Game:

Planet Zoo (2019)

Category:

Review

Duration: 23:51

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12

The world as a whole has waited longingly for this day... the triumphant return of New Release Friday - pumping your eyes and ears full of my Planet Zoo Gameplay and Review. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's about to get wild.

Seriously though, welcome back. It feels good to be back recording New Release Friday, though I am undeniably quite rusty on the NRF and video making front as a whole. We're here for Planet Zoo and to give it a hot spot of gameplay and a review on the channel. Typically the process with NRF is to pick a random game, but in the past I have picked games that I have been eyeballing for a while to review and I have done the same today with Planet Zoo.

If you'd like to take a look at Planet Zoo yourself (probably not for a gameplay and review or to record an episode of New Release Friday, but just because it looks fun,) here is a quick easy link for you:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/703080/Planet_Zoo/

Now that we've gotten the formalities out of the way, let's get on a move on with this Planet Zoo gameplay and review - DESCRIPTION EDITION. Planet Zoo is a management sim, tycoon style game revolving around the ownership, employment, construction, etc. of zoos and or wildlife prisons. From building and running your own zoo from scratch to just doing odd jobs in someone else's zoo, you can expect everything in between during your gameplay. Starting off, you will get to make an avatar that other people will see online when they look for you in the Planet Zoo world. The customization options are pretty limited and you look something like a low budget Sim's character. Luckily, once I made my avatar, I never once saw it again. That may be different once you get moving on a franchise or challenge mode though.

After building our character, we could move on and get into our Planet Zoo gameplay and review right and proper... well, after a quick soft lock and force quit through the task manager. I'm gonna be real, the Planet Zoo crashes and freezes weren't exactly uncommon during this 3 hour session. That doesn't stop us around here on New Release Friday though, NRF pushes through at any cost to get the gameplay and review out for all you wonderful people. We rebooted and started up the first tutorial which promptly started asking me to do different things around the zoo without ever telling me what any of the controls are or how to navigate the space around the zoo. Nancy made sure to talk about the GOAL of getting me familiar with flying around the zoo, but also did nothing to actually do that other than tell me to go find random exhibits.

I got the basics of navigation down after a little while, but it never really felt all that intuitive to me and I wish that I had gotten some degree of information regarding the control scheme. Straight off the bat, we were having some framerate issues, but it appears a lot worse in the video than it was in game - I have been trying to get all my stuff back up to speed on the recording front after being forced to upgrade to Windows 10 a few months back. Planet Zoo does in fact suffer from some performance issues, especially when dealing with large amounts of spectators and high zoom levels on animals or assets in the world. Further review will be needed to see if the most recent patch resolved anything.

I suppose it is time I start talking about some of the goods instead of spending this whole time complaining about all the Planet Zoo crashes, freezes, hangs, issues, etc. The game really isn't all that bad, I think I was just in a little bit of a frustrated mood coming into it, which reflected during my gameplay and review - it is called Delicroix's Genuine Gaming, right? Planet Zoo has a depth unlike anything I expected and this is true in almost every aspect.

To start, I found all of the animal information to be mind-blowing. You can click on any individual animal all the way from monstrous elephants down to tiny little beetles and assess each of Planet Zoo's inhabitants happiness, healthiness, environmental needs, nutritional needs, etc. These are all represented by color coded bars that have an ideal range, both of which update in real-time as a result of your gameplay choices. I found it really rewarding to make adjustments to a climate or habitat and review the bar in real-time, moving toward the green as I made my little animals happy.

Tycoon type games like Planet Zoo give players an expectation of customization. Most people come to these games with gameplay expectations of being able to build a cool "dream location." I think that Planet Zoo gives you everything you need to do exactly that. There were so many building and customization options that a lot of it was WAY over my head. I hope that eventually I will be able to review a lot of these features and learn to use them to make an awesome location of my own.

Overall in my Planet Zoo gameplay and review - I found the game to be a good time, but not without some big issues. Hope for patches.

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