Business simulators are strange beasts. They can be compulsively addictive, challenging and perhaps even educational, or they can be the object of scorn and contempt from so-called serious gamers.
Zoo Tycoon manages to hit the middle ground between serious sim and derision-target by pitching itself as a family game, suitable for children of junior-school age and casual gamers. In short, it hides below the radar of the hardcore gamers.
And that’s no bad thing. It would be a shame for a game as endearing and family friendly as this to catch flak from people who really have no interest in playing it. This is the kind of game you can happily play with your children or your grandmother in the room — in fact, the children will certainly want to play, and granny may well want a turn as well.
The original Zoo Tycoon was part of a splurge of similar business sims that swamped the PC game shelves in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and inspired a host of browser games such as Farmville. This is the game’s first outing on a console, and despite some over-complex menus, it’s made the transition pretty well.
What the game offers is the chance to run a zoo, from choosing the admission price to cleaning up the elephant poo. The money you make from visitors can be spent on expanding your zoo, which brings in more visitors. You can bring in more animals and open new exhibits and open restaurants and snack bars.
Ultimately, you are working to release your animals back into the wild, but in the meantime you get to feed bananas to your chimps, and who doesn’t love that?
Get your prices wrong, or overstretch your budget, however, and you’ll find keeping your animals in good condition and your zoo open increasingly tough.
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Frontier Developments
Genre: Business sim
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox 360
Version tested: Xbox 360
Star rating: 3.5/5
