Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection is a business management game. It is the enhanced version of the 2013 game that was for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It has ten short tutorials to teach you the basics of the game, although it is done in a fairly boring manner. This is particularly so if you’re itching to quickly understand everything so that you can get into the meat of the game.
This genre doesn’t have the best reputation for its implementation of controller controls but surprisingly, it works really well it. It’s probably to do with the game originally designed for consoles. However, there are still some quirks that you need to get used to, especially if you wanted to get a quick overview of what’s happening. Luckily, using the left trigger will bring up a snapshot of the current needs of your zoo, like animal and guest happiness, and the areas that are critical for you to improve on.
There are two many types of views. The first one is a third-person view where you can explore the zoo as if you were a guest or staff member. The second is an overhead view that is more familiar for this genre. The latter view is more efficient at managing the zoo, while the former is fun to just fiddle around with and explore your zoo. The third person camera needs some work as it seems to get caught in the environmental objects and start shaking as a result. There are various photo options too, and ways to have the camera track specific animals.
The game is menu heavy and you will need to constantly enter and back out of layers of menus. This could be streamlined a bit more as it doesn’t feel very well designed at times. There are different types of enclosures and facilities to build. In order to appease your guests, you will require both types of buildings, to maintain the animal variety as well as entertainment variety. You’ll need to balance the number of animals you have in your zoo with food, entertainment, guest facilities and staff facilities. Money is naturally the limiting factor. There is also a fame level that will increase the potential for more guests as it increases, which will increase your income stream, as well as unlocking new things to build.
New facilities and enclosures are unlocked but you still need to research them. Researching takes times, anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. The same goes for animals and there is a solid variety of them to put on display. It covers most of the ones you would expect in a zoo, like giraffes, elephants, tigers, lions, hippos, chimpanzees, as well as ones like alpacas, antelopes, kangaroos and owls. You can feed and wash the animals manually but this is tedious and something you don’t want to do after trying it out the first time. It is better to build staff facilities and hire staff to automatically take care of them for you.
There are various single player modes, with the Campaign mode being a big one. In each level, it will give you a set of objectives to complete in an allotted amount of time. These range from increasing the fame level, to building a certain number of things, to adopting a certain number of animals. Some can be finished quickly, while others will take longer. This version contains the original campaigns, as well as two new ones. The harder scenarios can be tough as they require you to do things like breeding endangered animals and releasing them, all the while you are strapped for cash. Unfortunately, these scenarios can also feel padded given that you have to wait minutes at a time with nothing to do as you wait for the cash to build up.
So, while the game is easy to pick up and manage, it can quickly become repetitive. It lacks the nuances that makes business management games addictive. The levels in Campaign, and in the other modes, usually have you end up repeating the same types of basic steps to get your foundation in place, before completing the rest of the objectives. As a result, it doesn’t feel like there is much variety. The original campaign has 21 levels, with 5 additional levels in the new south American campaign and five more in the new Australian campaign. The two new campaigns focuses on the new animals but it is basically more of the same. It takes around ten to fifteen hours to complete all of them but it depends on whether you can clear those harder levels on your first go or not.
Challenge mode is similar in the fact that there are various zoos and the objective is to collect the specific animals in those zoos. There are some differences here, such as the limited money, and crises such as staff strikes will occur. Annoyingly, there are some animals which require you to obtain it in another zoo to then transfer it to the one that needs it for completing the challenge. The Sandbox mode on the other hand gives you unlimited money and no waiting time for new animals or buildings (you just have to fulfil the fame level requirements) to build your dream zoo. However, this mode is also kind of boring given that it removed too many of the restrictions.
Overall, Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection is an average game as it doesn’t quite capture the addictiveness of a business management game with its gameplay loop. In Campaign mode, there is too much waiting involved until you can do your next step, so there’s swathes of empty time wasted. While you can tell that it has simplified mechanics so that it is easier to pick up and play, it simplified it too much so that it can get boring fast. It’s still fun for the time that you spend on it but it is not going to keep you addicted for much longer than the campaigns.
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