Alright, I am not used to writing reviews but here goes.

Overall I do recommend this game, I played it on the game pass last year but have bought it now on steam with the Aquarium DLC, so at the time of writing I have actually played much more that 25 hours. While I recommend it, because I think you get your money's worth of play time, it comes with some aspects that can affect how you enjoy the experience.

Pros : I loved the base game so much that I was really excited playing the Aquarium DLC, hence my purchase. The base game has lots of things to love, starting of course with the beautiful graphics and a bounty of variants to discover, 10 variants for each of 56 species if I am correct (the collector in me lives for this). This keeps you occupied quite a long time and you can make your zoo and enclosures beautiful in the meantime. For some people the game mechanics of morality points etc is a drawback, but there is a sandbox mode available later for those who like mixing things up, so not really a drawback for me.

Cons: - more explanations would be nice to figure out how the different buildings and employees work. There is a lot of walking in the dark till you figure it out. Some poor wording choices and lack of update to descriptions make some dynamics complicated to figure out... it is just a matter of text that could easily be fixed with a tiny update in my opinion. For example, as you have more visitors, your employees will become tired quicker and have no energy and be less efficient, it says when you hover over the energy bar that you can schedule a break for them to recover. This is a non-existent feature, don't try looking for it. There is no scheduling hours, or shifts to alternate with a second shopkeeper. They will just be exhausted till the next day.
Another thing, when you want to store something to use in your shops, it actually goes through the food store room of your animals where the animal keepers go. I thought it would go to the warehouse but no, there it will only be sold. It is misleading because on the farm processor, it says "select to amount to be stored for your animals, leftover will be sent to the warehouse" , I thought, I am not using this stuff for my animals so this is not the place to store it... turns out it is.
So, some explanation about how this works would be welcome when you acquire the building, and some simple rewording.

Finally, my biggest complain is about the Aquarium DLC. The real reason I am writing because I am so frustrated. Never, has it been so hard for me NOT to join the dark side. OMG. I am going out of my mind with grinding to collect the animals. To give you an idea, I have 140 days in game (20 weeks), I make 200k a day and have 4 million dollars overall. I have unlocked all the fishboat upgrades for weeks, and it is a miracle if I get 1 new species per week. It has been so from the beginning. When I got the first 2 upgrades I thought, the boat is finally gonna be a bit more productive. I unlocked all slots (6 fish) thinking it would increase the odds if it is all statistics. Nope. With all upgrades, I get maybe 1 new species during a week. Now I am just bored, I put the speed at max to grind the days , money I don't need comes in, and I wait for a new fish... that killed the fun for me. I never felt that for the base game, since you keep working on the collection with nursing and trading, stats usually work with you. Here they don't.

While on the evil boat... everyday I get the alert they have got something I don't. So yeah, never been harder to resist. So keep that in mind when buying the DLC.

And one last thing, I read in another comment. Someone complained about the lack of interaction between the animals and the enrichment objects. That's true, unless it is floating like a ball or a floatee, they will push around from time to time but that's about it. All over enrichment items are more decorations than anything.
While in the base game, animals would climb on bars, jump on the trampoline, go into the leafs...

That's all I have to say I think, hope it is useful.

Great game for building your own zoo. You get to have the lovely pixel style art and it's easy to use to create your own space. Decorating and unlocking all forms of animals will get you hooked for hours if you like chill games where you design your own space.

Fun game!
Pros:
- you can create your zoo however you like
- you can micromanage pretty much everything, including the food/drink sold from your shops, and your staff
- lots of breed types (it's a fun challenge to collect them all)
- I like the 'trade' option with other zoos
- the art style is cute
- you don't have to have a 'conventional' zoo, it can be inhumane / a farm / black market if you want to

Cons:
- sometimes having too many pop-ups is overwhelming, especially early in the game when you're figuring out what to do

pretty gay

1000 years of trying to keep the rabbit population down

You can have people bring dead bodies for your animals to eat

its a good game, its fun and i love how much you can customize the zoo, i love the unlocking system and i love the breeding system as well

u can give a snake a trampoline

Zoo init

Love the game. So many things to do and so many routes to take a playthrough between the morality choices, tech tree, progression lines, hybrids, all the micro and macro management. Highly recommend.

Love: animal variants, hyrbids, evil corporation options, benevolent zoo options. I can choose to play it like a zoo tycoon, or a mad scientist with mutant animals, or become a megafarm murdering exotic animals, or become a self sustaining zoo. There is always a minimum of a dozen things to do at any given time.

Ways it could improve:
a highlight to move system for building so I can move groupings of structures like a whole decor layout over.
Save anytime. Having a pause system without save anytime is detrimental to anyone who keeps the game paused for major changes. I quit playing a 36 hour save because my renovation crashed 4 hrs in.
More user friendly UI for my animals so I can at a glance see all animals in an enclosure without having to scroll through a single row bar, or navigate to the donation list to get to something closer to a easily readable list.