Zoo Tycoon

I played a ton of Zoo Tycoon 1 & 2 when I was younger. It was fun to make your own zoo, filling it with dozens of different animals and attractions. I remember rebuilding my local zoo, or trying to at least. It was to tempting to just add some dinosaurs.Being a kid and being able to build a big-old-crazy zoo was just awesome. In that regard Zoo Tycoon for the Xbox 360 succeeds. But if your looking for a complex or semi deep management game, you'll probably be disappointed.

The first thing I noticed about this new Zoo Tycoon was how much more alive the zoo felt. You can actually walk around the park as your custom created zoo keeper, checking on animals and watching kids run around. It was really cool to just explore the zoo I was building from that perspective. But if you want to stay old school, you can always switch to the "Tycoon" camera as they call it. This is your classic eye in the sky view. I was surprised at how well the Tycoon camera controls felt, as I tend to hate playing these types of games on a console/controller.

In fact overall the controls in Zoo Tycoon are smart and polished. You are always a button press away from getting back to working on your zoo. Smart use of context sensitive menus and easy to read icons make this game a breeze to play on a console. I especially love the ping feature. Click the X button and you will be able to see a bunch of icons relating information like "Hunger" or "Social needs". This made managing my zoo quick and easy.

But as I was playing I began to notice how little there was to actually do. What was there was too easy to pose any real challenge. None of it was very fun either. Challenges pop up during the game that ask you to do things like "Take a photo of a bear" or "Adopt a lion". At first these were really great ways to keep me and my new zoo on the right path. But after 2 hours or so I was tired of being asked to "Take a photo" of something or "Fix this building". None of these challenges felt fun or interesting. At a certain point I just started ignoring them,none of the punishments are noticeable, and none of the rewards are any good.

For example, photos only have one criteria, to make sure the animal they want is in frame. That's it. After a while I started to test how strict the game was. I took dozens of photos of animals that were not zoomed in, behind a tree or another animal etc. It made the whole thing feel even less necessary. I also feel bad for the magazines who paid me cold hard Zoo Cash for those terrible pictures...

There's also not a lot to actually build. You have some snack shacks and pizza joints, but none of them allow you to change the menu. And you can choose to charge low, normal or high prices, but the game doesn't really tell you what those are. Whats a normal price for a pizza? Also, and this is just a little thing but I noticed it, you HAVE to charge something for restrooms. What?

As a fan of the Zoo Tycoon series I was also not digging the way you layout your zoo. Everything is pre-built, you don't lay paths or fences. You just plop things down and the game connects everything for you. I'll admit, it looks pretty slick and works well for the most part. But it also means every zoo you make ends up looking like a random spider web. I miss sharp right angles..

This is a game about making a zoo, so the animals are the stars. But, while they are nicely animated and look cute, there's not a lot to choose from. You have some bears and lions to choose from. Some snakes too. But no moose, or gorillas. No Wolves either.No alligators or kangaroos. No ducks or dolphins or, well the list of animals is slim compared to what vanilla Zoo Tycoon 2 had. And if your dream is to have antelope running through a field or some mongooses (mongeese?) you better get the Xbox One version. I understand that the extra animals are most likely due to the larger amounts of data that a Bluray can hold, but hopefully they will come out as free DLC?

You probably should get the Xbox One version regardless if it has more animals or not, because the Xbox 360 version has smaller areas to build zoos in and worse, runs like garbage. (Full disclosure I have not played the Xbox One version, so I can't honestly say if it runs better, but others seem to say it runs pretty smooth.) Seriously, it gets down right unplayable at times. Early on, when you only have a few animals and buildings it runs fine. But eventually the game just starts to chug. This is made worse when you're on foot or when you're taking a photo. I had towards the end of my zoo a moment where the game literally dropped to no more then 6 or 7 frames a second. On top of that the game looks kinda grungy and I had texture pop in like crazy. I played with the game installed, and with it uninstalled and noticed all these issues under both circumstances.

There are is another game mode which is all about fixing or improving pre-existing zoos. There are a bunch of these "Scenarios" you can do, but after a while I found myself bored.I was doing the same things over and over with the same animals. None of them seemed challenging or interesting. Though I only got about halfway through the scenarios, so they might get harder. I don't know, and with how bad this game runs, I really have no desire to play anymore to find out.

The lack of content, technical issues and how flat out easy it is makes Zoo Tycoon a huge disappointment. There's no real sim-management aspects to the game, and the few that remain lack depth and are hidden in menus. After about 14 hours I had done nearly everything. It took multiple zoos, due to how little one zoo on the Xbox 360 can hold, but I saw all the animals. They looked pretty good. But its a shame this game has no PC release. No mods, or fan patches to help it. Plus I would really rather play this on a keyboard and mouse.

As I drove around my zoo, the frame-rate dipped. I looked at the animals as their models and textures popped in. I drove by some kids who were clipping into a wall, as the game asked me to take another photo for the 100th time.So I turned my Xbox off. I got up and installed Zoo Tycoon 2 on my PC. And unless you have some younger kids who like animals, I recommend you do the same.