When the PS5 launched in November 2020, most early adopters spent their first weeks with the console endlessly agonizing over Demon’s Souls, strolling through a snow-covered New York City in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, or exploring the history of PlayStation in Astro’s Playroom. But not me. I was busy building my dream theme park in Planet Coaster: Console Edition.
To this day, I still regularly return to Planet Coaster just to play around with my meticulously designed parks or attempt one of the more difficult career mode levels. This criminally overlooked game never left my console’s hard drive, even more than three years after the PS5 debuted. It’s easily one of my favorite games of this console generation to date.
So naturally, when its spiritual sequel, Planet Zoo, was confirmed for a console release, via the aptly named Planet Zoo: Console Edition, I was excited. And now, after testing the game, I can confirm that it is just as charming and fascinating as its predecessor, and even manages to take things a step further.
Let’s build a zoo
If you’re not familiar with the “Planet” games, they are management simulations from Frontier Developments, a British studio that previously worked on the beloved Zoo Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon franchises. As the name suggests, in Planet Zoo, your job is to build and maintain an animal park to keep your guests and the animals themselves happy.
One of Planet Zoo’s biggest strengths is its variety of modes. Whatever type of experience you’re looking for, you’ll almost certainly find a mode that appeals to you. Career mode takes you through a series of pre-designed scenarios and tasks you with completing various objectives ranging from building a set number of animal habitats to getting your guests’ satisfaction score above a certain threshold; and believe me, Planet Zoo visitors can be pretty. Damn demanding.
At the other end of the scale is sandbox mode, which gives you a completely blank canvas, access to all game elements, and unlimited funds to build your ideal zoo without restrictions. Well, there is a restriction, the “zoo complexity meter,” that limits the number of objects you can place in a single zoo. But this is to keep performance constant and is quite generous with the amount you can place.
Planet Zoo also offers a challenge mode that is a hybrid of racing and sandbox. You still start with an empty plot of land, but you have a budget to work with and you must unlock new items by completing research tasks. Finally, there’s a franchise mode that lets you build zoos within a shared online economy, forcing you to work toward community goals to succeed and earn rewards.
I’m a very goal-oriented player, so to date I’ve spent almost all of my time in Planet Zoo in career mode. One improvement I immediately noticed compared to Planet Coaster is that you can now customize your difficulty level on each career mode level, which is an appreciated touch as it allowed me to make the intro stages more difficult as I would otherwise They’re a no-brainer if you’re familiar with the genre.
Perfectly designed for console
To be honest, management sims like Planet Zoo are usually best when played with a keyboard and mouse. Because your interactions with the game consist almost exclusively of tabulating through a vast network of menus and submenus, it’s easier when you can quickly click around the screen rather than having to flip through each option first.
But I have to give Frontier a lot of credit for the control scheme they created in Planet Coaster, which has been replicated (with some minor tweaks) in Planet Zoo. Navigating the game’s network of menus is a breeze even with a joystick, and smart decisions have been made to ensure the player’s experience is not hindered even when playing on a console controller. Additionally, Frontier avoids using the dreaded on-screen cursor, which is always cumbersome on a controller, so extra kudos.
Perhaps the area that suffers on the console is the construction. It’s definitely still possible to build intricate structures and symmetrical animal pens using a controller, but some of the precision that comes with using a mouse is lost in translation. Fortunately, Planet Zoo: Console Edition supports keyboard and mouse, so players have that option if they find that a controller just doesn’t get the job done.
Lions, tigers and bears…
Having played dozens of hours of Planet Coaster, I naturally feel a great deal of familiarity with Planet Zoo. The menus and user interface are almost identical, and the images are as well with many repurposed or repurposed aids. Additionally, the general gameplay is more or less the same, as you look to build an impressive looking park with all the amenities your guests could want; After all, happy guests spend more money!
Of course, the key difference in Planet Zoo is that instead of designing adrenaline-pumping roller coasters, you’re building delightful habitats for a whole herd of animals, from African savannah elephants to Asian small-clawed otters. To be honest, before playing Planet Zoo, I wondered if caring for animals would be a little less engaging than building roller coasters, but I was pleasantly surprised at how compelling I found keeping my creatures happy.
At Planet Coaster, once you’ve designed your perfect thrill ride, you open it to the public and move on to the next one, but at Planet Zoo, your animals need constant care. It is not enough to build them a nice habitat and then forget about them. If you neglect any of your animals for too long, they will become restless, sick, and eventually even die. Having to constantly check their needs has led me to create real bonds with these digital beasts and want to see them thrive.
During one of the first career mode levels, I accidentally placed two incompatible animals in the same habitat. This led to them colliding and one of them mauling the other to death (don’t worry, Planet Zoo is a family game, there was no blood involved). After discovering this, I was not only upset because my progress in the game was affected, but also because I felt like I had failed in my duty of care. That’s a feeling I never had during all my hours with Planet Coaster.
Goodbye free time
Even after just a few sessions with Planet Zoo, it’s already very clear to me that, like its predecessor, it will take up a lot of my free time in the coming weeks. Like Planet Coaster before it, I hope it becomes a permanent fixture on my PS5’s hard drive for years to come.
Frontier has once again done a phenomenal job of bringing a game that was initially clearly designed for PC to console with almost no hiccups. The controls are extremely intuitive and the level of content on offer is huge, and there’s even a Season Pass if you want to care for even more animals and additional career mode levels to enjoy. However, it costs a whopping $69, which is more than the base game!
Planet Zoo is a game where you can easily waste an almost terrifying amount of time. Last night, I sat down to “quickly” create a habitat for a pair of grizzly bears, and an hour later I was still perfecting the placement of each plant and making sure my guests had the best possible vantage point of the bears. .
Planet Zoo is a very special game and although it took a little longer than I expected to arrive on console (the game was originally released on PC in 2019), I’m delighted that it’s finally here and it’s as brilliant as I expected. Now I’m going to check on my zoo, it’s almost feeding time and the animals are hungry.
Planet Zoo is now available on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC.
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