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Microsoft Zoo Tycoon Preview

Publishing houses round the world must be filled to the brim with executives busily squeezing their brains in the hope of extracting yet another field of human endeavour that they could possibly base a tycoon game upon. BigKid have been lucky enough to receive a preview copy of Blue Fang’s latest offering, Zoo Tycoon, and I can only presume that “Biomedical Research Lab Tycoon” and “International Drug Cartel Tycoon” are on the way.

Flippancy aside, while Zoo Tycoon does not revolutionise or even stretch the genre, it does promise to be a fairly solid and entertaining game for the tycoon fanatic…

Surprisingly enough, Zoo Tycoon puts you in the position of running a zoo. You’re in charge of laying out your zoo to ensure the maximum amount of satisfaction for your guests, and ensuring that they don’t leave until they’ve spent every last dollar in their sticky little pockets. If you’ve played any Roller Coaster Tycoon at all you’ll know what to expect. You lay paths, hire staff, place attractions and make sure your guests have access to food and other necessities such as restrooms (I swear I caught a couple of the little brats relieving themselves on the grass because they couldn’t find a toilet, but then I do have an overactive imagination).

However, the game is called Zoo Tycoon, so the main emphasis is on acquiring animals and designing enclosures that will keep them happy. To this end you are offered a large selection of animals to choose from, and a variety of tools to get the environment as homely as possible for them, ranging from trees and other foliage, to rock formations and even the odd toy.

Zoo Tycoon offers a respectable range of scenarios to complete, in addition to three fairly in-depth tutorials A random example of a medium difficulty scenario is one that requires you to improve the appeal of a really crappy zoo within a given time period. The freeplay mode offering 3 different sized maps and adjustable monetary starting funds is where the game will probably offer the most mileage.

While the graphics of Zoo Tycoon will not leave you gob-smacked, they are well executed. Blue Fang have delivered a clean and appealing visual style without getting too cutesy, which would have been tempting given the subject matter.

I was very impressed with a couple of aspects of Zoo Tycoon. One was the sheer number of items available to place in the park. On top of the hundred odd animal species, there are loads of items to spruce up the appearance of your park, ranging from your standard trashcans and benches to statues and flowerbeds and pizza stands and the like. Add to that a huge number of auxiliary attractions such as elephant rides and reptile houses and you can really go to town with the design of your Zoo.

The other aspect that impressed me was how well thought out interface is. Designing attractions in Roller Coaster Tycoon can be a fairly hit and miss affair. Zoo Tycoon avoids this by giving you lots of feedback throughout the process of designing the exhibits. At the point of choosing your animals you can access background information about animals in the wild, which will give you clues about how to design environments. Once you purchase the animals your zookeepers can give you information like “Stripy Joe the Tiger needs more trees”. AND if you need your clues in a more direct manner little smiley or frowny faces will appear above the animal’s heads as you add or subtract items from their surroundings.

Unfortunately, Zoo Tycoon lacks the creative appeal and challenge that still keeps me firing up Roller Coaster Tycoon occasionally. Designing blocky exhibits just doesn’t compete with putting together huge roller coasters and watching them in action. Don’t get me wrong; there are some very challenging aspects to Zoo Tycoon. However these mostly involve the economic management of the park and making sure people can find the food stands, which can be very frustrating indeed (be aware that I have based my opinions on a preview copy of the game, and I would expect that the full version will address some of the balancing issues).

Ultimately I feel that Zoo Tycoon will make a great stocking filler for the kids. Given the amount of information offered on the different animals, you can fool yourself that it’s educational. However, the game does encourage experimentation along the lines of “who will win a fight out of a tiger and a salt water croc”, so if your child disturbs you maybe buy them a Tonka Truck instead.

Zoo Tycoon has gone gold, and should be on store shelves within the next month. A demo for the game is available from the official Microsoft site.

  posted by allie · at 8:06 am · filed under Previews