Let’s Build a Zoo offers a complex zoo management simulation that allows you to perfect every element of your park, from pens to the food right down to the animals’ DNA.
Lately, I’ve been thinking “What if I just switched jobs? What if I did something else for a while?” Whenever that thought is in my head, I often play management games where I can pretend to be employed somewhere else. So, I picked up Let’s Build a Zoo and thought “Who needs qualifications? Let’s just start our own zoo!” The game itself does what it says on the tin; you are running your own zoo with a bit of startup money. Animals are gained from purchases or trades, and eventually you can start creating your own genetically-mutated animals and breeding them. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
The tutorial does a great job of explaining what you need to do (to a point). I say this because things were going great at my zoo. Customers were coming in, I was getting paid, busses lined the streets full of people who wanted to come to my massive zoo that I spent loads of money on. I was on day 60, heavily invested in the life of my zoo. There was a notification that a little duck had died of old age a while back, and everyone who entered my zoo, days later, kept talking about it. I thought “That’s odd!” and continued. Soon, protesters were coming in, stating the food was off and that there were dead animals. I adjusted the food quality for all of the animals in the game, getting rid of filler and focusing on expensive fresh produce. The protesters stayed.
Then, I took a closer look at my zoo and a lot of the enclosures seemed to have these weird rocks covered in bugs. This is when I discovered that my zoo was absolutely loaded with dead animals, I had failed to notice a whole notification system in Let’s Build a Zoo that could show me exactly where problems were, and I was charging 22 dollars a ticket to look at enclosures with sick animals or rotting corpses. In a failed attempt to fix this, I purchased a bunch of crematoriums and hired a load of new staff, but it takes ages to get rid of each body and my zoo was packed with them. I soon restarted and had a whole new, and better-managed zoo, thanks to my experience in the previous save.
In Let’s Build a Zoo, the game does start you off slowly, giving you lots of tasks to plod along at. With that said, there is a lot of freedom as well. You can make evil decisions (for instance, doing animal testing) which can result in having a completely different zoo than someone who is aware of their carbon footprint and refuses to harm the animals. These sort of decisions change what you can end up unlocking in your massive research tree. However, there are some aspects that feel evil, like splicing animals together, that don’t cause any harm and are fine (game-wise). It’s an interesting concept, especially as you discover each and every different variety of an animal and then start cloning them.
Your animals can be bred to discover new varieties as well, and will also breed on their own (especially rabbits). You will need to decide if you want to get rid of your extra animals or if you want to donate them. Over time, you can even start releasing your animals to the wild and bring back extinct animals. You can edit so many things in this tycoon game as well: the materials in your various food places, the food your animals have, etc. Also, their enclosures have different stats depending on their water intake, amount of space, and the toys that are available in them. The contents also affect the animals’ behaviors. It’s very fun to watch all of your snakes jump on a trampoline or your horses sit on a box like a cat.
Let’s Build a Zoo is easily a game that you can sink hours and days into, crafting the perfect zoo while managing the various parts of it. Many decisions crop up from day to day, as well as weekly reports on how well you are doing and if you go into debt. My only real issue during my hours of play was that the game doesn’t have a way to tell you that you cannot complete a task as you have not researched the right thing, which would be really helpful as you often cannot see where various research findings are unless you unlock something directly next to it. Otherwise, it’s a really fun game that builds up bigger and bigger. As long as you notice the dead animals and, uh, dispose of them properly!
Let’s Build a Zoo is available now on the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and Steam.
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