Key Preview Takeaways:
- Conservation is an excellent addition to the scope of Planet Zoo.
- PZ2 immediately drops you into the on-the-ground view, which is an effective way to bring you into the game.
- There’s a lot of detailing and decorating to do for players interested in that.
The animal lover in me was immediately delighted by the couple of hours I got to spend with Planet Zoo 2. And not just because the various creatures large and small who inhabit it look the best they ever have in a tycoon game – especially in the animation department – but because of the increased focus on conservation. While it has “zoo” in the title, a huge new component to this sequel is the introduction of free-roaming wildlife preserves that can be sculpted and shepherded to see the species in your care returned to and thriving in their natural habitats. And in a franchise that has always struggled to make the economics of running a park fun on their own, that gave me new goals to strive for.
Going Wild
I didn’t even start my Planet Zoo 2 career from the typical top-down strategy game perspective. Rather, I was placed directly into the world at ground height, allowing me to walk around the lush East African Rift Valley in first-person. While some previous Frontier games like Jurassic World Evolution have included this as a feature, making it the first thing you do before placing any buildings or fussing over graphs literally changed my perspective in a positive way.
Hopping into a rugged offroad survey vehicle, I was quickly driving around extremely detailed landscapes with dense grass and foliage taking pictures of warthogs and zebras, some of which I had to crouch down to approach in a stealthy manner to keep them from bolting. The level of fidelity this close up is really impressive, both for the environments as well as the animals themselves. And I was impressed by the performance, though I didn’t get a chance to look at the specs of the PCs Frontier gave us remote access to.
Similarly to how running a zoo requires you to build habitats that meet all of an animal’s needs, managing a reserve presents you with a handful of irregularly-shaped biomes like savannahs or dense forests that have their own set of needs to achieve “flourishing” status, which will maximize the wellbeing of native species you release into them. They require a certain percentage of different kinds of native plants, access to water, and so on. I had unlimited funds in the demo, and the East African preserve I was tending was already in pretty good shape. So I’m not sure how big a project it might be to revitalize a heavily degraded ecosystem. But this is definitely the part of Planet Zoo 2 I’m most excited about.
Captive Imagination
Of course, you’ll also be running more traditional zoos with captive breeding programs to be able to pay for all of this and create healthy candidates to release back into the wild. And that side of things feels pretty familiar to the first Planet Zoo. Again, my biggest bone to pick with Frontier’s modern tycoon roster is that they don’t really present challenging economic simulations for those of us who think balancing the books and fending off bankruptcy is a big part of the fun, and with unlimited money turned on, I can’t say if they’ve done much to change that.
It still excels where Frontier games have long excelled, though, in the detailing and decorating department. There is a dizzying selection of parts to choose from that can be resized, rotated, combined, recolored, and remixed to make just about anything you can imagine, as well as a pretty decent set of pre-built stuff for players who don’t want to spend hours making one gazebo. No judgment! It’s just not my thing. There are pre-made styles for North, which have a modern Nordic design; West, which look more outdoorsy American; East, which are Asian-inspired; and South, which have a tropical motif that fits Africa and to some extent Oceania.
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