Planet Zoo

---{ 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
---{ 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

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, I'ts 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!

Welp after a few hundred hours its time for me to finally give this game a review.
Im gonna preface this that this game is one of my favorite games and my favorite creative game for multiple reasons.
Ofcourse i like animals, i am a zoo nerd, BUT i want to talk about none of that.
This game is imo arguably the best building game on the market, if you like animals or not and just the amount of freedom and pieces you get in the game is astonishing, completly breaking any caps making your creativity your limit.
Im somewhat competent of a builder by now aswell, but if you want to see how much you can push the limits of the game, go to the frontier forums and search for "Sallands Adventure Zoo" from the youtuber PS Vision Gaming. The zoo part in the name is imaginary, instead of building a zoo this guy built a whole modern town set in the neatherlands so if the fact that its a zoo game kept you from buying it (eventhough lets be honest if that was the case why would you even read this) this game still is a fantastic choice to just build whatever your heart desires.
But talking about honestly, this games main point of critic ive seen is the large amount of dlc, which is a fair critice to make, but none of them really sat right with me. Most people say its bad because content is locked behind them, which is simply not true. No major content in itself is locked behind a dlc and the main game is completly sufficent in giving you a great experience, but where the dlc really come in is to spice up the game and expand where the base game is lacking.
For my own quick suggestions, do not get any dlc at the start, unless you allready know enough about the game that you know you will enjoy it. When you play the game, learn the ropes which can allready take a litte as the building has quite the steep learning curve as anything about aesthetic has and for that time the base game and its 75 species and 6 distinct building themes are more then enough.
Once you got a bit more into it and enjoy the game, thats when i would buy dlcs one at the time regarding whatever your preferences are. Wanna built an australian area? Cool get the australia pack. South America? South America Pack! And so on and so for. There are 3 packs id recommend outside of this pattern, those being the europe, the wetlands and the grasslands pack.
The grass- and wetlands pack offer a good array of only(!) animals, each giving 7 normal animals and 1 terarrium animal for the wetlands and 5 different butterflys for the grassland pack. These packs combine fill the base games most lacking areas, increasing the amount of of south american habitat animals from 2 to 6, the australian from 1 to 4 with arguably the 2 most important ones in the emu and wallaby, add 2 more birds to go from 3 to 5 and filling out the list of asian animals which mostly are very big in the base game with some smaller creatures, including a cute otter! With these 2 packs you not only increase the amount of animals from 75 to 95, the most possible with any combination of 2 packs, it also expands most lacking areas to a degree that they become passable, even without their specific dlc.
The europe pack is here for another reason, as its by far the most important pack for building none zoo things, as it features 250+ new pieces, the most out of any dlc, focused on different european architecture, giving a great boon to building beautiful european styled buildings and while this pack is not neccessary for that it does expand the options by quite alot and makes it much easier.
Besides the dlcs, the game also has offerd a free update that came with each of them, featuring many new mechanics and just new things, sometimes larger and smaller, making sure to give everybody something whenever a new dlc rolls around if they buy it or not. Each update has a few new free plants, bug fixes and many other new things with the last update for example featuring 12 new plants, 4 new music tracks, an ingame video editor to make tours of your zoos, a camera mode, the ability to customise staff members uniform, adding a new behaviour to one base game and 2 dlc animals to make them more unique and overhauling a base game animals looks by adding multiple new colormorphs and mutations for it.
And this was arguably one of the lighter updates, as the 2 anniversary updates for example both have added a new animal to the game for free (the black and white ruffed lemure and the red deer).
So all in all if you like building games, animals or zoos this is the game for you. The animals are beautiful, the building fantastic and the options allmost limitless, only being limited by your creativity. Dont be scared of the dlcs, you wont need them and can buy them, if at all, over time when you need them and still have a more then enjoyable experiance that regulary gets updated with a few new toys.

