I really like management games and this one was pretty awesome at first. I really appreciated the art, how (at first glance) laid back this game was, and how (at first glance) no-stress the entire experience was.

This game quickly evolves into a micro-management nightmare, and it was really sad to see unfold. There are so many different things that you need to pay attention to, and as the size of your facility increases, it just becomes more and more stressful to keep up with. I was looking for a casual experience where I could just chill and let the game automate at least some of what was happening, but it was very much the opposite of that. You need to manually check that everything's in order in virtually every single capacity. And it's not even that it's necessarily difficult, because it's not. As someone else put it: It's very overstimulating. The UI is honestly pretty awful and maneuvering it felt very unnatural. It made the entire process of dodging and dealing with 1000 different mechanics in rapid succession so much worse than it probably could have been. I was willing to keep playing until I popped in the reviews and realized this was not only a common sentiment but gets increasingly worse as the game goes on. The soundtrack was cool though

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the number of popups is completely insane and detrimental to enjoying the game. This is not a chill game, this is the worst possible nightmare for anyone who struggles with overstimulation or choice paralysis. I actually wasn't going to refund this, but reading the negative reviews with more hours than me saying this issue persists for the whole game means I'm getting out while I can. The games that this draws heavily from allow you to enjoy what you're doing, making your park, thinking about your choices, seeing how things interact with each other. This game does not allow you to breathe and it suffers greatly for it.

👍 Incredible time-killer
👎Incredible time-killer
👍Great pixel art
👎Everything is tiny and it all kinda blends together
👎Lacking ingame menus and options — lots of unintuitive or inconvenient decisions
👎Takes long time to unlock animals but at some point you realize there's no difference between any of them
👎At which point it becomes an idle game — the zoo runs itself, pixels move, occasionally you need to go through a few menu options to make it continue to run itself

I was really excited to try this game. Unfortunately, it’s left me frustrated and dissatisfied. It can be fun and addicting at points, but the gameplay design and UI choices destroyed most of my enjoyment.

Cons

Enrichment: The enrichment mechanic is terribly unbalanced. Animals require a lot of it. You can keep this under control by not having too many animals in your pens, but the problem is that the trading mechanic to obtain new animals and the breeding mechanic to obtain new variants encourages overcrowding until you’ve finished both of their requirements. There are a multitude of enrichment items, but from my experience, they’re all about as effective as the others. A big problem is that they take up a lot of room in the pens, which conflicts with how slowly you can buy more land and how many decorations you need in your pens for 100% deco score. The default small ball ends up as your best item. Particularly because you can stack it on top of itself. Trying to design nice pens is impossible because of the amount of enrichment items you need, and if you spam the small balls like I mentioned, then the balls will appear all over the pen (though they only occupy their spot, regardless of where they appear).

Obtaining New Animals: Admittedly, I’d have preferred some sort of unique research tree, or something like quests. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it contributes to the enrichment problem. Additionally, you can’t view the space requirements for the new animals until you’ve traded for them. However, you can’t build a pen for them after finding out, because you have to immediately place them in a pen when you trade. You should be able to view this stuff beforehand so that you can plan your pen sizes. As it is, you have to guess at the pen size, or temporarily place them in a different pen and then transfer them once they arrive. You can expand pen sizes, but when you have to buy one expensive land plot at a time, it can be frustrating.

Hybrids: Cool in theory, terrible as implemented. You have no control over which animal is the head and which is the body. You also can’t control which variant of the animals are picked. All of this would be fine if you could eventually unlock these powers, but you can’t. I can’t understand why once you’ve discovered a hybrid, you can’t reproduce it as much as you like. Or instead, why you can’t unlock the power to choose the head/body and variants used.

Research: Research seems great at first. Eventually, you’ll be able to hire an extra researcher to speed up the progress. And then there’s nothing. It never scales into the late game, and you’ll hit a point where you’re making tons of cash each day, simply waiting to purchase the remaining land tiles and for research points to come along so you can maybe get close to finishing the tech tree. By the way, there is apparently a cash cap, which makes this even harder to leave on fast speed and idle.

Decoration: This is a nightmare stat to chase. You have to build way too many items to get to 100%, and you have to do this for each plot of land (all of the land is divided into large squares of land, which is what I’m referring to). Trying to make nice looking parks or pens is impossible if you want to hit 100% Decoration score. You have to spam so many different items/trees/plants (in my experience, deco items are mostly worthless if you’re going good as trees are superior for deco points along with CO2 reduction). There’s not enough themed items either for the amount of spam required. Repeated items lose their value (from searching online, trees/plants start losing deco value on the 4th copy in a land plot, which seemed correct from my play through). There should also be a way to declare certain zones as industrial: there’s no reason for your farms to need decorations.

