

Or in Planet Zoo, for people who want to lay out an ambitious grizzly bear pen complete with a mountain, a faux-cave, and a waterfall. It’s for people who want to place every trash can and every tree and every rock, who want to spend hours beautifying a reptile house or maybe just a toilet. Planet Zoo, like Planet Coaster before, is an incredible construction kit. Still, I’m having a great time sidestepping the issue by building a massive zoo with everything in it. The current implementation is bizarre, and undercuts what should be one of Planet Zoo’s best ideas. That sort of Haussmann-like renovation is par for the course in builders, but Franchise Mode seems designed precisely to avoid such situations. Laying out a gondola was proving needlessly difficult and I was having a hard time keeping my staff’s assigned work areas organized. After spending 12 to 15 hours on my first, I realized I’d backed myself into a corner in terms of some late-game options. Of course, that also means you’re going to screw up the first time. It’s manageable though, with most of the nonfunctional items hidden until after you’ve laid down a foundation and done some research. Starting a new zoo is still intimidating, presented with acres upon acres of empty land to fill. You can research new themes to decorate your zoo, new staff facilities to accommodate your growing employee pool, new barriers to better protect your guests from your animals (and vice versa), and so on. You start with a limited construction kit and limited funds, then gradually expand both your zoo and your options. Positioned between Career and Creative, Franchise Mode is a slightly structured sandbox. Twice-or three times now, if you count the beta. You could play with a restricted toolbox in someone else’s zoo…or you could just go make your own.Īnd make your own, I did. The prefab zoos Frontier includes for each mission are inspiring, sure, but unlocking all 14 will take a lot of patience. I did dabble in the Career early on, but quickly tired of going through the motions of what felt like an extended tutorial. Frontier Developments wouldn't go into details about what Planet Zoo's story mode is about but the developer did say there would be one, which will hopefully delight those in search of a narrative reason to become the best zookeeper possible.It’s a lot of hours, most of them spent in Franchise Mode. One of the biggest criticisms directed at Planet Coaster was the lack of a substantial campaign or story mode. The visuals here really pop everywhere you look.
PLANET ZOO VS PLANET COASTER PATCH
Whether you're watching everyone explore your park from a distance or you're zoomed into a patch of fur on one of your lions, everything looks realistic and colorfully vibrant. There's more than enough here to keep nitty gritty management fanatics excited. Hippos will need deeper ponds than other species so they can swim and bathe, and so on. Do you have a zoo in the desert? You'll need to build cooling pads beneath the floor of your timberwolves' den (not to mention power generators) to accommodate them as well as shelters for your lions to hide in during storms.

Every animal has different needs you'll need to respond to in some fashion.

You'll need to do more than feed your animals to take care of them. The Management Side Of The Game Is Strong Every species of animal reacts realistically to their real-world counterpart, with wolves following a pack mentality while other species might just go off and do their own thing. Frontier is working hard to make sure each individual animal stands out, with genomes affecting major things like behavior to small details such as coat patterns. The occupants of your zoo are more than just units you have to care for.
PLANET ZOO VS PLANET COASTER HOW TO
Frontier Developments showcased the it knows how to bring the park sim into the next generation by striking a fine balance between meticulous management and wacky shenanigans, and we look forward to seeing the result with Planet Zoo. If you haven't played Planet Coaster, but loved management sims like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon, you should give it a go. Here's why we're excited to play the game when it releases this Fall. We recently got to watch a 15 minute demo of the game in action and came away rather impressed by Frontier's ambitions and the promise of their take on running a zoo and caring for its animals. Planet Zoo is an upcoming management sim by Frontier Developments, the company behind Planet Coaster.
