Planet Zoo
Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Format PC Release Out now
PC
Planet Zoo’s animals are so good that there didn’t really need to be any other game around them
Planet Zoo is capable of moments of great peace. Those times when you lose yourself in the busywork of building and planting and tweaking, letting the gentle soundtrack guide you into a sort of trance. When you lock the camera into a close-up on your favourite resident – in our case, an incredibly chill red panda – and just watch them do their thing for a while. Or, best of all, when you zoom out into the clouds for that everywhere-the-light-touches view, hit the triple-speed button, and soak in the satisfaction of a machine beautifully designed – before, inevitably, spotting that one thing that could do with improvement and getting sucked right back into that meditative loop of build, plant, tweak, emerging a couple of hours later unsure when exactly it got light outside.
Unfortunately, Planet Zoo is also capable of causing intense frustration. The controls can be like wrangling a disobedient animal – discovering your mouse and keyboard have turned feral, the camera launching through the level geometry to visit the zoo’s own personal Upside Down. The game comes with a library of keyboard shortcuts that will make you long for the days of printed manuals, but there are still some baffling omissions. There’s no key to rotate the camera, for example, leaving you to rely on the hold-and-drag mouse controls – which is how we ended up looking at our zoo from the underside.
The game is also lousy with bugs. We have multiple experiences of campaign objectives failing to register that we’ve completed them, and one particularly bad instance of a zookeeper disappearing. She is carrying a crate with a newly-adopted timber wolf inside to its enclosure. We look away for one second, and in that time they have both popped out of existence. We find her eventually, buried a couple of metres underground in that expanse of negative space the game seems so oddly fond of. Months have passed in-game, but her legs continue to pump away at some imagined pavement: she’s still trying to deliver the wolf. We reload an earlier save.
Our notes are littered with these kinds of grumbles. Buildings don’t snap into place the way you’d hope, meaning construction is often a faff. The tutorials dwell on the easy stuff, and never explain more complex techniques like terrain deformation or dealing with slopes. The menus explain themselves precisely half the time, and it’s never the half you need. There are way too many spiders. The thing is, though, the reason these kinds of complaints dominate our notes is probably those hours-long gaps where the game swallows us whole and we forget about writing things down.
These note-taking hiatuses all result from the game’s Challenge mode. This is Planet Zoo at its purest. Career begins as a string of tutorial missions in prefab zoos, and even once it starts to give you a blank slate, there’s always the knowledge that your stewardship is only temporary, until you earn that gold star and can move on. Sandbox hands you unlimited money and maxed-out research trees, but in doing so robs the game of a little urgency.
Challenge gives you a plot of land, a little starting money and just leaves you to it. You pick the biome and continent – which dictate the climate and backdrop but not much else – and turn that land into whatever takes your fancy. Unsightly hill right where you’d planned to stick the giraffes? You can level it out, or even excavate the land to create one of those sunken enclosures. Then, of course, you’ll want to make it inviting to your longnecked transplants. You resurface the whole thing, pulling up roots and laying down bare soil, pick out trees and rocks to remind the giraffes of their savanna home and arrange them just so.
Finally, a couple of engrossing hours later, you unfreeze time and get to watch the animals settle into what you’ve built for them. And, oh, those animals. They’re an incredible achievement: photorealistic down to the last bristle of fur, moving in a way that’ll trick your construction-addled brain into forgetting they’re just a bundle of status bars. Watching these creatures nose at their toys, scrap with a rival or paddle around the pool would probably be enough to justify Planet Zoo’s existence. But it’s more meaningful because you researched to unlock that toy, because you made the mistake of adopting two female bears and putting them in the same pen, because you spent ages figuring out how to dig a pond.
Simply, Planet Zoo’s animals are so good that there didn’t really need to be any other game around them. The same can be said for pretty much every system in the game. The tools for reshaping terrain and laying out paths and tunnels and bridges, fiddly as they are, are so involving you sometimes forget there are animals to coo at. There’s a robust resource-management element, with just the right amount of challenge to balancing the stats-on-a-graph requirements of your animals against those of your guests, your staff and our old friend capitalism. There is, honestly, an excess of game here.
Planet Zoo feels like a game intended to be enjoyed over months, the way many of us tended to a family of Sims over entire terms of schoolnights. Evaluating it now – knowing we’ll likely be gawping at other players’ skill and creativity well into next year, hoping the elephant’s worth of wrinkles get ironed out – feels a little like evaluating an iceberg based only on the bit of it you can see above water. For now, though, we’ll settle for appreciating those moments, the ones that outlast the frustrations, where we sit back in our chair and marvel at the results of our own work. And on that basis, Planet Zoo is a triumph.