This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

The year was 2022 and a little steam game was getting ported to consoles that looked like it would be a great game for my wife and potentially for one of my kids. The game was called “Let’s Build a Zoo” and its art style and promise of running a tiny zoo seemed like a slam dunk for someone who was having a hard time finding a game to grab her interest. And… it worked, I ordered the physical version for PS4 (because I am stuck in the past), and she played the hell out of it for a good two weeks. During those two weeks, I would watch her play and it seemed deep and interesting enough that I was going to have far more fun playing alongside her, so I ended up starting a zoo myself, despite not spinning this game on my randomizer. For that time, we had fun… She might play for an hour and then I would play for an hour. The game was inoffensive enough that the kids paid no attention to it when it was on TV, or were interested in our new animals. We would compare notes to see how far we were: “ I just got horses!” or spark creativity in each other as to how to layout our zoo, or better prepare for what is to come. However, I am getting ahead of myself.

Let’s Build a Zoo is a management simulation game. You play as an overseer to a zoo, and control all aspects of it including building habitats, hiring employees, researching new items, purchasing decisions, etc. You start off as a basic zoo with just rabbits and eventually trade, rescue, or purchase other animals to live in your zoo. Occasionally you will get little tasks to complete from investors or customers where you will have to build a certain item, obtain a certain animal, or make so much money in a given day. These tasks don’t have timers, meaning you can’t fail them, and just something to work towards while you are chipping away at the overall goal, which is simply to build the best zoo you can. At the end of each day your zoo closes, and you get a little stat sheet for how you did, and at the end of each week you get a weekly summary for your finances. If you can’t pay your bills, you automatically take out a loan and have to start paying it back.

There are literally a million things we could talk about all the systems in this game at play, but lets just focus on the animals. Every animal in this game has preferences to what habitat the pen should be (Grass, Sand, Jungle, etc.), how big the pen should be, what animals it sees as threats, the types of food it eats, how fast it ages, how long its life is, and how fast it reproduces. I am sure I am leaving something off in that list, but there was a lot of thought going into each animal. If you want a healthy animal that reproduces and lives a life to the maximum age, you will need to think about all this stuff. For instance rabbits, can have a relatively small pen, and can even share that pen with other calm animals like cows or capybaras. You could technically put rabbits in with your bears, but even if they survive they won’t have a high quality of life and reproduce or make your guests happy. When building a pen for these animals, you can’t just have a 4x4 square with an animal in it, because animals need water and enrichment (fun) otherwise your guests will be unhappy and thus your profits will start to sink. Happy animals mate and produce offspring, which can be a boon (people loving seeing babies) but also have negative effects (more space, more water, more food, more fun will be needed). You will be balancing not only one animal’s needs but every animal in your zoo.

Lets talk about breeding here, because it is perhaps the largest part of this game. Yes, you heard that correct. There are 9 variants for every animal, which means that if you want a full set of rabbits, you will have 18 rabbits in a pen (male and female of each variant). How do you get variants? Well through breeding, of course. When animals mate they have a percentage chance that their offspring will have a variant. Certain combinations of variants create other variants and so forth and so on. Eventually you will open up a nursery, where you can see the percentages laid out in front of you, as well as what variants will be produced. Variants are pivotal in this game, because most of your animals you will get by trading with other zoos. Other zoos don’t usually want the basic animal in order to trade with you, so you might need (for instance) the 3^rd variant of a rabbit in order to get a pig. Then the 4^th variant of a pig to get horses, etc. etc. While you can control a lot as the overseer of the zoo, you can’t control the animals in the pen, so while you are bound to get a couple variants that just appear from random breeding in pens, the majority of your new variants will come from very selective breeding in the nurseries. My advice, is to build at least 3-5 nurseries as soon as you are able in order to help speed up this process. Of course as animals age, they no longer become fertile, or they die out and depending on what animal you need you might need to re-start breeding to get earlier variants, or use a special building called the CRISPR in order to help fill in the gaps.

The CRISPR is a special building that allows you to create any animal that you have unlocked (they call it cloning, but you might not even have the animal in your zoo anymore). It costs a little bit of money and will take a few in-game days, but if you need a specific animal that you have unlocked you can just create one out of thin air, without breeding. Now this is great, but you can’t pick its gender as that is randomly assigned, so if you are looking for a female or male version of Variant 3, it might take you a couple swings on the CRISPR to get the desired result. The other aspect of the CRISPR is to create hybrid animals by mixing the genes of any two animals that you have at least unlocked half of the available variants for. It’s a fun idea, and fun to mess around with, but your hybrid animal can not reproduce and is not needed for any trades with other zoos, so I found that it wasn’t usually worth it to create hybrid animals towards progression.

