With Planet Zoo, I feel like Frontier (maybe) got the balance right. Jurassic World Evolution skewed too far in the other direction in my opinion, heavy on management but very restrictive when it came to player creativity. Planet Coaster is primarily a game about theme park construction, light on the management aspect. It’s a mix of Frontier’s best ideas, really. Staff paths return from Frontier’s more fantastical Jurassic World Evolution, allowing you to maintain the zoo-as-theme-park illusion. There are some simple monorail-style rides you can put in for the braver guests. Want a bunch of logs for your chimpanzees to play on? You place those one at a time, and the animals will actually climb on them-a feature Frontier says took a year to get right. Want a pond for the animals to drink from? Or a sand pit? You build it, and each animal will prefer different terrain in their pens. It makes for a hell of a first impression though, and was certainly enough to sustain a 20-minute demo on its own. In my experience visual prowess always wears off sooner or later, the eye growing accustomed to this new baseline. I don’t know how long that feeling will last. “Very cat-like,” as Frontier’s Liesa Bauwens said. And the cheetahs? They lounged in the sun, refusing to do anything interesting. A few experimented with the “enrichment items” scattered around their enclosures, stripping meat off a hook or rubbing against a pole. Most of our demo-which is recreated by Frontier in the video above-was spent up close and at ground level, eye-to-eye with the animals as they went about their days. It makes for a builder you want to sit and watch, as much as play. Planet Zoo’s not photoreal by any means, but there’s clearly a lot of love and care put into every animal species, same as the work Frontier did on Planet Coaster recreating amusement park rides. During our demo Frontier talked up its fur shader, its eye shader, all the various technological tricks that make these animals look more realistic. Thus we get to see how far we’ve come, and we’ve come a long way. Setting that one aside though, Planet Zoo is the first proper Zoo Tycoon game (albeit without the name) since 2004.
Ironically it comes from Frontier, which also developed 2013’s ill-fated Zoo Tycoon-a console-centric iteration that stripped out or simplified most of what made the series great.
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