Let’s Build a Zoo is a charming tycoon-style zoo building game available for PC via Steam or the Epic Game Store, in which players create the animal observation park of their dreams.
Construct pens and stock them with rabbits, pigs, porcupines, snakes, and a variety of other fascinating creatures. Pizza, Coke, cotton candy and slushies should be served to park visitors.
Create a series of austere concrete enclosures on barren ground, or decorate your zoo with flowers, trees, and statues. Until the strange things start happening, it’s very standard zoo-building fare.
You’re going about your zoo business one minute, doing easy tasks like luring a particular amount of visitors or constructing a snack bar the next.
The next thing you know, you’re faced with a “critical option” that will determine whether you are morally good or evil. You come upon a stray puppy. Do you spend money on flyers to try to track down the owner, or do you dress it up like a lion and put it on display?
Do you make a purchase or call the cops when a black-market animal trader shows up at your park?
Yes, Let’s Build a Zoo is the Mass Effect of zoo management simulations, allowing you to build your sprawling animal empire as a Paragon or Renegade. As your zoo grows, the path you take will decide the enhancements you may unlock through research and development.
Only a more upright zookeeper can establish a release center, returning animals to the wild to boost biodiversity. Similarly, only a true wicked thug can construct a slaughterhouse, which converts live animals into dead ones for use in evil factories.
It’s less ‘good vs evil’ and more ‘bad versus normal’ in terms of morality systems. The good, moral choices are self-evident and make perfect sense, whereas the wicked options are so ridiculous that selecting them instantly converts the game from simulation to farce.
Go good if you’re looking for a simple zoo-builder with a decent sense of humor. Go wicked if you like to mess about and make dead animal jokes. The dramatic contrast between good and evil doesn’t detract from the flexible management simulation at the heart of Let’s Build a Zoo.
This is a tycoon game that appeals to both casual gamers who want to watch the joyful animals bounce around in their enclosures and severe micromanagers who want to fine-tune every component of their park to achieve maximal productivity. Put a popcorn vendor on the map if your park visitors are hungry.
If they’re thirsty, put a Coke machine in the room. If they aren’t buying enough soda, up the salt in the popcorn to get them to drink more, but be careful of dehydration-induced vomiting.
Sometimes all I want to do is drop some buildings and start breeding pigs. Other times, I’d like to pick and choose which staff will be responsible for each animal cage. I adore a game that allows me to do both, rewarding me for my meticulous attention to detail while also punishing me when I just want to jam as many capybaras as possible into one pen.
While I don’t always appreciate Let’s Build a Zoo’s unnecessarily complicated menu system, I do appreciate the wealth of information available to me. I can easily see which animals are threatened by their neighbors by clicking on an enclosure and selecting the cohabitation option. I can observe how much water each animal consumes.
The really useful heat maps in the upper right corner of the screen provide me with rapid access to data such as light coverage, water saturation, park accessibility, and decoration score.
Let’s make a zoo! Quote from the Back of the Box You’re all terrible people who will choose evil. a zoo management simulation with a twist Liked Absurd moral dilemmas, charming pixel graphics, and gaming features that appeal to both casual and diehard sisters Disliked Menus that are overstuffed can be a bit much at times. Springloaded Games is a game developer.
I spent six hours playing a difficult zoo management game. Let’s Build a Zoo is a comprehensive zoo-building simulation with a great deal of depth and intricacy. It’s also a fun game that grants us access to a CRISPR DNA splicing machine, allowing us to assemble thousands of different charming genetic monstrosities.
A duke is a duck with a snakehead made by combining a snake with a duck. Consider a goose, which has a little gooseneck on a big boarish torso. Piecing together these strange animal mixes becomes a metagame within the main game once you acquire access to the CRISPR facility.
To unlock an animal’s DNA and make it suitable for CRISPR splicing, you must breed several types of animals. Then comes the insane science. DNA-splicing animal hybrids offer a layer of absurd fun on top of what could have been a very serious zoo management sim, similar to the good versus evil morality system.
There’ve been many instances during my time with Let’s Build a Zoo when I’ve gotten so involved with zoo-running minutiae that things like the mob showing up to dump a corpse, or a new animal showing up in my CRISPR, have caught me completely off-guard.
Let’s Build a Zoo particularly excels in these moments of ridiculousness. It’s a cute little game with just the proper amount of ‘what the fuck?’ to keep me entertained for hours.
