Planet Zoo 2 review: Superstar animals and frustrating micromanagement

Planet Zoo 2's animals are truly majestic creations. Even at a time when games are gnawing at the chain-link fence of photorealism, watching Frontier's meticulously modelled critters clamber and prowl, swim and fly, or play with whatever enrichment toys you've dunked into their enclosures, is always a treat. Like watching animals in a real zoo, there's a soothing, almost therapeutic quality to it. Which is just as well, as there were times playing Planet Zoo 2 that I felt like I needed an emotional support animal.

Frontier Developments' management sims have never been the sleekest examples of the genre, but Planet Zoo 2 couldn't be fiddlier if it involved teaching an octopus to play the violin. Doing anything in this game requires navigating a tangled spider's web of menus, and while there are rewards to be had, I found the experience altogether more exhausting than enjoyable.

Reserving judgement

Planet Zoo 2 adds three major new features to Frontier's game of zoological construction, namely fish, birds, and nature reserves. While the aquatic and avian animals are welcome additions to Planet Zoo's menagerie, it's the latter feature that has the biggest impact on play. Rather than serving as simple attractions for your guests, zoos now contribute to conservation efforts around the globe, with you able to release reared and rehabilitated animals into vast swathes of untamed wilderness.

Perhaps "untamed" is the wrong word to use here. These reserves are central to Planet Zoo 2's career mode, where you manage a network of zoos while also restoring numerous reserves from the Swedish tundra to the jungles of Sumatra. This involves physically sculpting ecosystems, filling them with the right kinds of plants and undergrowth so they can support the animals you release into their rolling landscapes.

It's a noble idea, and what I admire most about Planet Zoo 2 is how seriously it takes its animals and the effort that goes into conservation (between the frequent and terrible dad jokes, in any case). But this doesn't change the fact that the reserves are not all that interesting to spend time in. It's basically a gamified terrain editor where you can wander around and take photographs.

Reserves also pull your attention away from the day-to-day management of your zoos, as the career mode is built heavily around releasing animals into these reserves. As such, you're constantly flitting in and out of menus as you hop between zoos to find the right animals and box them up, then hop to the reserve to watch a cutscene where the camera spins around your liberated animal—or at least, the foliage that it's usually hiding underneath.

I didn't find Planet Zoo 2's career mode to be as interesting or imaginative as that of Planet Coaster 2, which brought some fun ideas to the table like building a Bifröst out of waterslides. While the career mode's zoos are wonderful to look at, including one nestled dramatically in the mountains of China, the objectives are mundane management fare. Here's a zoo that's in debt. Here's a zoo with limited space. Here's a zoo that's in Wales.

Of course, one might argue that career mode is not the main event of Frontier's games, and the real fun is to be had in sandbox mode (or franchise mode, if you want to trade animals online with pet pals). But here I found myself rubbing up against Frontier's finicky creation tools more than I ever have before.

Tool academy

Frontier has always relied on the power of its creative tools to compensate for their inherent unwieldiness. With Planet Coaster, you kind of expect a rollercoaster to be difficult to make. But building a habitat in Planet Zoo essentially amounts to drawing a circle, and I really feel like this should be easier than it is.

I wish Planet Zoo 2 let you drag out habitats by area—especially since area is one of the most important elements of a habitat. If you release an animal into an enclosure that's too small, you'll have animal rights activists banging on your gates before you can say "PETA" (at least, that's what the game kept telling me was happening, but I never actually saw any peeps wielding placards).

Area isn't the only element of an enclosure that's important, though. Oh no. Outside of dropkicking animals into the woods, most of your time in Planet Zoo 2 will be spent faffing with the many, many variables of any given habitat.

Is it the right temperature? Does it have the right terrain type? Does it have the right plants? Are water bodies connected to the filtration network? Is there the right number of animals in the habitat? Is there the right sex ratio of animals in the habitat? There's even a whole submenu dedicated to hyper-specific criteria that determine whether an animal is 'thriving' or not.

This should be where the fun of Planet Zoo 2 is found, but combining these pernickety problems with solutions that often demand you select and plonk down tiny objects that just love to clip through the scenery makes the whole thing a chore. Frontier does try to make setting all this up less onerous. Many of these variables have quick buttons that will take you to the appropriate submenu, and if you're not the creative type there are a fair number of pre-designed habitats that you can plonk down in your zoo.

But these feel like dressings on a wound that needs major surgery, a fundamental overhaul after a decade of UI tweaks and additions. Even some of the solutions have problems of their own. One premade enclosure I used several times—the Medium Southeast Asian Climbing Habitat—comes with numerous non-native plants by default. Hence, every time I built one, I'd have to manually delete half the plants regardless of which animal was being housed.

Middling management

Amid all this menu-based meddling, the actual management of your zoos gets a bit lost. Where setting up enclosures for 20 parakeets is likely to give you a cluster headache, keeping your financials in check is disconcertingly simple. Plonk down some shops and donation bins, make sure you don't over-hire staff, adjust your ticket prices occasionally, and the cash will roll in faster than an armadillo hurtling down a ski slope.

I've spent numerous sessions practically ignoring my wider zoo while I fiddle around with habitats—including full blown animal escapes with guests stampeding for the exit—and still found myself a hundred grand in the black.

It's a shame, because the animals at the centre of all this micromanagement cruft truly are splendid—world class examples of art, animation and audio design. Although I'm sure most players will be excited by the aquariums the sequel adds, it was the birds that caught my attention, from big raptors like sea eagles and long-eared owls, to tropical specimens like toucans and the long-tailed parakeets. Mechanically they don't make much difference—basically you need to put a big net over their habitats. But they do make your zoos feel much more varied.

There are also lots of incidental animations and other neat design touches that I appreciate. For example, if you zoom the camera into water and then zoom back out, it triggers a splash effect on the camera itself, which is a fantastically tactile flourish. It makes you feel connected to your zoo in a way Planet Zoo 2 otherwise rarely does.

This is what Planet Zoo 2 needs more of. Not the fancy splash effects—ways of connecting players with their zoos that don't involve acting as an unpaid level designer. I want creation that feels like play rather than work. I want zoo management that tells stories beyond "This habitat does not have enough soil." And gosh darn it, I want a big floating god hand that lets me place the wee beasties myself. Releasing an adopted animal into its new home should be a moment of triumph. But more often than not while playing Planet Zoo 2, it was simply a relief.