The Animals: The sprites are great and so are the variants. But unfortunately, they don’t do much. They basically jump and down. Or stand on things. And maybe jump up and down really fast if you have a trampoline.

Facilities: The game never explains what Facility optimization means, but it affects your parks score. Searching on a random reddit post revealed some of the answers from the devs, such as having one bathroom per plot of land (I don’t know if this was later patched). Either way, with no explanation, how on Earth are you supposed to manipulate this score? Again, this is killing the ability to design a zoo the way you want (yes, you could play in the sandbox mode, but I feel there’s too many things that restrict your overall design for little reason).

The UI: It’s a nightmare. A good example is the coop. You can select all. Or you can click a chicken, click select, then click another chicken, click select, etc. Why can’t you just select multiple, but not all, with a simple hotkey+click? In general, it’ll drive you insane. It’s not the worst UI of all time, but it’s not good. The tiny sprites for animals in the most of the UI is infuriating as well (this could be a problem with my computer, though; perhaps the UI is larger on other ones).

Lack of explanations: So many mechanics aren’t explained. And they don’t seem to be documented on any wikis. I found a lot of answers in my search kept coming up on reddit (with the devs occasionally replying to questions).

Fast Forward: There comes a point in this game where you have to set it on fast forward and just waits for weeks (in-game). Unfortunately, you can’t let it idle, because it saves at the end of each day and prevents the next day from loading until you clear the save message. There should be an option to disable needing to clear that message so you can let the game idle, to gain enough cash to purchase land plots, to let animals breed the last few variants you’re missing, and to wait for the research points to flow in. As mentioned above, there’s also a cash cap, making idling even harder.

Good Route Reward Spoiler Monkey Milk: For one of the facilities, you can choose to use Monkey Milk or Cow’s Milk. However, Monkey Milk appears (from my testing) to be the evil choice, even though producing Monkey Milk is the good route’s reward. Seems like a really strange oversight.

Technical Issues (these may not be a fault of the game as I play on Linux, which it otherwise works great on):

Lag on fast forward towards later stages of the game. My computer is more than capable of running the game. Additionally, music rarely, if ever, plays.

Pros

Art: I love the art style. But chasing the decoration score makes it hard to enjoy. The animals look really great, as mentioned above.

Animal Variants: The variants are great, and it’s fun to chase after them. I’m not a huge fan of the breeding system, but it’s exciting to see what you’ll get next. However, the UI is way too small to see the little pictures of each variant (making it hard to know which ones you’re trying to get rid of when releasing them).

Morality: I like the system. I do think the Good one has some stuff locked to it that should be allowed on the Evil route (like the Nutrition Hub).


I can’t help compare this game to Zoo Tycoon, which came out over 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I’d recommend playing that game over this one. Its animals do things (Zoo Tycoon: when the T-Rex eats someone or a polar bear bats the person around vs Let’s Build a Zoo: They stand around and then the person becomes a corpse). The mechanics in Zoo Tycoon are better as well when it comes to building the animal’s enclosures with specific items (like trees) affecting the rankings based off of the animal exhibits they’re placed in.

If you get it really cheap, it might be fun to mess around with. You can see by my playtime that I got many hours out of it, but a lot of that was just letting it settle on fast forward to gain research points or wait for animals to finally breed a new variant.

I usually love simulation games, especially when they involve animals like this one, but I did not find this game fun. I found it very hard to learn to play and very confusing. I was looking stuff up every two second because it wasn't explained and I couldn't figure it out. I am glad I got it on sale because it was not worth the purchase and I can't return it because I bought it more than two weeks ago.

i am always in debt :(

You can give your animals the most luxurious habitats and the finest diets and hire a veritable legion of zookeepers and the game will still call you a horrible person because your employees will never ever clean up the poop fast enough.

Pros: cute art style, decent variety of animals, the DLCs are pretty decent, and the core exhibit design is intuitive.

Cons: Progression is glacially slow, no sandbox mode, animals have no animation except jumping, the morality system is either good or cartoonishly evil, and it's overall just kinda boring

i liked it in concept, but it's very hard to keep track of all your enclousers, because they (imo) need a lot of micro managing, which is made even more annoying by the fact that every menu is hidden behind a lot of clicks. That lead to me not even wanting to expand the zoo at some point. Plus the flow of the game is constantly interrupted by all the unnecessary pop ups.

this game made me cry and is sad