It’s a gorgeous achievement that tackles issues related to wildlife endangerment and environmental education, and while it does an excellent job bringing animals and the management experience to life, at some times it feels almost a little too big for its britches. Planet Zoo offers four major gameplay modes: Career, Franchise, Challenge and Sandbox. Career mode starts off with a couple of tutorials that teach you basic construction and mechanics before following up with different scenarios and objectives you can progress through, and even though I didn’t find it especially fun to jump into already-built zoos, the mode is definitely necessary to help you wrap your head around how the game works. Though the tutorials walk you through many topics, I wouldn’t expect it to completely hold your hand through every crucial aspect of the game. Regardless of whether you play through the tutorials or not, the overwhelming majority of your first few days with Planet Zoo will be spent just figuring things out - and frankly, being downright confused for much of it. Planet Zoo requires an extreme level of micromanagement between guest, employee and animal happiness.
#PLANET ZOO PS4 GAME HOW TO#
There’s a deep level of consciousness that has to go into every thought and decision you make, and in hours and hours of play with the game, I never quite figured out how to balance the scales in all three directions at the same time. On one hand, my animals need feeding so I don’t run into another Hiroyuki disaster, so I need to place my zookeeper’s hut close to the exhibit so he/she doesn’t commute too far and waste precious time. I can’t place it too close, though, because then all my guests will be grumpy that their zoo experience is being ruined by seeing the staff facilities out in the open. This isn’t just one aspect of the game, it’s every aspect. Guests will always be pissed that they don’t have a good enough view of the animals, or that they can see staff buildings, or that the park as a whole doesn’t offer enough stimulation to them. Animals need space, high-quality food and toys for stimulation, and the correct male-to-female ratio in their enclosures. I can’t even begin to understand what my employees want, because sometimes just getting them to flat out do their job feels enough like pulling teeth, let alone investigating why they are happy or not. Planet Zoo has so many vastly different components to factor in and so much attention required in so many areas that getting the park to run smoothly on its own for even a second feels damn near impossible. Many times, you are not offered enough information to even grasp all of the mechanics, and other times certain snags in the game go unexplained. My panda bears, for example, kept continuously getting boxed up while in their enclosure, and I had to keep releasing them when the game deigned to notify me that my pandas were getting miserable because they had been boxed up for hours. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what was going wrong in their enclosure that they kept getting scooped up by the game and plopped back at the entrance of their pen. To this day, I am still perplexed by issues like this, and I’m not convinced whether it’s my own stupidity and oversight, or whether the lack of help offered in the game is the reason for my small failures.
Is it because I haven’t placed enough feeders in the enclosures to keep up with the appetites of my animals? Is it because my staff is getting stuck somewhere along the way, or because they are incompetent? Am I incompetent? I am still perplexed why I have a consistent stream of alerts that my animals are starving when I have more than enough staff and facilities to accommodate them. I’ve had my fair share of confusion in Planet Zoo, and I know that some of it must be my own human error, but I also feel that certain mechanics are overly complicated for no reason.
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