Frontier Development’s Zoo Tycoon was one of those dark-horse sort of launch day titles. It wasn’t getting a lot of attention despite being a Xbox exclusive and having been a very successful franchise many years ago on PC. With Kinect, SmartGlass, and community or cloud based features, not to mention 1080p visuals, Zoo Tycoon does a fine job of integrating new Xbox tech with classic management simulation.
The basic gameplay and goals of Zoo Tycoon are just like that of any other game in its relatively niche genre, only with more bears. You are the owner/operator of a zoo and you’re a very busy person. For anyone who has played these “micro management” type of games, there’s literally always something to be doing. Whether you’re tending to your Sims, building cities, or researching technology to improve your military, no matter the setting in the game, the core mechanics of prioritizing and staying flexible is vital to success. In Zoo Tycoon, you don’t have any invading forces to worry about, but you do have to always keep your eyes on your economics. Depending on the scenario you’re playing, you might start off with little money or a lot, or in Freeform mode you don’t have to worry about money at all. Keeping money is only possible through keeping zoo visitors happy and coming back, and from receiving donations and contracts by completing various pop-up Challenges that appear from time to time. Challenges and Notifications, accessed through the down and up d-pad buttons, will keep you constantly on your toes as you try to keep your animals and guests happy, facilities operational, and balance in the green.
While its true that the gameplay mechanics within the first five minutes are the ones you’ll still be using five hours later, the formula really doesn’t get old. It’s a tricky balance that games of this type must achieve, balancing fun with reward and also challenge. I thought Zoo Tycoon did a very good job of this, and starting from scratch in the Challenge Mode, where you only have $25,000 to work with, turned out to be a solid good challenge, but one that I learned from. In other words, it took me a few tries to get a better feel for what I needed to do. It’s really easy to spend your money upfront, but, building decorations and extra exhibits, even before you can afford to adopt animals for them, and researching all sorts of other structures and advertising methods and so on, drains your funds quickly and quietly. Meanwhile zoo visitors will be eager to see increased animal variety. Should you increase the cost of admission? Make it free? Charge to use the bathroom? Hire more janitors to keep the park cleaner? Zoo Tycoon provides a very engaging platform to assert your managerial skills while still making time to feed the giraffes from the palm of your hand.
The experience of Zoo Tycoon is best started, though, with the ten part, hour-long training mode. Even though I have never played Zoo Tycoon and the last management sim game I did play was Funky Barn at the Wii U launch, much of the tutorial was unnecessary, but, I did learn several important gameplay elements and the tutorial is structured well enough as to be a real boost for casual gamers. One of the most important tricks I learned is being able to switch between zoo and tycoon modes, the former of which puts your customization character in a third person view on the zoo grounds. A lot of management tasks can be performed here, and it’s the best way to see and interact with the animals. However the tycoon mode, which you can toggle by pressing Y, is better for zipping around your park in an overhead view. It’s not as glamorous as being at ground level and seeing your visitors and the animals, but it’s way faster. I ended up spending most of my time in tycoon mode and at times I sort of regretted that because I wasn’t getting to see or interact with my animals very much — my zoo was so busy with other tasks and I’m the type that always tries to stay ahead of the curve and/or prepare for the next issue that I have yet to gear myself down a notch to where I can stop and enjoy the scenery more. SmartGlass integration actually helps in this endeavor as your device can used to show you the all important Economic Breakdown, which gives you a great line-by-line list of what everything in your zoo is costing you and earning you. It’s easy to see where problem spots lie.
Moving around in your zoo on foot, or with any of several funny-looking buggies (golf carts), is intuitive and fun. You can call for a buggy at anytime by pressing X and I thought it hilarious how a buggy will literally come flying in on the screen, usually landing with a squeak and tires rubbing off on the pavement. You don’t have to worry about hurting your visitors while driving, they’ll always move out of the way. Buggies can be used to race others when playing with up to three friends and they’re also used to zip around to different areas of the zoos, like in Challenges that require you to deliver medicine to your exhibits, for example. On that note, for those quick, five minute challenges that have you driving a buggy from the main gate to your exhibits or other facilities never triggered for me. I would drive to where I was told to go, but nothing would happen, so I’m not sure what I was doing wrong. Anyway, another advantage of being on foot is being able to use the Kinect motion commands to wave at visitors or to feed certain animals by hand, like giraffes. Building interactive devices like hose cannons and glass windows lets you spray down animals to clean them, often to not only their delight (and thus yours), but the surrounding audience, too (talk about a win-win-win). The windows are used to interact with chimps; Frontier Development did a really neat thing here: when you are close to a window, you can see a faint reflection of yourself on TV, next to the face of the animal, as captured by Kinect. From here you can wave your heads, cover your eyes, smile, blink, and so on, and the Kinect did an impressive job of picking those up, and as a result, the animals did an entertaining job of mimicking those motions. Kinect support also includes 150 or so voice commands, but, I’ll be honest, I ended up not using these. Menu navigation was snappy enough and I didn’t feel it necessary or all that helpful to use the voice commands to perform routine tasks.
