Zoo Tycoon Review

Bear-ly worth it.

In Zoo Tycoon, nothing is more important than your animals. Whether you're simply watching an elegant giraffe leaning over a pool to drink water or marveling at the adorable baby elephants romping around, every species in this menagerie is delightful. But unlike the original Zoo Tycoon games for PC, the Xbox One version’s poorly laid out menus and worse Kinect functionality make them hard to enjoy.

You learn how to become a zookeeper through 10 in-depth training missions that clearly explain the most important aspects of the job – building exhibits and managing the layout – while not overwhelming you with details. This is where you learn to swap between the neat third-person exploration mode and the top-down Tycoon mode. It’s also the first time you get a taste of the inefficient menus you must consistently flip through to conduct zoo business, no matter which of the three modes you’re playing.

While menus are a consistent and important part of every sim, especially the older Zoo Tycoon games on PC, they’re poorly designed for the Xbox One. There are nice page-turning

sound effects and some extra educational information, but that's where the praise ends.

For example, to keep your animals happy you’re required to place animal-care options like a feeder and bathing station in every exhibit, along with some enrichment options for them to play with. That nostalgic process is made harder than it needs to be by the cumbersome menu design, which makes it aggravating to move from one build option to another. There’s no option to build multiple instances of the same item either, so if you place one tree (or anything) and want to place a second, you’re forced to go back through the menus every time.

Building new locations automatically adds the most accessible paths for your guests to get there, which, while convenient, takes away some creative freedom. Considering I'm supposed to be making the zoo of my dreams, it's annoying that I’m unable to decorate how I please.

Making sure all of your cute animals are happy is a perpetual priority, as is raising your zoo’s fame. Timed scenarios only give you 15 to 45 minutes to complete everything on a checklist, sometimes leaving little time to sit back and enjoy the exhibits you’ve built. Stopping to smell the roses once in a while might’ve made always having the same few objectives tacked on to otherwise-unique missions get repetitive a little less rapidly.

Research is as fast as this sloth.

Yet it's research, which is undoubtedly important for real-life animal conservation efforts, that's the worst part of Zoo Tycoon. In Campaign and Challenge, you have to research just about everything, including animals, concessions, facilities, decorations, scenery, exhibits, all the way down to how you advertise your Zoo, before you can build or do it. Researching can take anywhere from five seconds to two minutes, but you never know how long until after you select it, and you can only ever research one thing at a time. Having to sit there and wait for a lion exhibit I want to finish researching so that I can research the lion, as well as all of the individual enrichments, one at a time, is a major frustration.

I expected Campaign Mode to roar louder than the other two, but its 20 levels all feel too similar to one another – and to the tutorial – and boredom sets in quickly. Their rewards are just as thin, with only a couple of decorations and a location to unlock for use in the other two modes. Challenge Mode tests your ability to make the most of your resources by plopping you in a location with a set budget, along with periodic objectives. But if you’ve ever balanced a checkbook, the difficulty here doesn’t live up to the mode’s name. Freeform Mode is the only place where Zoo Tycoon spreads its wings and refreshingly lets go of the confines of money and research. The only goals are to enjoy yourself, the animals, and build whatever you want at your own pace and progression comes at a rewarding pace.

The elephants couldn't be cuter.

Multiplayer allows you and up to three friends to work together in any of the three modes, but unless you’re using headsets it can be hard to coordinate. Everyone can contribute to tasks for completion, so getting objectives done is easier than ever. It’s also fun to ride around with friends in buggies in third-person view. But you can still only research one thing at a time which seems limiting when you have extra people waiting around for certain things to finish researching.

Again, though, it all comes back to the animals, and in theory, Kinect offers a whole new way to interact with them. They’re a disappointment. You can build three Kinect-capable interactions in your zoo, but they only work for specific animals. Feeding and washing animals with Kinect can be frustrating because the camera didn’t always pick up my movements, but the facial recognition is incredible when it works. While it can only be used with chimps and big cats, they can distinguish when you’re blinking or opening your mouth and mirror your actions. I loved playing with my baby chimps… but it’s always faster and easier to use the controller to manipulate the animals than Kinect.

This tiger loves her exhibit.