Some games and genres make creating sequels easy, and some made it hard. For management sims, the typical build up of expansions in the years after release can create a development minefield of expectations from fans. With Planet Zoo 2, at least, there are some major requests and wishes from fans to fulfil. Namely the additions of sea creatures and flying creatures to what your zoo can be a home to, but this game will go further in other ways as well.
Arriving seven years after the original, Frontier are able to make leaps ahead in terms of the underlying game engine, which lends itself to some truly stunning new visuals. This is a new version of Frontier’s own Cobra engine, that goes beyond just enabling higher quality assets for foliage, rocks and the general terrain, but also brings a new global illumination lighting system, proper ambient occlusion and more to the table. There’s still a slightly odd juxtaposition of the cartoony human guests and the realistic environments and now increasingly realistic animals, but it works.
Let’s start with a dip below the water surface, whether it’s crocodiles needing a mixed habitat, able to move from land to water and creating proper physics-based waves, or with the new aquariums with delightful crepuscular rays cast through the water. These are a million miles away from just placing water tanks in a building, and can be sculpted habitats filled with dozen of different types of sea creatures, with side-on viewing windows for guests who, perhaps, pass through adjacent cave systems to witness the majesty. Staff, meanwhile, will have to don wet suits with goofy fishbowl-style headgear, passing in and out of aquariums to clean, perform maintenance and all their other tasks.
There’s two types of sea creature, with ‘hero animals’ like turtles and the derpy looking sunfish, or with the various shoals of smaller fish. The hero creatures have the full welfare requirements, while shoals are dealt with as a group, and all will have their natural desires for depth, creating a layered visual experience. There’s dynamic pathing through the environments – you could created underwater arches and tunnels for fish to pass through, for example – and the brand new creature animation rigging enabled the very different motions that are needed for swimming for the different species.
In that regard, there’s a lot of crossover with birds and flying creatures. Again, Frontier had to handle a completely different style of motion with hopping and flying, full 3D pathing as bird fly between trees, branches and other perching spots, and the task of capturing the look of our fine and feathered friends. Another key aspect is their aviary habitats, because birds would just fly away if they could. Aviaries have roofs that are dynamically generated for you based on the boundary fences and the supporting poles that you place, with various angles and heights. The roof is then automatically generated and adjusted on-the-fly as you make tweaks and changes, whether it’s a mesh (for which you can control the tension and sag), glass or other materials.
It’s not just the new types of creature that have been lavished with love and attention, and Frontier also showed off how they’ve improved their ground game. You can construct large wooden climbing frame structures for monkeys and apes – the Western Chimpanzee in this demo – and beyond great looking fur and more detailed faces, the new animation rigging allows for much better behaviours. There’s better climbing animations and transitions from walking to climbing, and creatures will figure out for themselves if they would rather jump across a corner of the frame instead of walking all along. More ambient behaviours mean they can hang or sleep while dangling limbs off a beam, so this goes beyond simple navigation.
Tigers are another great example of the improved fur shaders, and Frontier can now layer animations together on top of basic movements, so you can read an animal’s demeanour – this particular tiger looked generally lethargic and unhappy, needing water because she was thirsty.
Adding a pool of water was a one-click action for a depression in the terrain, and after a little drink, the tiger was immediately more active, moving a bit quicker and happily starting to rub on the scenery and scratch on a tree. That’s right, scratching and similar happy animal behaviours are no longer restricted to the enrichment items that you place, and they will be able to use trees and other appropriate elements as well.
It’s a pretty comprehensive improvement for the animals, and it gets better for the humans as well. There’s more detail and business to all the staff areas, so you can see people at work, and open plaza areas are now featured, similar to Planet Coaster 2. The Workshop is also now integrated into the building and item browser, so players will be able to draw upon curated and general player creations, quickly grabbing them and dropping them into your own world – great for someone who just wants something that look nice but doesn’t have the desire to dig into the deeper creation tools themselves. The possibilities, though, are delightful, a gift shop with multiple angles roofs, full sized windows, doors or not, and plenty more fine details.
But this isn’t just about your zoo, or even your family of zoos. Planet Zoo 2 is leaning in on the conservationist message of the first game even further, presenting wildlife reserves on the world map, allowing you to invest in and restore these wide open regions and release animals back into the wild to live out their lives. These aren’t structured like zoos, so there’s no cut off habitats, it’s just an open region with some observation spots for staff, allowing herds of giraffes and elephants to roam freely.
It’s a delightful meta-layer to Planet Zoo 2 that shows that Frontier really cares about this angle. It’s all well and good tweaking habitats and watching happiness stats and meters within your zoo, attracting guests to see and appreciate the breadth of what the natural world has to offer, but zoos are about far more than entertainment, and it’s great to see that featured within this game.
