Review for Planet Zoo. PC game, the video game came out on 05/11/2019
Frontier Developments, in recent years, has dedicated itself to the development of management video games, enjoying great success. In 2016 he published Planet Coaster, a management software dedicated to the world of amusement parks and later, in 2018, it was the turn of Jurassic World Evolution in which you had the opportunity to build a dinosaur park with a lot of official license of the homonymous film saga. Now it's the turn of another management video game: Planet Zoo, which will allow you to build and manage the zoo of your dreams on your home PC.
Planet Zoo proposes four game modes: Career, Challenge, Franchise and Sandbox. The mode Career it is divided into chapters with the first three being a kind of tutorial, to help you familiarize yourself with the game mechanics. Advancing with your career and completing the various chapters you will also unlock new zoos that can then be used in the mode Challenge.
The latter will allow you to manage preset zoo parks with various objectives to be achieved. With the mode sandboxInstead, you can indulge yourself in building and managing your zoo from practically nothing with no restrictions whatsoever, especially regardless of the economic aspect. The fourth and final game mode available in Planet Zoo is the Franchising - or multiplayer - which will allow you to build multiple parks at the same time, manage them and exchange entire portions of the zoo online with other users. Not only that, the strong point of the online mode is the ability to buy animals for your zoo by visiting a kind of virtual market where you will find an infinite number of specimens, even rare ones, which can also be purchased with the so-called safeguard credits which we will talk about later.
All four available game modes are fundamentally based on two main hubs: construction and management. Through the powerful editor present in Planet Zoo it will be possible to build a large variety of structures: from research centers to enclosures, from souvenir shops to monorails for zoo visitors. Furthermore, almost everything is customizable, from colors to dimensions.
The construction of the various structures will sometimes be a bit cumbersome and newbies may be discouraged by the amount of options available but, with a little patience, time and creativity, you will be able in a short time to master all the various settings available. The terrain will also be editable and it will be possible to create hills, small ponds, lakes and much more. But before you dedicate yourself to landscaping and altering the landscape, you will need to focus on some functional and fundamental structures for your park such as offices, visitor bathrooms, shops or an exchange center from which you can access the animal market. Planet Zoo features a huge variety of animals - more than 70 species - and each of them has been faithfully reproduced by the developers.
Each animal, from the giant African snail to the American bison, are very similar to their real counterparts both in purely aesthetic and behavioral terms. Inside your zoo you will have to build special enclosures in which to make them live and, in addition to paying attention to their needs, you will have to recreate their habitat - or biome - in which they are used to living. In Planet Zoo there are also numerous animals that could not live in an enclosure such as snakes or spiders. For these, and for other types of races, you will have to build glass rooms in which to recreate their biome. Through the window, visitors to the park will be able to admire your splendid specimens.
In order to recreate the biome suitable for each species present in Planet Zoo you will have to pay attention to a whole series of parameters that will vary according to, for example, the type of vegetation or soil, as well as the presence of a shelter or a source of water. Recreating the perfect biome for your specimens will be of fundamental importance and it will be equally important to feed them properly. Even inserting more specimens of the same species, or other compatible ones, inside the enclosures can ensure that they do not get stressed or, in the worst case scenario, that they do not get sick or even die. It will therefore be necessary to take care of it almost individually and also pay attention to the climatic conditions. In addition to recreating the native habitats of the various animals that you decide to include in your zoo, you will also have to keep temperature and humidity under control by placing generators capable of both lowering and raising the temperature and humidity inside the enclosure according to needs. .
The combination of all these factors will determine the welfare value of each individual beast and contribute to increasing its prestige, its cash value and the number of visitors willing to pay to see it. In addition, the increase in the prestige of each single element will reward you with safeguard credits that can be spent in the trading center - or animal market - to buy rare animals of a specific species. Each animal, if cared for correctly, will also be able to reproduce and create puppies and this is certainly one of the aspects of the game that gives more satisfaction. Over time you will surely become attached to some of them but, sooner or later, you will have to do the right thing and set them free bringing them back to their place of belonging.
To make the zoo work at its best you will also need hire staff. For example i attendants they will take care of keeping the enclosures clean and bringing food to the animals while they are meccanici it will be up to you to repair any damaged fences or machinery. THE veterinary then they will help you to keep the health of the various specimens under control and you can also assign them study activities on certain diseases to avoid the spread of epidemics within the zoo. In Planet Zoo there will also be the possibility to hire scientists, suitable for carrying out genetic research to improve the statistics and prestige of future animal generations. In short, in Planet Zoo there will be no time to get bored, on the contrary: with the passage of time the things to keep under control will be so many thanks also to a truly impressive amount of content. Inside the game there is also a section dedicated to each animal species - zoopedia - which you can consult at any time to learn important notions on the various specimens available.
Planet Zoo presents a very accurate graphics and the quality of the textures of the numerous animals makes them very similar to their real counterparts. Zooming in on the various specimens it is possible to admire every single detail especially, of course, at higher resolutions. The game environment has also been excellently recreated by generating, very often, very suggestive views and overall visuals. The various structures present and the various human characters that populate the zoo also present a high level of detail.
Same thing can be said about the sound effects, where the sounds of the various animals correspond exactly to the real ones. Finally, the background music is pleasant and never boring.
Planet Zoo is fun, educational and stimulates the creativity of each player. The build editor, although it can be a bit cumbersome at times, allows for a truly impressive level of customization. Taking care of the over 70 animal species in the game is engaging and rewarding also thanks to excellent general graphics and excellent sound effects. The game offers a very active community, and the possibility to buy or sell the rarest specimens online is also very fun and interesting. Frontier, on the whole, partially re-proposes the good things already seen in Planet Coaster but this time dedicating itself to the animal world with admirable care. The result is an excellent management software, rich in content and with a practically infinite longevity.
► Planet Zoo is a Simulation-Strategy game developed and published by Frontier Developments for PC, the video game was released on 05/11/2019
