A management sim about running a series of zoosExpect to pay: $45/£35Developer: Frontier DevelopmentsPublisher: Frontier DevelopmentsReviewed on: Intel i5-6600K, GTX 980, 8 GB RAMMultiplayer: No, though you can share creationsLink:The difference between a roller coaster and a ring tailed lemur is that when one has a problem it's a mild irritation and when the other has a problem it's a cause of unbridled panic and overwhelming guilt. There are stressful components to every management simulation game, but where Planet Coaster's mechanical breakdowns make me worry briefly about profits, Planet Zoo's biological breakdowns make me feel like a neglectful, abusive monster who should be dragged off to jail and never allowed near another living creature ever again.Planet Zoo has several official modes—Career, Challenge, Sandbox, and Franchise—but its two actual modes are Things Seem Fine and Oh God What Have I Done.

Swimming Animals in Planet Zoo. Twisty the clown. These are all the habitat animals I directly observed swim. Aardvark; African buffalo; African elephant; African.

My elephants, giraffes, orangutans, panda bears, and dozens of other beautiful creatures can starve to death or die of dehydration if I'm not careful. They can contract diseases or get injured by fighting one another for alpha status. They can feel fear and stress and lack of privacy and the effects of isolation. They can overheat or get too cold. They can kill each other if you put the wrong animals together in the same habitat.

At one point I saw protesters carrying picket signs in my park. It was because my giant burrowing cockroach's glass box was slightly too humid for its liking. I couldn't even keep an ugly bug that eats dead leaves happy, and I instantly felt terrible about it.Planet Zoo isn't just a management sim, it's a survival game. In fact, forget that I just compared it to Planet Coaster. At its most stressful, Planet Zoo is more like Frostpunk or Prison Architect.

None of the lives you're in charge of actually want to be there, and making a mistake puts those lives in danger. This is mostly a good thing—stressful experiences can be a weird sort of fun, and heart-wrenching guilt should be a feature in more games.

But some of the stress of Planet Zoo is due to parts of the game not working that well.(Image credit: Frontier Developments) Gibbon ArchitectTake my current zoo, which I've named Zoo Bisou. It's still small with only a few habitats—two bears, two wolves, two nile monitors (giant lizards), one Galapagos tortoise, plus enclosed glass exhibits featuring two tarantulas and two snakes. I've been getting notifications for a while now that my bear's habitat is a disease risk because it's not clean, but repeatedly sending one of my zookeepers over to vacuum up enormous bear turds hasn't made the notification go away. After several frustrating minutes I finally make a guess that the issue might be the small river running through the back of the bear's habitat—even though the water looks fine ('Water View' mode doesn't show any alarming red danger zones).

I install a water purifier and the disease risk notification vanishes, but Planet Zoo didn't make it clear that the water was the problem, and it should have.And in the time it took to figure that out, I now have nine giant lizards instead of two, because one gave birth to a huge litter—so I have an overcrowding problem in that habitat. I also now have roughly 20 tarantulas (not only did my original pair give birth but their offspring have matured and reproduced incestuously), three more snakes, a new wolf cub, a new bear cub, and some protestors picketing because my turtle is sad that it doesn't have any toys. Plus, one of my zookeepers is complaining that he can't find his way to the staff room, which I discover is because he's somehow fallen through the map and is wandering around underground.

Taking the time to solve one problem gave literally everything else in the zoo time to develop their own problems.(Image credit: Frontier Developments)This combination of legit problems and game flaws isn't a complete disaster. The spiders giving birth means I can sell a bunch of them for cash, useful since I'm not currently operating at a profit. I can make my lizards' habitat a bit larger and start feeding them birth control pills so they don't produce another unexpected litter. I release my surplus snakes into the wild, which earns me conservation credits that can be spent on rarer animals, and I put a vet to work researching the tortoise to find out what kind of toys it likes—something I wish I had to option to do before I adopted the tortoise. (Unfortunately, research can only be undertaken when you've actually got the animal in the park already, which feels pretty irresponsible.) My underground zookeeper, meanwhile, has quit in frustration, so I drag him to the zoo's exit (he can't find it himself, naturally) and hire another.

There are no information in the game about an each animal is able to swim or not.