---{ 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
---{ 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

To start: I am not a great writer and writing a review for this game is daunting as I have so many thoughts on it, good and bad.
You will probably notice that the list of negatives is a lot longer than my positives, and while that is true its also not entirely indicative of my overall feelings on the game, because at the end of the day I AM recommending it and it is one of my favorite games of all time. I just want anyone considering buying it to be fully informed on what they’re getting into.
This game has gotten me not just more interested in zoology but architecture and city(zoo?) planning as a whole and I’ve learned a lot from it and it’s awesome community. If building a zoological facility is an interesting idea to you I wholeheartedly recommend it as you will not find any other game as in depth and graphically up to date.
It is especially nice to see how… tasteful? It is with it’s approach to zoos as a whole, with its big emphasis on conservation, education, and welfare. The zoopedia entries get very in-depth and are up to date with current care standards. I don’t get the feeling that I’m simply making a theme park with animals in it - it is entirely focused on the animals, which might be boring for some people but in my eyes is a huge positive.
And with all that out of the way, my list of pros and cons:
The Good:
- The game looks great. With some decoration skills you can make some beautiful scenery and buildings that look close to real life.
- The animal models, especially as of late, are incredible. The amount of detail and love that goes into them all the way down to their walk cycles and behaviors are well researched and beautiful.
- Optimization is pretty good for the majority of players. I have an underwhelming laptop that still manages to run it pretty well even with lots of pieces onscreen, albeit at lower graphics settings.
- The group function is powerful and convenient once you figure out how to use it, the game would not function without it and I’m glad it’s there.
- The dev team is active and fairly responsive to criticism, going as far as to remodel animals that were inaccurate (Binturong). They seem to care deeply about animals and conservation. If you guys read this; you’ve done a great job.
- While I mostly play Planet Zoo for sandbox building, the actual gameplay is engaging and I enjoy most of the campaign levels.
I have seen a lot of people struggle with staff properly maintaining animal care but as I’ve gotten used to how the game works I have not had much issue with it.
Maybe its been tweaked since then, but if you still have these issues I would suggest making sure to train your staff so they work more efficiently, this seems to be more effective than hiring more staff much of the time.
The Not So Good:
- The DLC. If there is one thing that steers people away from Planet Zoo it would be this. I’m a sucker for zoology and happily buy new DLC as it releases as I’m excited to build for new animals, but not everyone is me, and the amount of animals and building pieces locked behind a paywall has gotten absurd, especially when iconic animals such as polar bears and penguins are not base game.
- The learning curve is extremely steep. I have hundreds of hours invested into it and only recently have found myself confident in my ability to build… anything. The group tool is a potentially powerful tool that I feel could have been explained more without a google search.
- Tutorial and campaign levels can and will break. The tutorial levels seem especially bad about this and these are obviously the worst ones to have this issue and initially discouraged me from playing. I have seen bug fixes released but continue to see people complain about them which is concerning.
- Many core mechanics are hostile to realistic zoo design. If you want something that truly mimics real zoos you will have to do it in sandbox where it doesn't matter that all your animals are starving and dehydrated because your staff can’t reach them.
- Related to the last point; animal space requirements can be odd and seem more based around catering to their janky hitboxes that ruin traversability. Leaning towards more space than less is obviously great in terms of welfare, but many of the very small animals look strange or nearly invisible in these wide open spaces.
- If you are aiming for realistic zoo design you will find yourself repeatedly hitting a wall in performance.
Because in-game mechanics do not mesh well with this type of design, you end up having to sort of “fake it till you make it”, using hundreds or thousands of small pieces to cover things up or build structures that should probably already be props (sun shades on the workshop made from thousands of decals when they could easily just implement 1 piece props given how common these are in zoos).
You can see why this will eventually lead to your framerates tanking. I’ve had some saves repeatedly crash just from panning the camera around too quickly and overwhelming it from the sheer amount of objects it needs to render.
- While most of the animals look excellent, there seems to have been a shift in art direction over time, leading to some of the original animals appearing strangely stylized and unrealistic (the lion being the biggest offender). The modding community is excellent and has great remasters, though!
- The dreaded pathing. I am putting this at the bottom since I have more or less learned how to tame it or at least accept my fate when it doesn’t work how I want it to. It’s a pain, it’s finicky, it often makes zero sense why it works the way it does. My biggest tip to anyone struggling with it is to smooth your terrain before placing it, but even that does not always satisfy it.
---
…And that’s it! Hopefully this is helpful to anyone on the fence about buying it, especially with all the DLC. I say give base game a try and see if the mechanics mesh well with you before buying anything else, and if you’re just looking for a management game to skip out on DLC entirely, as they mostly targeted towards complex building and people that care about having specific species.
And if Frontier is reading this for some reason: PLEASE do more base game patches and additions, it’s getting pretty ridiculous at this point.

---{ 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
---{ 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

I don't know what happened. One minute I was ten years old casually enjoying zoo tycoon, now I am in my late twenties and planet zoo has stolen my life away. I am okay with this. I never want it back.