Want to make your nurseries and CRISPR more efficient and better, let me welcome you to this insane research tree. Early in the game you will be able to build a research hub and hire a researcher. Once that is done, you will slowly start accumulating research points which can then be allocated into this tree to unlock all sorts of things. Here is the catch, you start in the middle of this tree and research out, but you can only see what you can research, right next to what you have already unlocked. However, the tree is not organized in any meaningful way. One direction is not all the cosmetics and another direction is all the buildings, or anything of the sort. Something you really want and need, might be hiding just around the bend, but you won’t know until you pour points into new trash cans, or be able to change the ground your characters walk on. Now everything you upgrade has a purpose, and even when you feel like you are wasting points, it does contribute to a bigger picture, so for instance spend your research points on 3 bathroom packs, and your bathrooms might be able to hold more people now, or people relieve themselves faster. That doesn’t alleviate how frustrating it can be, if you are looking for something in particular. Some task might ask you to build a burger shop, but you have to find it and research it first… well that might be anywhere between the next thing you research or the 50^th thing you research based on the direction you go. A perfect example is that when I was playing alongside my wife, I was able to find a farm and start planting crops to save money from buying all the animal food, but she went in a different direction and never uncovered farms until much later. It would be one thing, to make that choice if you can see everything in front of you… its another thing when you are blindly picking a direction and hoping the next uncovered tile will be something you need. It’s hard to get excited about wasting research points on new flowers for your park, when you really need to find a new habitat to house some animals.

I will just get this out of the way, I didn’t “beat” this game like I would beat other games. I never rolled credits, and so perhaps there is a final task, or a final animal that you have to get before the game says “you win,” but I just can’t play anymore of this game. That sounds damning, and maybe it is, but this game is more of a grind than any JRPG I have ever played. I can appreciate how much thought went into all the systems in place, and for a good month I was invested in playing this game a little every week, but eventually you are going to get to the following point in the game. You will either need to wait to get a special variant to trade with a zoo, wait to get enough research points to spend on something you need, or wait to make an insane amount of money so you can buy more land and you just sit with the game at full-speed waiting to get what you need to progress. When you need a certain variant, and it only has a 20-30% chance of being born, there is nothing enjoyable about flying through days waiting for animals to become pregnant, have their kid, nurse their kid, and then potentially try again if you didn’t get the variant you need. I know you can be working on other stuff at the same time and usually I was, but at some point you are just going to be skipping days waiting for a dice roll to go in your favor. Initially I thought, that I would play and try to get at least one of every animal, before I called it quits… but I am finishing the game with probably 45ish animals out of 62. My loop now involved waiting to make upwards of 100,000 so I could buy a single new land plot, just so I can expand the size of some of my current pens, waiting to get a certain variant, and researching in random directions to hopefully find something useful that isn’t new benches or lake decorations. My park is successful and makes 20k a day, I spend about 15k a week on animal food.. I have high ratings in all the things that matter, but I’m bored of sitting through this game. I can play for an hour or two and make close to no progress in getting the remaining 17 animals. Maybe I didn’t fulfill the brief by running credits, but this game would only suffer more if I have to spend another 20 hours of my gaming time fast forwarding to get the last few animals.

Hey did I mention this game has a morality system. Yup on top of all the other systems, your zoo has a morality system and that impacts what buildings you can get. In true video game fashion, toeing the line between morality gets you nothing good, so you either have to go full saint or full devil to get the best benefits. If you are good, you unlock greener energy items that will save you money (recycling instead of just trash, wind power to cut energy costs, etc.). When you are evil, you get to invest in buildings that make real snakeskin wallets, convert some of your zoo pigs into bacon, or siphoning energy from nearby businesses and houses. Some events pop up from time to time that will also allow you to make moral choices. The mob might pay you to dump a body in the pig pen, so that the pigs eat and destroy any evidence, or to paint a dog to look like a lion to trick customers. Some choices will net you money or animals (for instance choosing to take in animals from a fire will grant you monkeys), but ultimately it is about that morality scale, because certain research items can’t be built until you get to a certain number. Other than those weird new buildings, I didn’t see a need for the scale, customer’s don’t really complain if you are a good zoo or an evil zoo, other zoos don’t stop doing business with you, etc.. Even after establishing what zoo you are, I still have people trying to sell me bootleg animals, or hide bodies for them, regardless of what my current morality was, so it doesn’t matter outside of putting another obstacle into the game.

Being the non-villain that I am, I went the high ground route and was able to basically make my zoo fairly self-sufficient. I generate more energy then I use, so I don’t have energy bills, I grow plants and use that to feed animals that rely on plants, and have converted all my trash cans to recycling bins to cut my trash pickup cost. The big reward you get is a building that allows you to re-introduce animals into the wild in order to help save their dwindling populations. At any time you can donate animals and it removes them from your zoo and you get more morality points. This can be done if you have elderly animals that can’t reproduce (better to give them away then have them die on property), or if you have a pen that is overflowing with animals and you need to make some room. I can’t tell you how much time I spend just donating animals, because animals are constantly making babies. You won’t need 30 animals of the same variant, but since it’s a dice game, you might get that many sitting in a pen, so you donate the rest and move on, until you have more to donate because the flamingos just had 3 kids and now their pen is too small. You can actually make a pen stop producing kids, which will buy you some sanity, but that comes at the cost of potentially getting new variants, and keeping a cycle of younger animals in the mix to replace the ones that get too old. Quick aside on that, my wife was sick of dealing with her Geese having kids, so she removed their ability to reproduce, but then forgot that setting and when she remembered most of her geese were too old to reproduce and she had to start pretty much back at square 1 with those animals. My advice is sadly to never stop animals from reproducing and instead to waste precious moments of every day combing through the animals you have and just getting rid of the oldest animals of each variant. (yes, there is a research you can find where someone does this for you, but they only remove animals based on age based on the size of your pen… so if you want to make sure you keep certain variants around, or know that you need to expand a pen, they become useless).

