Recent reviews by dimm_ddr

Buy it if you love animals and want to just casually watch them play around, grow and breed in habitat you yourself designed.
Do not buy it if you cannot tolerate occasional crashes, annoying (but not really game breaking most of the time) bugs and shallow management simulator.

Planet Zoo is amazing game: it is meditative and beautiful but it is not a proper zoo management simulator even if it is looks like one. It is very simple given you have some patience at the start and there is not much to do. Sure, there are some animals to see and quite many of them too. But they are not that different or even hard to manage. Stuff management ends with zone of work and some training and while research exist here it is mostly to keep players from munch through content too fast.

P.S. It is possible that there are some actually hard scenarios in challenges mode, I did not try it yet. So take "casual" with grain of salt.

I did not play at the release so I cannot say how much this game was improved but it is a hell lot of fun right now. Imperator Rome fells like something in between Crusaders Kings 2 and Europa Universalis 4. It has much more character development then EU but less then CK2. And it has much more in term of realm government then in CK2 but smaller scale then EU.
And that middle ground actually did the trick: you finally feels like you govern a realm with a ruler. Not with just nice picture in a window you will open once or twice in hundred years but a person with quirks virtues. And different type of government finally feels like something different. It is not just some background percent changes it is really something you will see a lot. You will understand why dictatorship is better then republic (to hell with all this stupid senators who only cares about their own good and cannot agree on starting a war) and why it is other way (hello you, stupid ugly monster who everybody hates but who refuse to die already or step back from throne).

Short nice game with amazing art and cool soundtrack. And this is not another match 3 game or VN which is also a big plus.

Dark and cold winter night. You come home tired and frozen. You open a bottle of whisky and start this game. Do you feel it?