Zoo Tycoon
Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to creating a compelling management sim than taking a family experience and slapping the word “Tycoon” on it. Nothing proves this point more than Zoo Tycoon, a flat and predictable game that’s never more than slightly amusing.
Its RollerCoaster influences are never far from the screen thanks to the familiar interface, little giggling visitors, and pastel color palette. The central problem with Zoo Tycoon, though, is its real dearth of creativity: you can’t display much ingenuity as a player, and the developers have shown little themselves. The main task in the game is keeping your animals happy by following the instructions of the zookeepers right down to the literal ground. The zookeeper will tell you if the cheetah, for example, needs a little more dirt, a little more water, and a little less grass. As a player, that’s exactly what you do: simply follow instructions.
Beyond the individual animal exhibits, the rest of the park is completely pre-fab. From the tiny ice-cream stands to the enormous petting zoos, these buildings are already constructed, needing only to be clicked on and placed. You can set the general size of the pens and the layout of the walkways, and tweak the landscape a bit, but for the most part, the game has a cookie-cutter feel. The result of all the pre-fabrication is that almost all your parks look the same, with little opportunity to add any personal touch.
Zoo Tycoon has only 13 scenarios to complement the standard free-build mode. The tutorials and the beginning challenges gently ease you into the game, but once you reach the intermediate and advanced scenarios, some frustrations appear. For one, the game strangely allows you to construct your zoo in pause mode. This means that time-sensitive challenges are robbed of their urgency because you can build your zoo exactly the way you want it (cash permitting), and then turn on the clock. Even worse, you have no way to speed up time, so if you accomplish a scenario’s goals before the proscribed time limit, you’ll have to spend the remaining time just performing occasional upkeep, waiting for the clock to run out.
Graphically, Zoo Tycoon is not without its charms. Seeing those cute little people overpay for their salty snacks while gazing at the lions is sorta fun. Everything is quite small, however, so picking up some of the cutesy creatures to examine them is an exercise in pixel hunting. Fortunately, you can turn off the foliage so you can see your park a little more clearly, but on the flip side, the game seriously chugs when you have a lot of little people onscreen.