing the game, and all of them have workarounds or things that can be done in response, so they’re not deal-breakers. Honestly, I have enjoyed playing this game so much I’m handing this review in late because I’ve really had to tear myself away from it. Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling that if it weren’t for the bugs, we would probably be looking at a 10 out of 10 title here. If you’re reading this sometime in the future, there’s every likelihood that it would qualify for such an accolade at the time of reading, but as we don’t re-review anything here at GameGrin, Frontier have let themselves down by releasing this slightly before it was ready. 

Overall, Planet Zoo is a wonderful game that is as fun as it is educational. It’s clear that Frontier have put a lot of time and effort into making it as realistic and detailed as possible. I’ve learnt loads through the detailed “zoopedia” included within the game (such as the fact that hippos don’t actually eat marbles so my opening paragraph analogy is flawed), but I’ve also had a great time doing so. I just wish those times didn’t keep getting interrupted by the frustrating stability issues.