Let's Build a Zoo Reviews

This is a really fun interesting game, that manages to merge a few different elements of games together to make something a bit new. At it's heart this is a management game that lets you run a zoo and lets your creativity loose as you can design and build it as you go along. It also let's you trade/sell and breed your own animals adding extra levels of fun to the the game. What I worry about is it all becoming a bit repetitive as you have to micromanage all aspects of the zoo. I have spent over 40 hours playing this game and I will say at the moment I have not got bored of it even if some elements have become a little tedious. Those are elements that you regularly have to do or check, that early on make sense that you would have to, but the bigger your zoo get's it would be good to be able to automate some elements to take the burden off yourself. There is plenty to do and see in the game and I do enjoy watching the visitors and their reactions and the little Easter eggs the developers have hidden in there for us all. Well worth the £6-7 I spent on this in the sale.

I enjoyed this game obsessively for a while but am kind of disappointed that I hit performance issues before unlocking it all. I had plans. The game keeps you very, very busy at the beginning and as your staff train up (and you replace the inevitable poor work ethic ones with motivated staff) it starts to self-manage some of the tedious parts. There are slower stretches as your system becomes self-sustaining while you wait for the right animal to be born in your breeding system to unlock new ones in your zoo. Eventually, though, it just all got too complex to run. I'm not sorry for the time I put into it, it was fun, and on the basis that 76 hours is really good value for what I paid I do recommend this. I would recommend it very enthusiastically if i had been able to continue through to the "everything unlocked phase."

Cute, fun game that really scratches my Zoo Tycoon nostalgia itch. Easy to get lost in playing for hours My biggest complaint it that the game only saves at the end of the in-game day, making it annoying when something comes up and you have to step away from the game, you have to choose between losing your progress or waiting for the game to save before you get up and go. Which is deeply annoying

Its a good game. You can look after animals and hire zoo keepers to feed them. The cleaning of pens is not always up to standard as janitors can lack in it no matter how many you have. I love decorating my own zoo and bringing in animals from giving another animal so I can expand. I personally would never want to do a evil play through but thats up to you. Just make sure not to get rid of an animal you need for trading as a I was stuck for a bit on not being able to get new animals because I got rid of the goose breed and then had to get goose back from rescue and wait until I had the right breed to give to the trader to get the animals I needed. Apart from some of the things this game lacks on cleaning animal pens and that you can get stuck, its relaxing to play and doesn't require much effort once you understand the feeding system and assigning zoo keepers to pens to feed the animals. There is a lot of different ways you can have your zoo.

Not quite an idle game but quickly turns into one after enough hours and progression. Fun at first and quickly gets old. I only continued for achievements but I would not recommend this game unless you buy it super on sale. Not worth full price but maybe less than half.

A fun cute and quirky little game, I just wish it was still being updated and supported. The game is "complete" and moved on from which yeah, that's how games used to be, but nowdays even if its paid DLC it would be nice to see further updates, especially to address some of the concerns with the game. Overall it's a really fun game, but old school in the sense that it's unforgiving and doesn't really hold your hand a lot. You have to take a lot of manual control because the automatic AI is horrible and it will just abandon pens of your animals and they will be dying from no food when you have more workers than you even have places. I love the idea of Dinosaurs and Water creatures, but it's a shame and cop out that these are essentially separate games. They should be integrated into the base game and be able to have a true Zoo and Aquarium in one. The game is cute and cozy and funny, but sort of stressful. And the management gets to be a bit too much to say its relaxing. The graphics, the music, and funny little quips and events that come up like trying to dress up a lost dog as a lion are humorous and entertaining but its hard to know what the impact of these things are some times.

The game looks cute, but it is somewhat overwhelming with the amount of task that continuously pop up. I wanted to keep building enclosures, but I kept having issues with the janitors not cleaning their designated zones. Also, animals were breeding non stop and stressing the others out. On top of it, theirs new task that constantly pop up, research points, hiring new people and the newspaper every time you complete something. Its fun, addictive, but a little annoying.

