This Is The Zoo Of My Dreams!

Visitors to Buddy’s Tropical Paradise are greeted by friendly staff who man the entrance, a broad vertical garden shaped like an arch that straddles the main path leading inside.

When they walk through the gate a new vista opens up before them: tiered tropical gardens, waterfalls, and wide boulevards lined with palm trees and flowers. They hear the rumble of big cats calling to each other in the distance and monkeys shrieking as they fling themselves from branch to branch.

A monorail carries passengers above, its tracks looping over animal enclosures and threading tunnels that emerge amid the terraced jungle, eateries and souvenir shops.

And straight ahead, the first exhibit: a sprawling habitat occupied by jaguars who are enjoying some yums and will probably have a nap in a few minutes.

Buddy’s Tropical Paradise doesn’t exist in the real world, of course. It’s my first attempt at fully functional, guest-attracting park in Planet Zoo, a simulator that allows you to do practically anything you can think of.

You can design your own habitats, enclosures, buildings and scenery. Fancy a monorail that laps the entire zoo? You can do that. Picturing a 1940s style Tarzan-themed jungle boat ride where visitors can see caiman, capuchin monkeys and jaguars up close? Start carving up the river, my friend!

As the zoo’s architect, you’re responsible for everything. You’ll need veterinary facilities, animal quarantine, keeper huts. You’ll need to staff your park with veterinarians, keepers, security officers, maintenance staff and mechanics.

And don’t forget the vendors to run the souvenir shops and man the food stalls, where your guests can grab hot dogs or cool off with slushies on a hot day.

A suitable home for your animals

Designing a habitat is about a lot more than reserving space for your animals. You’re tasked with picking the right barriers, mindful of which species can climb or leap great heights. A good habitat should reflect the animal’s home in the wild with appropriate flora, temperatures the species thrives in and a feeding system that mimics the way they’d naturally obtain food.

Then there’s enrichment. Trees for your monkeys to climb, ponds for your tigers to take a dip, bushes for your elephants to strip. Different species enjoy different toys and challenges. An ice block with meat in the middle would hit the spot for carnivores on a hot summer day, but your pandas will want bamboo.

Designing habitats and getting them just right is not only fun, it’s an intuitive way to learn about the needs of individual species and how they live.

The leopard learning incident

My first stab at building a leopard enclosure was a disaster. It looked pretty enough with its Hindu-inspired temple architecture and pond. There were plenty of scratching posts and trees that could withstand claws.

I installed a sprinkler to help the big cats cool off, designed a series of raised platforms for them to climb, and scattered enrichment items all over the habitat. The leopards had balls to bat around, boxes to sit in, rubbing pads, logs and rocks to climb, and plenty of cover and shade.

But when I had the leopards brought into the zoo, through quarantine and into their exhibit, I realized you can’t just design a home for animals from an aesthetic perspective. I’d used several plant and tree species that weren’t native to leopard habitats, the terrain was wrong and I hadn’t paid any mind to ambient temperature.

Making those mistakes was truly educational. When your animals aren’t happy in Planet Zoo, protesters show up, and it’s up to you to read the alerts about where you went wrong and how to remedy your mistakes. It’s an intuitive and fun way to learn about each species and the environments they thrive in.

The escaped jaguar

I’m still learning the ropes, although I do have a basic knowledge of the way the game is designed thanks to some time playing Frontier’s theme park building game, Planet Coaster. The first time I tried to build a jaguar enclosure, I forgot to wall off a viewing cave with protective glass, which my guests did not appreciate.

Even though jaguars don’t like to confront humans, a big cat is a big cat, and the game sent me urgent warnings as people ran for the exits. When I found the escaped jag, he was lounging not far from his enclosure, watching people freak out.

In real life it’d be a disaster, but I was able to revert to a previous save, make sure the viewing cave was sufficiently protected, and this time around I placed only two jaguars — a male and a female — in the large enclosure.

After a while, while I was tinkering  with an exhibit meant for capuchin monkeys, the game sent me an alert: the female jaguar was pregnant! She gave birth to two energetic, curious cubs who are currently having fun chasing each other around the enclosure and going for dips in their pond.

As in real life, the game has you source animals from an international pool, with information on breeding and genetics so you can contribute to conservation. When you adopt animals, their first stop is the veterinary facilities for examination, then quarantine. When they pass quarantine, you can have your staff release them into their enclosures.

It took me several hours to familiarize myself with the basics, design an entrance and a main boulevard for the guests, create some tiered gardens with eateries and shops, and get my jaguar and orangutan exhibits up and running.

My monorail currently runs out of track a quarter of the way through the park, and my river boat ride looks pretty cool, with dense jungle, towering trees and the ruins of Mayan temples not far from shore, but completing it will require appropriate barriers to keep the animals in as well as building out more scenery.

I’ve got my sights set on an elephant exhibit next. It will be necessarily huge, so it’s good to reserve the land early and plan smaller exhibits and facilities around it. I’d also like to put the elephants, lions, zebra, giraffes etc into one Africa-themed section of the park, while the tigers, giant pandas and snow monkeys will be housed in an Asia-themed section, with buildings that reflect the architectural styles of countries like Japan and China.

There are also aquatic exhibits, animals for your own reptile house and aviaries. Those enclosures are more complex than the relatively straightforward orangutan exhibit, for example, so I’ll have to spend some time figuring out what makes a good home for peacocks, sharks and komodo dragons.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to make one giant felid park, with snow leopards, pumas and cheetahs joining the tigers, lions, jaguars and others. Of course I did name it Buddy’s Tropical Paradise, so I may be forced down the all-cat road if Bud gets his say.

Planet Zoo is not a traditional video game. There are no winners or losers, and there’s no “end state” unless you intentionally include one.

It’s more relaxing and much slower-paced than your typical game, and it’s a great feeling when you’ve managed to take something from your imagination and perfect the design. When you want to check your progress or just admire your own work, you can set the camera to follow guests and watch as people stroll through your zoo, taking in the sights and sounds.

In that sense it’s more like a virtual model train set or living diorama. You can load up the game and tinker with your zoo when you’ve got a spare 15 minutes, or spend a few hours getting absorbed in the finer details of how to keep pangolin and red pandas happy.

Planet Zoo is appropriate for all ages, although its depth and complexity would probably be a lot for younger kids. In that case, it’s probably best to have an adult guide them so they understand the game is built on interlocking systems: exhibits need power and water, shops need staff, veterinary surgeries need veterinarians and so on.

It’ll have enormous appeal to kids who enjoy Lego, Minecraft and other building games, so if you’ve got a little builder in your life, this could be a good fit. But make no mistake, there’s a lot here for adults to enjoy too.

PITB verdict: Four out of five paws!

The only thing keeping Planet Zoo back from a five-paw rating is the DLC (downloadable content) scheme, which requires users to pay extra for certain “packs” containing extra animals, scenery pieces and scenarios. That’s a problem plaguing the larger video game industry, but if you wait for a sale, the normally $44.95 game can be had for as low as $11.24 on Steam. DLC is likewise discounted. Steam’s summer sale is a great opportunity to get games like this for a fraction of their normal price. This year’s summer sale is scheduled for June 27, though it’s possible Planet Zoo could be put on sale before then as well.