I am positive that I am missing something about this game, like we didn’t even talk about building the actual park. Balancing making paths, bathrooms, subways, and food stalls for your customers against making bigger pens for the animals, against making the park look beautiful by adding decorations throughout the whole thing. I would say that for me personally, this game is probably too much like running a real zoo. I mean, I know this game is far easier than running a zoo, but there are so many things to keep track of and manage just to make your life slightly easier. (Did you know your employees have stats too, and level up…. Because why the hell not add more into the hopper). When I come to simulation games like this, I only want 2/3^rd of the real-life experience. Let me build the pens and get the animals, but I don’t want to have to worry about their diet, or their breeding habits. Let me place buildings and make a really cool looking park, but I don’t want to have to worry about setting the nutrition for the hot dogs I’m selling or the cost of a soda in a vending machine (things you can do). I certainly never want to just sit in place for long periods of time waiting around for a dice roll to go in my favor. I don’t mind the research tree, or unlocking animals in a branching path, but eventually I am going to tire of this treadmill.

I think of similar games and how they handle keeping you moving so you don’t get bored in the same fashion. Planet Coaster has you hitting certain criteria at parks and then encouraging you to go somewhere else and get a change of scenery. Two point campus has different schools for you to go between so you are working towards different goals in new environments. SimGolf had you create multiple different golf courses and rollercoaster tycoon had 21 different scenarios as well. Sure all these games had sandbox mode, or you could sit in one location and perfect it, if that was your desire, but Let’s Build a Zoo makes you do that. Yes, there is DLC that opens up a dinosaur park… and yes there is a sandbox mode that allows you a little freedom from the grind of getting animals in certain order, but ultimately your “main” mode is still just sandbox mode. This game would have benefited from giving you certain scenarios to keep it moving. Build a successful zoo with only the first 4 starter animals, or convert this garbage land into a thriving zoo, or make a profitable zoo with no animals and only shops… I don’t know, just throwing out some scenarios that would break up the mundane. I’ve played my zoo forever, and my only option is to start a new zoo that looks the exact same, in the same locale, with no animals…. Or continue my one zoo.

Now this game is certainly someone’s cup of tea, there are over 550 animals to collect (62 animals x 9 variants, not including hybrids or dinosaurs for the DLC), lots to manage, and plenty of hours to be had in terms of finishing the game properly. I did enjoy my time with it for the first 10-15 hours, everything seemed new and managing the first few pens you create isn’t that taxing, but when you are trying to make sure 45 different animals are happy and healthy and enjoying life enough to keep making variants, just to get to animal 46 and so on… that fun wears thin. To give you just a general idea, to get all the achievements in this game is around 80 hours (with some people having over 100-120 hours on record). Now some of those are building two zoos (one good, one evil).. but that also includes getting all the animals and all the variants. I also think that hour count is head down, doing everything in your power to get achievements and move on, my playtime with the game was probably close to 40 hours and I’m certainly less than halfway with all the achievements/trophies.

So perhaps this is the first game I didn’t technically finish, but I don’t think there is a finish for this game. Sure we could argue getting every animal is beating the game, or buying every plot of land, researching everything that can be researched… but those seem like completionist goals to me, which is far removed from just beating a game. I think this game in particular, the end is when you have decided you have done enough. I built a profitable zoo, I have over 300 animals in the zoo, and customers line up every day willing to spend $50 a ticket to get inside. That sounds like a better zoo then the 3 actual zoos that I live near (within an hour drive)…. So I am going to take this as a win and a finish.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I don't know.. This game is alright and like most games in it's genre can be incredibly deep for people who want to dive right in. Sadly I think the experience gets stale and the grind is far too long in this game for it to be something incredible enjoyable for everyone. I stopped before I got Lions or Tigers, and people who love animals or love the idea of running a zoo are going to have to wade through long hours where your best animal is a snake before they can get some good stuff. I understand that this game takes a "walk don't run" approach and you have to start somewhere, but having a zoo game where a lot of the fun animals are in the back half or back quarter of the game seems like bad design. I am ranking this as The 94th Greatest Game of All Time. Its sits between "Hand of Fate" (93rd) and "Phantom Doctrine" (95th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening