The park where I cultivated Spring loaded games‘ Let’s build a zoo currently houses two lions. One is actually the lost dog of someone we dressed up as a lion. The other is a dead animal robot that saves me money by not having to eat or drink. You could argue that my zoo isn’t actually home to lions, but sometimes I let the mafia dump human bodies into my pens instead of food so they don’t argue about it for long.
Let’s build a zoo, available for PC via Steam or the Epic Game Store, is an adorable tycoon-style zoo building game where players can build the wildlife park of their dreams. Build stables and fill them with rabbits, pigs, porcupines, snakes, and dozens of other eye-catching animals. Fill your park goers with pizza, lemonade, cotton candy, and slushies. Decorate your zoo with flowers, trees, and statues, or build a series of austere concrete enclosures on bare ground. It’s pretty easy to build zoo until the strange things happen.
In a moment you are going about your pet business, doing simple tasks like attracting a certain number of visitors or building a snack bar. Next, you are suddenly faced with a “critical decision” that will steer your morals in the direction of good or bad. You find a lost puppy. Do you spend some money hanging flyers and find the owner, or do you dress it up like a lion and display it? If a black market pet dealer shows up in your park, do you go shopping or inform the police?
Yes sir, Let’s build a zoo is the Mass effect of zoo management simulations that allow you to tread the Paragon or Renegade path as you build your sprawling animal empire. The path you choose will determine what upgrades you can unlock through research and development as your zoo progresses. Only a righteous zoo keeper can build a release center where animals are reintroduced into the wild to increase biodiversity. Likewise, only a really bad bastard can build a slaughterhouse that turns live animals into dead ones for use in evil factories.
In terms of moral systems, it is less “good versus evil” and more “evil versus normal”. The good, moral choices are obvious and make perfect sense, while the bad choices are so outrageous that they turn the game from a simulation to a farce in no time. If you’re looking for a relatively straightforward zoo builder with a healthy sense of humor, you’re good to go. If you want to fool around and make jokes about dead animals, you get angry.
The versatile management simulation does not detract from the dramatic gap between good and bad Let’s build a zoo‘Score. This is a tycoon game that works for both the casual gamer who wants to see the happy animals hop around their enclosures, as well as the more die-hard micromanagers who want to tweak every little aspect of their park for maximum efficiency. When your park goers are hungry, put a popcorn seller on the menu. If you’re thirsty, have a drinks machine ready. If they’re not buying enough soda, increase the amount of salt in the popcorn to make them drink more, but watch out for dehydration-induced vomit.
Sometimes I just want to drop some buildings and raise some pigs. Another time I want to carefully choose which employee will look after each individual animal enclosure. I love a game that allows me to do both and rewards me for my attention to detail without penalizing myself for just trying to cram as many capybaras as possible into a pen.
And although I don’t always appreciate it Let’s build a zooBecause the menu system is often too complex, I appreciate the amount of information I have on hand. I can click on an enclosure, click the coexistence option, and immediately see which animals feel threatened by their neighbors. I can see how much water is being used by each animal. The incredibly handy heatmaps in the top right corner of the screen give me instant access to information like light coverage, water saturation, park access, and decoration ratings.
Let’s build a zoo is a serious zoo construction simulation with tons of depth and complexity. It’s also a silly game that gives us access to a CRISPR DNA splicing machine so that we can join different animals together into thousands of different adorable genetic monstrosities. Combine a snake and a duck into a dukake, a duck with a snakehead. Or how about a piggy with a tiny gooseneck on a massive boar body?
Once you gain access to the CRISPR facility, piecing together these weird animal mixes becomes something of a metagame within the main game. You will need to breed different species of animals to decipher their genome, which makes them suitable for CRISPR splicing. Then the crazy science begins.
Like the good-bad-moral system, DNA splicing of animal hybrids is a layer of ridiculous fun on top of a potentially very serious zoo management simulation. There have been many cases during my time with Let’s build a zoo when I’ve gotten so involved with zoo-running trivia that things like the mob showing up to throw away a corpse or a new animal showing up in my CRISPR have completely surprised me.
In those moments of absurdity Let’s build a zoo really shines. It’s a charming little game with just the right amount of “what the hell?” To keep me busy for hours
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