// PC GAMER — GAMING
Planet Zoo 2 review: Superstar animals and frustrating micromanagement
The animals are superstars, but they don't quite make up for the fiddly, frustrating micromanagement.
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What is it? Zoo-based management sim with added fish, birds, and nature reserves.
Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10
Planet Zoo 2's animals are truly majestic creations. Even at a time when games are gnawing at the chain-link fence of photorealism, watching Frontier's meticulously modelled critters clamber and prowl, swim and fly, or play with whatever enrichment toys you've dunked into their enclosures, is always a treat. Like watching animals in a real zoo, there's a soothing, almost therapeutic quality to it. Which is just as well, as there were times playing Planet Zoo 2 that I felt like I needed an emotional support animal.
Frontier Developments' management sims have never been the sleekest examples of the genre, but Planet Zoo 2 couldn't be fiddlier if it involved teaching an octopus to play the violin. Doing anything in this game requires navigating a tangled spider's web of menus, and while there are rewards to be had, I found the experience altogether more exhausting than enjoyable.
Planet Zoo 2 adds three major new features to Frontier's game of zoological construction, namely fish, birds, and nature reserves. While the aquatic and avian animals are welcome additions to Planet Zoo's menagerie, it's the latter feature that has the biggest impact on play. Rather than serving as simple attractions for your guests, zoos now contribute to conservation efforts around the globe, with you able to release reared and rehabilitated animals into vast swathes of untamed wilderness.
Perhaps "untamed" is the wrong word to use here. These reserves are central to Planet Zoo 2's career mode, where you manage a network of zoos while also restoring numerous reserves from the Swedish tundra to the jungles of Sumatra. This involves physically sculpting ecosystems, filling them with the right kinds of plants and undergrowth so they can support the animals you release into their rolling landscapes.
It's a noble idea, and what I admire most about Planet Zoo 2 is how seriously it takes its animals and the effort that goes into conservation (between the frequent and terrible dad jokes, in any case). But this doesn't change the fact that the reserves are not all that interesting to spend time in. It's basically a gamified terrain editor where you can wander around and take photographs.
Reserves also pull your attention away from the day-to-day management of your zoos, as the career mode is built heavily around releasing animals into these reserves. As such, you're constantly flitting in and out of menus as you hop between zoos to find the right animals and box them up, then hop to the reserve to watch a cutscene where the camera spins around your liberated animal—or at least, the foliage that it's usually hiding underneath.