Controls are accessible and easy to get the hang of. In the zoomed-out tycoon view, the sticks are used to fly around and zoom in on areas of the park. A large ring acts as your cursor for hovering over and selecting objects. For example, in any spot on the map that doesn’t have some kind of object you have placed, the default action is “Build Zoo,” which opens up the master menu of building a new structure of some kind. There are eight or so different exhibit types, from tundra to grasslands, to tropical forest, and each of these can be small, medium, and large, depending on your current fame level and whether or not you have paid and taken the time to research the larger plots. More surface area means more animals that can be accommodated meaning more revenue to keep everything else running. Once built, exhibits need animals, which aren’t cheap. Animals then need care in the form of various facilities that offer food and water to stay clean. Animals also have a social meter that is generally the toughest criteria to satisfy when you’re starting out and money is tight. You want to get in the interesting animals to get more visitors, but those animals won’t be happy for long without some companionship, and the visitors will start to notice that they aren’t happy. Other exhibit facilities include toys for the animals and interactive features such as the water cannon and glass.
The use of LT to bring up quick sub-menus for objects and animals has a huge impact on making the right decisions. For example, you can build a grasslands exhibit, but would you know all of the animals that would be happy their? A three star rating is used to show what habitats animals like, so it’s easy to at least get the right exhibit to the right animals — how you maintain them after that is another challenge, but between those sub-menus and the always-available Zoopedia in the pause menu, knowing those basics at least isn’t a problem. LT is also used on a per exhibit and per animals basis to see exactly what factors are in good or bad shape so you can address them. The overall Main Gate view, easily reached by pressing Select and then LT, gives you a quick color-meter based view on the state of you entire park — very handy.
One issue I had is that it took me a few hours to be able to visually distinguish the different exhibit types from one another. I couldn’t tell if what I built earlier was “alpine,” or “tundra” for example, but that’s a key difference because different animals like different habitats. This wasn’t because of the visual quality, it’s just that those areas literally do look kind of similar. The game will show you the type of habitat when you hover over the exhibit, but, when you press A to start to work on that exhibit, the name of the type disappears from the screen. For me, this meant the minor nuisance of having to press B a couple of times to back out of the menus I had just navigated through in a hurry. I had the same sort of “back-tracking” to do whenever I went to an exhibit to inspect the animals there and I wanted to see if what I had there was male or female or how many of each. It’s very easy to quickly “click” into those exhibits and get to where you’re about to adopt a new animal, only to have to back out to see what gender makes the most sense. These are relatively minor nuisances that become less common as you play more.
Zoo Tycoon offers players a lot of Fame levels, and with each level comes some combination fo new animals, decorations, researchables, etc. It’s always exciting to see what gets unlocked next. With over 100 animals, although some are just variations in color, I thought there were enough animals, items, and tasks to keep busy. You can partake in the management frenzy through a few different ways. At first, I was kind of confused by the game modes and their apparent over-lapping setup. From the start menu, you have Single Player, Co-op, Community, and Options. Within Options, the first place I always go, there wasn’t much of interest, you can disable the vibration that occurs with each new Challenge or Notification, turn off Speech Recognition, invert the controller, adjust volumes, and so on. In Community, the first time you go here you can read about three Community Achievements that are put out there every quarter, or three months by Microsoft. These are pretty interesting and I can’t think of another game that has done this. You can choose between one of the three challenges, in this case the leading one is a challenge for the collective Zoo Tycoon community to raise tigers in their zoo up to the max level, fifteen, and then release them to the wild. Doing so many thousands of these will get Microsoft to give $10,000 real dollars to a real tiger conservation group — pretty cool stuff.
As for the Single Player mode, you can Continue, Play, or Load a Zoo. Loading a Zoo is split into both local and cloud based or shared Zoos. I had one in each after having played the Campaign, which gives players twenty scenarios of increasing difficulty, and the Challenges mode, which has about twenty scenarios of its own, but has the player starting off with just $25,000. Challenge mode is the most rewarding and, well, challenging mode in the game. Training and Freeform mode are available here too, with the latter supporting up to three online players to pitch in and help construct a gigantic and profitable zoo. While your Fame level increases here, some animals are still only unlocked in the Challenge mode. I should point out too that, you can share animals between zoos when playing online, although I wish this were more robust and that there was some kind of basic marketplace to more easily barter and trade not only animals, but zoo goods, too.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
