Planet Zoo 2 Review: Superstar Animals and Tiresome Micromanagement

The animals are as beautiful as ever, but they are trapped in a cage of micromanagement.

The animals are the superstars, but they don't quite make up for the frustrating, frustrating micromanagement.

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what is it Zoo based management sim with added fish, birds and nature reserves.

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia 2080 Super, 32GB RAM, Windows 10

Multiplayer: No, but you can share works.

The animals of Planet Zoo 2 are truly magnificent creatures. Even when games are hitting the chain-link fence of photorealism, it's always fun to watch Frontier's meticulously modeled creatures climb, crawl, swim and fly, or play with whatever enrichment toy you've tucked into their enclosure. There's a relaxing, almost therapeutic quality to it, like watching animals in a real zoo. Which is just as well, when I felt like I needed an emotional support animal in Planet Zoo 2.

Frontier Developments' management sims have never been the most stylish examples of the genre, but Planet Zoo 2 couldn't be more interesting if it involved teaching an octopus to play the violin. Doing anything in the game requires navigating a tangled web of menus, and while there are rewards, I found the experience more frustrating than enjoyable.

Planet Zoo 2 adds three main new features to the zoological construction game Frontier, namely fish, birds and nature. Resources While the aquatic animals and birds are added to Planet Zoo, it is the second feature that has the biggest impact on the game. Instead of serving as simple attractions for your guests, zoos now contribute to conservation efforts around the world, and you can release bred and rehabilitated animals into vast areas of untamed wilderness.

Perhaps "untamed" is the wrong word to use here. These reserves are in Planet Zoo 2's pro mode, where you manage a network of zoos while restoring numerous reserves from the Swedish tundra to the jungles of Sumatra. This involves physically sculpting ecosystems, filling them with the right types of plants and undergrowth to support the animals you release in their rotating landscapes.

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Reserves also take your attention away from the day-to-day management of your zoos, as the job mode is heavily built around releasing animals into these reserves. As such, you're constantly flipping in and out of menus as you wander between zoos to find the right animals and box them up, then drop into the save area to watch a scene where the camera pans around your freed animal — or at least the foliage it's usually hiding. Below.

I didn't find Planet Zoo 2's professional mode as interesting or imaginative as Planet Coaster 2's, which brought fun ideas like making Bifröst out of water slides to the table. While it's amazing to look at the zoos in the state of occupation, including the zoo that is dramatically located in the mountains of China, the management goals are trivial. Here is a zoo that owes money. This is a zoo with limited space. This is a zoo in Wales.

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Of course, one might argue that career mode isn't the main event of Frontier games, and the real fun is in sandbox mode (or franchise mode, if you want to trade animals online with pet friends). But here I find myself disagreeing more than ever with Frontier's creative tools.

Frontier has always relied on the power of its creative tools to compensate for their inherent inefficiencies. With Planet Coaster, you kind of expect a coaster to be difficult to build. But building a habitat in Planet Zoo is basically the same as drawing a circle, and I really feel like it should be easier than it is.

I wish Planet Zoo 2 allowed you to draw habitats by area - especially since area is one of the most important elements of a habitat. If you leave an animal in an enclosure that's too small, you'll have animal rights activists knocking down your gates before you can even say "PETA" (at least, that's what the game kept telling me was happening, but I didn't actually see anyone holding placards).

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However, area is not the only important element of an enclosure. oh no Aside from dropping animals into the jungle, most of your time in Planet Zoo 2 is spent with the many variables of any given habitat.

Is it the right temperature? Does it have the right type of land? Does it have the right plants? Are the water bodies connected to the filtration network? Are there an adequate number of animals in the habitat? Is there a suitable sex ratio of animals in the habitat? There's even an entire sub-menu devoted to the ultra-specific criteria that determine whether an animal is a "bloomer."

This should be where the fun of Planet Zoo 2 is to be found, but combining these dangerous problems with solutions that often require you to pick up small objects and drop them. Clipping through the scenery makes things overwhelming. Frontier tries to make all of this harder to set up. Many of these variables have quick buttons that take you to the appropriate sub-menu, and if you're not the creative type, there are plenty of pre-designed habitats you can cram into your zoo.

But these are like dressings on a wound that needs major surgery, a major overhaul after a decade of UI tweaks and additions. Even some solutions have their own problems. One pre-built enclosure I've used several times - Central Southeast Asia Climbing Habitat - has several non-native plants by default. Hence, every time I made one, I had to manually remove half of the plants, regardless of which animal was kept in it.

Amidst all this menu-driven meddling, the actual management of your zoo gets a little lost. Where housing for 20 parrots is likely to give you a cluster headache, keeping your finances in check is alarmingly simple. Get some shops and donation bins together, make sure you don't over-staff, adjust your ticket prices every so often, and the cash will come in faster than an armadillo on a ski slope.

I've spent numerous sessions ignoring my wider zoo while fiddling with habitats - including full-fledged animal escapes with guests heading for the exit - and still find myself hundreds in the dark.

It's a shame, because the animals at the center of all these micro-management are truly wonderful examples of world-class art, animation, and sound design. While I'm sure most players will be excited about the aquariums the sequel adds, it was the birds that caught my attention, from large predators like sea eagles and long-eared owls to tropical specimens like toucans and long-tailed parrots. Mechanically they're not that different - you basically have to put a big net over their habitat. But they make your zoo feel much more diverse.

There are also a lot of random animations and other neat design touches that I appreciate. For example, if you zoom in on water and then zoom out, it creates a splash effect on the camera itself, which is a wonderfully tactile flourish. It makes you feel connected to your zoo in a way Planet Zoo 2 rarely does.

This is what Planet Zoo 2 needs most. Nine fancy splash effects - ways for players to connect with their zoos that don't involve acting as an unpaid level designer. I want a creation that is more like play than work. I want zoo management to tell stories beyond "this habitat doesn't have enough soil." And god damn it, I want a big floating god hand that lets me put the little animals on my own. Releasing an adopted animal to its new home should be a moment of triumph. But often while playing Planet Zoo 2, this was simply a relief.

Rick has been fascinated by computer games since the age of seven, when he would sneak into his father's office for secret Doom sessions. He grew up on a diet of similarly inappropriate games, with favorites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was the gaming editor for Custom PC magazine and the associated website. But he's always kept one foot in free games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, The Guardian and, of course, PC Gamer. While he plays anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a special interest in first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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