Very cute and simple game. Great for if you enjoy management and zoo building games but don't have tons of time or energy to dedicate to heavier games like Planet Zoo. Not necessarily a tedious game to play and overall easy to "grind" to a sandbox-like experience if you have prior experience playing management games. While overall the game is enjoyable, there are a few negatives including an actual sandbox mode and the DLC. The DLC is, in my opinion, a difference in preferences with the majority of the player base wishing that the DLC was merged with the main campaign. Instead, to access DLC you have to save up in-game currency and purchase separate parks within that save file that you can then travel to and play on. Personally, I don't always like when my "normal" zoos have extinct animals mixed in with the regulars, but I would like to at least be able to make the choice. The DLC is also accessible via the sandbox mode, however, there is no main menu option for a sandbox mode save file, and you either have to save up in-game currency similar to the DLC parks, or go and look up a guide provided by the devs to access it with cheats. Despite having the DLC parks as an option, the game can end up feeling repetitive because of the forced campaign run every time you start a new save. You will always have a "farm-esque" start and you will always have to follow the predetermined animal unlocks to get further into the game. After reaching a certain amount of in-game days played the game does offer more freedom in what animals you are offered, but it more often than not feels like "Lets Build a Farm" rather than an actual zoo. While I find it disappointing that the devs have more or less abandoned development on this within the past 2 years and I wish they would provide patches for specifically a standalone sandbox mode or maybe adjusting the cohab rules, I feel the game is good for the price it's being offered at, and even better when it and its DLC are on sale.

This games ui and managment system needs a huge overhall. the base of the game is solid, the core concept and all the assets in the game are great, but the bigger the zoo becomes the harder it is to actually keep track of whats going on. If you arnt paying maticlous attention, you will quickly end up with starving animals that are bored and live in overcrowded exhibits as you have to manually check on food reserves, the breeding and the enrichment in the enclosures. managing staff is next to impossible due to the inability to order the list of staff based on factors such as experiance or job satifaction, and there is no way to check on your full list of financial outgoings untill the end of the week, when a huge sum of money leaves your bank. there is abosutely zero automation in the early/mid game. the upgrades system is not a tree, but rather a grid where unlocking one item lets you reviel the items directly next to it to give you a selection to unlock, with a few points of intrest across the grid to encouge research and progression. the morality system is something that i, persoanlly, am neureral to. i found myself more naturally enclined to pick the "good" options. in future play thoughs i may chose the "evil" ones. The animal breeding was also soemthing i found myself feeling neutral towards, with very little intrest in it outside of the progression it allowed with animla trading. The genetic engeneiring, however, i found to be tedoious. if there is an option to say "no" to it , its not very prevolant, leaving me with animals i ended up selling or sticking in a penn together and ignoring. I did really like the fact that you could set the animals diets and farm/produce. idea is solid, but the execution is very mid.

In theory it's a cute, relaxing zoo simulator. But in practice it's a tiring game of tedious micromanagement. You continuously have to move animals around between pens, add extra decorations, decide whether individual animals can breed or not, etc. There are almost no quality of life features, and your keepers can't really keep up with the job, so you're just stuck hiring a keeper per pen and manually assigning, moving things, etc etc. The animals' needs system is really basic, so the only real effort in meeting it is in actually setting the options. The game has quite a bit going for it in terms of art, systems, decorations, progression. It's just a shame that the core loop is clicking through 50000 buttons. I also think that the input for the game really let it down. Alerts keep popping up but don't take you to the relevant action, and switching to the right build menu takes quite a bit of clicking around. I was playing on the Steam Deck and tried creating a fully custom control scheme to help with menu switching, but some of the controller-specific radial menus disappear with mouse and keyboard input. It's a game I tried to like, but unfortunately it just felt like I was battling it to achieve relatively simple things. And the bigger my zoo grew, the more tiresome it became to add another decoration into each pen, hire more staff, etc. Because the game doesn't really offer ways to do things at scale, and all your staff need to be micromanaged, it ends up getting more and more bogged down as you play.