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.
New to Planet Zoo 2, almost all the types of buildings you can plop – outside of restrooms and quarantine facilities for sick animals – have fully-modeled interiors that you can enter in first-person and see guests and staff hanging out in. Restaurants start with a serving counter, but then allow you to add multiple sections of seating areas, including outdoor patios if you want, which can be easily linked to that counter to let guests and staff know they’re all part of the same facility. And from what I could tell, this simply works. Gift shops function the same way. Even staff break rooms can have custom seating and activities.
Meanwhile, the terrain editor remains powerful and easy to use, with a couple new tools. Water still requires making a reservoir and then setting a fixed elevation to snap to. You can change everything from the surface texture, to make it more choppy, to the cloudiness and tint. If you want to make the blood sea from Iron Lung, you’re more than welcome to. I still couldn’t figure out a way to make a river that actually looks like it’s flowing downwards from a higher elevation, though. The best I could manage is a flat channel with an illusion of directional flow, more like a canal.
Serious Fauna
Of course, the animals are why we’re really here. And they do look completely stunning, from much more realistic fur modeling to diverse and lifelike animations. It’s still a bit uncanny to see these nearly photoreal beasts next to Frontier’s cartoony human guests and staff, but at least the campaign advisors have been dialed back a bit in their goofiness. They’re upbeat and cheerful, but aren’t constantly making groan-worthy popsicle stick jokes like in the last game, which I appreciated.
The animals have quite detailed stats as well, so even if the economics aren’t a home run, it seems like starting a breeding program is going to have plenty of depth. Each individual has stats for Vitality, which represents their dominance in combat; Longevity, which can affect their max lifespan within a certain degree of realistic variation; Fertility, which is their chance to produce offspring; and Immunity, which represents their ability to fight off disease. These can all be passed on, along with some visual traits like a rarer dark coloration for leopards, and creating juveniles with the best possible traits will take lots of careful cross-breeding and several generations.
Aviaries and aquariums are also part of the base game now. In the case of aquariums, the max height of the water seems to be set by where you place the little staff airlock that divers use to access it for veterinary and cleaning tasks, though I wasn’t able to confirm this. It seems like you can dig them out just about as deep as you want below that, though. And glass tunnels can run through them with almost total freedom, allowing guests to feel completely immersed in the exhibit. Semiaquatic species like penguins will hang out on land and in the water when their enclosure includes both.
Aviaries are a little bit fiddly, but worked pretty well once I got the basic gist of them. You start by simply building a flat exhibit, then placing tall support poles at different intervals. Finally, you select the type of netting you’d like to put over the top to keep the flyers in, and it generates a custom roof shape based on the placement of the poles. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably need to tear this down and try a few times to get it looking nice. The exhibit will automatically compute if there’s enough area for the species inside to fly around freely, which is neat.
Dar-win or Lose
It wasn’t realistic to get a full picture of Planet Zoo 2 from the short time I had with it in this first hands-on, especially when it comes to the business tycoon side, but I’m pretty optimistic overall. I counted 49 species in the encyclopedia, from jellyfish to giraffes, from a variety of environments and biomes. And the ones I got to see in the flesh were marvelously rendered and a joy to watch, especially when I got to release them into the open environment of a nature reserve. Planet Zoo 2 will be open for business on October 13.
While you’re here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we’ve checked out recently!