Planet Zoo

Cons:
- it barely explains the controls
- building can be a massive pain
- trying to set up work zones and keep employees happy requires an engineering degree or something

Pros:
- the animals are cute
- once you figure things out you can build some pretty impressive zoos
- you can make custom buildings to house your employee buildings, and save the blueprints for use in other zoos
- the career mods story line is kind of interesting

Def recommend playing career mode to learn the game, since it also unlocks decorations for you to use in other zoos (mostly animal statues, but they're kinda cute animal statues.) I didn't expect there to be a sort of story line with career mode when I started it, but there is and it's kind of interesting to follow along in! Some of the animals can be annoying with how quickly they breed, since their numbers cna very quickly get out of control. Peacocks especially are bad about that, if you're not careful you'll end up with more than your keepers can keep up with. Having to manage waste, power, guest happiness, employee happiness, and animal happiness is a fun challenge and feels like a big step up from the old zoo tycoon games. I got this a while ago looking for something similar to zoo tycoon, quit for awhile because I got frustrated with the controls, but picked it back up again recently and now that I'm figuring things out (and googling everything I can't figure out on my own) I'm having a lot more fun with it! If you're going to play, I'd recommend looking up guides and videos to watch and/or listen to while you start out!

Its a fun game but its like the sims where buying all of the DLCs makes you go bankrupt.

this game has changed my life and I'm not exaggerating,
I am an autistic person and one of my biggest hyper-fixations my whole life has been zoo's, I used to play Minecraft mods with animals in them and make my own little zoos and I would play games like zoo tycoon for the Xbox and religiously watch Lego zoo speed builds. A fond memory of when I was little was when me and my family would go to Australia zoo, It's one of my favourite memories as a child, now that I'm older I am a big fan of simulator and sandbox type games.
This game is perfect for me because it brings me nostalgia from my childhood and it fits with my current interests, at first it was hard to work out but the tutorial mode helped me tons, the game is packed full of animals and it feels really realistic, my favourite part of this game is the enclosure making, I feel like I can express my creativity with how in depth the building is in the game, it reminds of the sims 4 in a way as it is incredibly beautiful, the animals are adorable and I love seeing them grow and taking care of them, I also love the humans silly designs.
the only negatives to the game is that you need a reasonable computer but it works on cheap ones and gaming laptops. Despite the small community in my country it is a beautiful and engaging game with consistent updates and a really full base-game, with cheap dlc too which is nice as I only get steam money on my birthday XD, I believe that if your a fan of simulator games this game is perfect for you, it is fully customisable and with franchise mode not being incredibly challenging and having challenge game modes it should keep u occupied and even become a hobby of yours!

When I first got this game in 2019 I was so disappointed. The micromanagement really put me off as It was so much more in depth than previous zoo games. My zoos kept failing and I stopped playing for at least a year. When I picked it up again I bought 4-5 dlcs that had been released and gave it another whirl.
After 1600 hours it's safe to say this is now my favourite game.
My tips would be:
-Do the career mode if you're a beginner
-Watch some of the amazing Youtubers, (ZSHPlays and Ladydesigner are brilliant).
-Slow down animal aging in franchise mode, it helps prevent overwhelm when trying to grow your zoo above 4 or 5 enclosures.
PROS:
10000s building pieces, you can get really creative
Beautiful graphics
Frequent updates by the developers
Franchise mode provides enough challenge for achievement driven people like myself (breeding gold shiny animals)
Educational and entertaining for my toddler
Developers Quick to fix bugs
Cons:
erm....I play it too much?

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Planet Zoo is really recommended for people who want relaxed gaming. If you are familiar with the franchise of Planet, then you know that you can enjoy playing for hours.
Here are some positives:
- hours of fun building, maintaining and ''walking'' through your zoo.
- The animals have natural behaviors.
- You can give the buildings any color you want.
- You can use your own images to create information boards in cages, along walkways, etc.
- It never gets boring
- Animals sometimes do nice and funny things
- Nice in-game rewards
- Albino animals can appear
Negative points:
- there could be some diversity in the appearance of visitors
- Computer can be slow when your zoo gets big
- some animals breed very fast so you can get negative visitors
- the animal exchange market can sometimes be expensive (other players offer animals for an absurdly high price)
Overall a game to definitely purchase and the DLCs are not expensive.

Very good purchase, at least if on sale. Most of the dlcs also highly recommended. Graphics and the zoo building and decorating aspects are amazing. Management and learning about animals are very okay too, but once you get your cash flow running it will continue to grow, and so the gameplay might get a bit dull.
Still with all, one of my favourite games suitable for many different purposes of gaming.