I had fun with the game, but it has serious design issues that become apparent the more you play and that eventually led to me stopping dead in my tracks. I'm glad I played the game and it is totally worth snagging at a discount, but only at a discount.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward with you simply building various things, including the enclosures for the animals, all with the intent of generating traffic to your zoo and maximizing profit. It is quite shallow and a lot of the work around your animals devolves into generating these very cookie cutter designs due to absurd requirements for various resources. And it becomes more troubling with the pathing issues your animal keepers have. Animals can traverse terrain your keepers cannot, which leads to them literally crapping in unreachable places that necessitates you constantly editing the enclosures to allow keepers in. It's a baffling design decision. And honestly, the game feels like an idle game more than a game you play actively. There’s so much downtime while you wait for the right animal to be bred to trade to another zoo just to get a different animal where you can repeat the process endlessly. The game really isn’t about the zoo itself, but creature breeding and collecting.

Most of the time you spend in the game will be fighting a UI that simply does not work well for the kind of game this is. There are so many menus you have to access to do simple things. And things are needlessly obfuscated or simply not represented well at all. It just makes it more and more unfun as your zoo gets bigger and there’s more and more things to manage that really shouldn’t require so much attention.

It is a very appealing game visually, but there's a distinct lack of animations for the characters and animals. So while it is pretty to look at with a lot of visual variety, it feels very still in a lot of ways. I definitely think they could have given more attention to the animations of everything, but it is a cheap game. And the music is nice, but forgettable.


The research system is well and truly just garbage. It is an erratic mess where you have no clue of what you're researching towards. It is just a haphazard collection of squares with no rhyme or reason to unlocking them. On top of that, research is agonizingly slow. Combine that with the mystery box approach to research and it forms an extremely tedious system that just feels like drudgery.

The game can be pretty engaging at first, but the sheen just wears off eventually and you realize that there isn’t really all that much to the game. It lacks depth and the execution is quite lacking in a lot of regards. For a lower price, it is worth a dalliance.

Meh at best.

This game is kind of tedious and at the same time also too easy? It feels like failure is impossible, which makes me wonder what the point of running the zoo even is then, but at the same time managing all of the animals and everything can also be a lot to handle. For some stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason, research progression is essentially fixed. You can increase it by hiring higher quality researchers, but that only works up until a very low point, and then there is one technology that allows you to hire too researchers, but that's all! Even when you could afford to expand much faster, due to running a well managed zoo.

This game doesn't feel finished... The menus are clunky, the "animations" (or lack of) are horrible, why do all animals jump? But worst of all, there's no way to manually save, you have to wait until end of day. Don't do anything big early in the day, if it crashes everything is lost...

stop it with the stupid cheat code thing and just make sandbox a mode.

Management sims need good menus and the ability to focus on the fun parts. This has neither. Although the art and music are charming, you spend far too long in difficult to navigate menus solving issues that are uninteresting. I want to build a zoo with cool animals and the hybrids and whatever. I don't want to be constantly dealing with random water issues or the fact that my zookeepers can't feed all my animals. I like the little animals and can deal with a little bit of the other stuff in order to make it feel more like a full zoo sim. But it's just too much of the nonsense.

I don't recommend.

The surface level of the game looks fun, aesthetics are great, but as you dig deeper everything starts to feel lazy and a bit silly. They also did this thing where you can chose to use electricity or go green. Electricity is extremely un-optimal and expensive to use, yet all the green options just magically work and cost little to no upkeep. Doesn't really make any sense.

I wanted to like it, I just didn't.

What a shame. This game has a lot of charme and potential, but it still needs a LOT of work before it's fun to play for a longer time. The gameplay becomes a chore rather quickly. The amount of micro-management required is immense... animals grow and die, enclosures become overpopulated rather quickly. Changing the size or items inside the enclosures requires ridiculous amounts of clicks and sub-menu changing. I can't put it any other way: The UI and the menu structure is simply a mess...
What a shame, that most games made today are made for phones instead of PCs... it's not even a proper port...

Didn't get a chance to sink my teeth into it long since I have to make a decision before the Steam refund period is over, but so far the game feels very limiting. In addition, it is rather clunky to control on Steam Deck, and the developer implemented a Proton "fix" that involved disabling the in-game music entirely, only further increasing the lack of engagement. Would definitely recommend other zoo simulation games more than this.