GAMING REVIEWS

High-performance playtime

The difference between a roller coaster and a ringtailed lemur is that when one has a problem it’s a mild irritation and when the other has a problem it’s a cause of unbridled panic and guilt. There are stressful components to every management simulation game, but where Planet Coaster’s mechanical breakdowns make me worry briefly about profits, Planet Zoo’s biological breakdowns make me feel like a neglectful, abusive monster who should be dragged off to jail and never allowed near another living thing ever again.

Planet Zoo has several official modes: Career, Challenge, Sandbox, and Franchise, but its two actual modes are ‘Things Seem Fine’ and ‘Oh God What Have I Done?!’. My elephants, giraffes, orangutans, panda bears, and dozens of other furry friends can starve to death or die of dehydration if I’m not careful. They can contract diseases or get injured by fighting one another. They can feel fear and stress and the effects of isolation. They can overheat or get too cold. They can kill each other if you put the wrong animals together in the same habitat. At one point I saw protestors carrying picket signs in my park. It was because my giant burrowing cockroach’s glass box was slightly too humid for its liking. I couldn’t even keep an ugly bug that eats dead leaves happy and I instantly felt terrible about it.

Planet Zoo isn’t just a management sim, it’s a survival game. In fact forget that I just compared it to Planet Coaster. At its most stressful Planet Zoo is more like Frostpunk or Prison Architect. None of the lives you’re in charge of actually want to be there, and making a mistake puts those lives in danger.

With the exception of Sandbox mode where you have a bottomless wallet and the ability to turn off things like animal sickness, injury, and death, Planet Zoo is an extremely busy and occasionally exhausting sim. Everything needs constant attention all the time – not only keeping your animals healthy but your staff happy, managing your budget and zoo’s reputation, and dealing with day-to-day concerns like preventing guests from vandalising park benches (by hiring a security guard and installing cameras) and making sure habitat walls don’t get so dilapidated they crumble and allow a tiger to terrorise the park (the guests won’t get mauled, but they do leave the zoo in a hurry).

The layers of micromanagement extend all the way down to elements like which colours of balloons you sell in a particular vendor stall and how much to charge for each individual colour, and Planet Zoo will even show you the profit margin for each.

A few more tutorials would have been nice to completely understand all of the features available – while the lengthy career mode walks you through managing, fixing and building several different parks in different parts of the world there’s a lot of obscure functions and options it never even mentions, so be prepared to dig through the help menu to figure a few things out.

Verdict

Another strong, yet stressful, management sim from Frontier Developments.