Planet Zoo

[54]

[Mike]

Fuck off.

 

/RTG

 

How much?

[Dokko]

Yeah could sink days in to that but you just know they’ll hold off loads on animals as dlc to milk the cow as much as they can.

[O Neill]

Beta for this has been out a few weeks for those that bought in.

 

As expected it is effectively a better version of Jurassic World. Swap the dinosaurs out for zoo animals and take the licensing handcuffs off which restricted the creative side of the game and you arrive somewhere close to Planet Zoo.

 

The first level, seen in most of the YouTube preview videos acts as a fairly brief tutorial. Pre-built zoo, add a few new animals, fix a few issues, learn your way around the (very detailed looking) menu system etc.

 

Much like Planet Coaster I can already see that a lot of the beauty in the game will rely on being able to sink time into building and customising. There should be a huge draw here for people who want to get right down into the little details of how each enclosure looks etc. There's a lot more landscaping to be done here than Planet Coaster as adding in water, trees and shaping enclosures is important to the inhabitants. It'll be interesting to see how well they manage to strike a balance between pick-up-and-play and detailed simulation experience. It felt to me that it was going towards the latter and that would probably limit it to fans of the genre who are more appreciative of the slower pace.

 

The most interesting note from the beta appears to be the Franchise mode where you build your zoo and can buy/sell animals on a global trade market with other players. That seems to be the mode that they are pushing.

 

Looks fantastic as well. I've been playing on a 32" monitor at 4K resolution with the graphics ramped up. Art style is a carbon copy of Planet Coaster which is bright, colourful and fun.

 

Definitely feels positive from the hour or two I played. Wasn't really enough time to scratch the surface but it does feel like an evolution of Zoo Tycoon in the same way Planet Coaster has reinvented the Rollercoaster Tycoon games.

[SEMTEX]

Fucks sake.

 

I want this, but I played Planet Coaster for about 3 minutes. It seemed very complex and scared me off.

 

Perhaps it's time to dedicate some time to Planet Coaster and really give it a good try...... and THEN buy Planet Zoo.

[O Neill]

I think there's a similar level of complexity here.

 

The key part to the learning curve is simply being able to navigate the camera, move around and grasps the controls for rotating/scaling/placing objects etc. Once it starts to become familiar and you are automatically doing things it becomes a lot of fun to play. But to start with it can feel clunky and awkward which makes it a tough game for people who don't have the time to learn how to play it.

 

A lot will depend on whether they have a decent set of tutorials in there. The first story mission goes through a few of the basics to get you going but it would be useful to have more advanced walk through tutorials I think.