Planet Zoo 2 doesn’t actually start off in a zoo, it first takes you a wildlife reserve in the middle of Africa. Here herds of animals roam freely, having been released back into the wild, and with continuing efforts to ensure that their environments are fit for their continued lives.
It’s a feature that means Planet Zoo 2 is asking, what is the point of a zoo? Is it for toddlers and young children to gawk at wild animals kept in captivity? Is it for Matt Damon to find a new purpose for his and his family’s life? No, while exposing the general public to animals is certainly a major part of their work – and a key part of generating funding and support – the modern reason for zoos to exist is to further conservation efforts around the world, as mankind’s impact on the globe continues to reduce biodiversity and threaten species with extinction.
In the wildlife reserves, you can walk around on foot or hop into jeep and pootle around, taking a moment to glimpse animals in a native habitat. Being guided through this initial exploration by Foundation Chairman Erik Ashford, you track down hippos enjoying the water, elephants plodding around in a herd, and fast-moving zebra which you really do have to work to track down.
Later visits, as you actually get to release animals from your zoos into one of the reservations, put a little more emphasis on ensuring the environment is suitable. Just as with the zoo enclosures that you need to tailor to an animal’s wants and needs, you also need to tweak the wider environments, removing invasive plants, painting in a variety of taller trees and smattering of rocks to make a space that’s suitable for a new herd of giraffes.
It’s a nice reward for successfully building and growing your zoos and nurturing the life that is in your care.
After this little trip to the savannah, it’s time to dig into the core zoo management sim that remains in Planet Zoo 2. This does, a little unfortunately, feel like it’s railroading you through the tutorials, giving you no chance to stray off the beaten path or to really do your own thing.
It starts with a companion zoo to the African wildlife reserve, taking you step-by-step through navigating the zoo and selecting enclosures, building a new enclosure for some aardvarks, and how to get the right balance with environmental needs and enrichments. It would have been nice to sit with this for a little moment, but the game zips straight into the two key new additions to the game: aviaries and aquariums.
Truth be told, these aren’t terribly tricky to get the hang of, as an aviary mostly just needs some poles to support a net roof and prevent escapees. The aquariums are a bit more in depth, needing water pumps to deliver fresh, brackish or saltwater, which defines which fish and other sea creatures will survive there.
There is much greater leaning toward cohabitation within an aquarium, as many fish are introduced in shoals, able to happily coexist alongside other species. It’s then turtles, manatees, rays and other larger sea creatures that are homed individually.
I love the look of the aquariums and how that can shape a zoo that’s build around them. The second zoo takes us to the chillier Nordics, featuring paths for visitors that dip down into a central space, surrounded by open air aquariums with glass walls for everyone to view the underwater world through. One aquarium even has a nice tunnel running underneath it. All that exposure, though, can stress out some of the animals, and as I introduced a trio of turtles, I also had to put up signs to call for more respect and no banging on the windows.
As I wrapped up my run through the tutorials and hopped over to the sandbox, I started to feel more of the complexities and time that it takes to really perfect an enclosure and look after these animals. It’s easy to have some preconceived notions about what will work, and then find out that actually it needs more tweaking, or the types of trees aren’t quite right. There’s shortcuts to filtered selections through an animal’s pop up status window, and that’s so important when there’s such a vast array of trees, plants, enrichments, and decorative items for you to use. In turn, the fact that there’s so much of this stuff actually makes it a little tricky to just select an enclosure and not its mass of items – I found that clicking on the staff doorway worked best for this.
Once you do have things set up just right, it’s a delight to be able to zoom in and appreciate just how much more detailed all of the animals are. The animations and their decision making for actions still feels a bit separated out, as opposed to blending together with contiguous thoughts – though having said that, my cat will sometime race a million miles per hour through half a dozen different wants and desires, so maybe it’s wholly accurate?
There’s great promise here for a much broader suite of tailor made animations and ways for creatures to interact with their environments. Big cats will scratch up trees as well as enrichments, apes and monkeys can more fluidly climb and pathfind across elevated poles and branches, and of course both birds and fish will be able to navigate 3D spaces to interact with what they want. That was difficult to really grasp during our hands on, but it’s something I really appreciate. There were a few times where I took a moment just to zoom right in and watch a secretary bird, a turtle, a lion, and it’s a lovely way to switch to simply being a viewer of the game and its inhabitants as opposed to playing.
Planet Zoo 2, then, is lovely. I do wish I’d had a bit more time to just soak in its atmosphere, both in terms of the back-to-back nature of the tutorial and wanting to have more time to play, but the addition of aviaries and aquariums opens up brilliant new avenues to explore, and the overarching message about conservation is such an important one to represent and support in this day and age.
