![]() ![]() Rain slows my frame rate to a crawl? Wait it out. My habitat walls keep melting into dust after only a year or two? Grit my teeth. Franchise Mode kicks me to the main menu? Sigh. Oh, and Franchise Mode is perpetually online, which is fine except when Frontier’s servers boot me from my zoo for no reason. Running a habitat parallel to a path is a matter of eyeballing it and eventually saying “Well, close enough,” which is less than ideal. I also find it frustrating there’s no universal grid you can toggle on and off. The pathing system is still every bit as awkward as it was in Planet Coaster, especially when you want to do anything extravagant like tunnel under a river. Planet Zoo could use a few interface passes, as it takes far too many clicks to (for instance) figure out what continent and biome an animal is from, then filter the “Nature” tab so it only shows plants from said continent and biome, then place the plants, then double-check that you’ve placed enough foliage to satisfy the animal, and so forth. I’m likewise fond of giraffes and their affinity for people, the way they crane their necks up towards crowds on an elevated walkway.Īre there annoyances? Absolutely. I’ve yet to grow tired of coming across bears 50 feet up a tree trunk, looking out over the horizon. But other times it’s surprisingly endearing. It doesn’t always work out, and sometimes you find a wolf swimming in place forever or some such. Planet Zoo puts a lot of emphasis-as it should-on the animals and making them seem realistic. It’s a treat to sit back and watch this clockwork zoo operate as well. I’ve spent hours on a single enclosure, trying to establish better sightlines, sculpting rivers and hills so that the animals are herded towards the glass and the waiting guests, placing rocks and foliage to mask the zookeepers who help stagehand this elaborate drama. ![]() ![]() That’s the hook for me here, the interplay between designing a great exhibit for guests and a great habitat for the animals. Or in Planet Zoo, for people who want to lay out an ambitious grizzly bear pen complete with a mountain, a faux-cave, and a waterfall. It’s for people who want to place every trash can and every tree and every rock, who want to spend hours beautifying a reptile house or maybe just a toilet. Planet Zoo, like Planet Coaster before, is an incredible construction kit. Still, I’m having a great time sidestepping the issue by building a massive zoo with everything in it. The current implementation is bizarre, and undercuts what should be one of Planet Zoo’s best ideas. That sort of Haussmann-like renovation is par for the course in builders, but Franchise Mode seems designed precisely to avoid such situations. But because of the way research works in Franchise Mode, building one of those tightly-themed parks would require ripping down everything you constructed early on to get the zoo started, then building on the rubble. All of the Career Mode example zoos are compact and tightly themed, be it a panda rescue or a safari park or a Victorian Era throwback. That seems counter to Franchise Mode’s aims, as I get the feeling I’m supposed to have a multitude of unique installations around the world. It’s oddly restrictive, and deters me from starting new parks. Older and wiser, with more of an idea what’s coming, but you still need to spend hours and hours to reacquire the same tools you had access to before. Even if you’ve unlocked all the themes, all the habitat enrichments, everything in one park, when you move to the next you start from scratch. Money is handled on a per-park basis though, as is-and this is what I found most disappointing-research. That, and “Conservation Points,” a secondary currency that’s used to attain rare or endangered animals like pandas, elephants, and giraffes. Only your “Trade Center” is shared though, a 30-slot storage bank that houses animals you haven’t put into a park yet. Planet Zoo positions it like you’re a zoo tycoon, a global enterprise that manages parks on every continent. So I started over, and I’ll say this: I’m disappointed, insofar as the “Franchise” name is a bit misleading. ![]()
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