planet zoo

There was a brief and special period, just after the launch of delightful menagerie management game Planet Zoo, during which the game’s simulated global economy went deeply and deliciously wrong. The theory was beautiful. In order to buy into breeding programmes for high-profile endangered species, players first had to prove their credentials with the husbandry of more mundane beasts. By trading healthy, happy animals with other player zoos, it was supposed, folks could work their way gradually towards the purchase of prestigious creatures like pandas, gorillas and ‘phants. Inevitably, however, players gamed the living crikey out of the market, and…

Planet Zoo is a deeply warm-hearted game. While it’s set up to give you as much freedom as possible in every aspect of your zoo’s design, it still steers you firmly towards being good to the animals which live there. Unlike Frontier’s other animal husbandry game, Jurassic World Evolution, where everyone knows the management layer is just a way of killing time until the inevitable monster deathmatches, Planet Zoo does absolutely nothing to signpost “nightmare animal supermax” as a valid playstyle. Personally, I think that’s a good decision. But as I already mentioned, it puts a genuinely phenomenal range of…