Though I usually associate David Braben’s Frontier Developments with the Elite series of spacefaring games, the studio is also one of the most important names in the theme park management simulation genre. And let’s be honest, swapping roller coasters and cotton candy stands for animal enclosures and feeding stations isn’t exactly a massive leap in terms of game design, menus and controls. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Frontier has spent years making zoo management games as well, even branching out into Jurassic Park themed spinoffs along the way. Today, we’re going to take a look at their latest installment in this niche, their biggest and most ambitious yet, Planet Zoo 2.

Planet Zoo 2’s editor is shockingly deep, if you decide to put time to learn all it has to offer.

Planet Zoo 2 stands out from other management simulators by basically giving you two different gameplay propositions inside the same package. One of them is pretty self-explanatory: create a zoo. Create enclosures, ensure that every animal is well-fed and comfortable, adopt them, hire staff, and make sure that your idea for a zoo is actually financially responsible. Or don’t, just set up a zoo in sandbox mode and create an entire sanctuary full of dozens of lions. The other one is actually quite interesting, and is almost like a reverse idea of managing a zoo; you can also manage a wildlife reserve.

In this second mode, you tend to preserve wildlife by managing reserves which will then receive animals from the same zoos you were building, once you deem they should be reintroduced to their habitat. First of all, you set up the necessary infrastructure to receive them: clean up the terrain, create lakes, observatory outposts, and so on. After that, send animals to the reserve and monitor their behavior from a more personal perspective. You can play as a zoologist, driving trucks and exploring the wilderness, in order to get close to these animals, take pictures of them, and gain Conservation Points. These points are actually used to adopt “high-tier” animals for your zoo. In essence, the game ties these two modes together, giving you an incentive to play both at the same time.

I can finally pretend I’m Nigel Thornberry. Smashing!

I’ll say that I had a lot more fun keeping a zoo, though. It’s where the largest chunk of content is present. After a brief tutorial, which introduces you to Planet Zoo 2‘s many mechanics, as well as the mandatory bureaucratic bits about building a zoo in the first place, the editor tools give you an insane amount of freedom for you to create the park of your dreams. New to this game are flying and aquatic animals, with their respective habitats as well.

The editor’s depth is insane. You can create every kind of habitat you can think of, tinker with its decoration, add in toys and other distractions for animals, and even analyze their level of comfort and liking towards their companion of the opposite gender. You can create suspended bridges to improve visibility, cable cars, you name it. Granted, the game isn’t the best looking park simulator in the world, nor the one with the best performnce optimization, but the level of detail is truly staggering.

Animal models are detailed. Human models, not so much.

Planet Zoo 2 delivers exactly what I expected from it. Thanks to Frontier’s extensive experience with theme park and zoo management simulators, what we have here is an impressively deep and detailed zoo simulator, complete with a robust editor that gives you an enormous amount of freedom to design the park of your dreams. While the new wildlife reserve mode isn’t quite as entertaining as traditional zoo management, it’s still an interestin addition to the gameplay loop. Rather than building attractions for visitors, you’re tasked with studying and preserving animals in their natural habitats, learning about their conservation status and ecological importance along the way. This is a game that will appeal to a very specific demographic, but they will have a blast with it.

Planet Zoo 2 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Planet Zoo 2 was provided by the publisher.