Let’s Build a Zoo (PS5)

Product Information

Control everything that happens in your park, from what your animals eat to what eats your animals...

The Dinosaur DLC is a fantastic addition to an already great game and is much of the same set up as your original zoo. You can fly there while working on your current zoo, and with you you’ll take a small stipend to set things up. The different dinosaurs are discovered and gain entry to your zoo through a group of palaeontologists who you can pay to discover more variants of dinosaur. With 51 dinosaurs to discover and display in your zoo, there is a lot of digging to be done. From your favourite stegosaurus to extinct mammals like woolly mammoths. With all that said, everything else is translated pretty well and makes the game relatively easy to play with an attempt to use as little buttons as possible trying not to convolute the controls. It’s a hard task but one I think Springloader has done creatively and intelligently. Dinosaur Island Expansion DLC

Learn all about your new charges and build environments perfect for their needs, from dense, lush forests to craggy volcanic peaks. If you'd rather your guests could get up close and personal there are brand new all-glass panels, as well as natural brush fencing! Let’s Build A Zoo is just as wonderful on console as it was on its initial release on PC. As with any building management simulator, some controls will never feel completely intuitive moving from mouse to controller, and Let’s Build A Zoo is no different, but only in minor areas. The Dinosaur Island DLC takes all the highlights from the base game and amplifies them in a fantastic addition to an already extremely enjoyable game.

It feels really fast paced with the day to day too. There is a pause mechanic of course but to see if things work or not you get a small window of opportunity to make corrections and with all the systems running it just sorta made me feel incredibly anxious. Let's Build a Zoo is simple enough on the surface that you can play as casually as you'd like, building a fancy zoo and keeping your guests happy. But for those players who like a deeper simulation, there are numerous underlying systems that can be utilized and explored. Let’s Build A Zoo is a pixel art title, however, it doesn’t just feel like your standard pixel art. It almost feels like it has been polished slightly to leave a nice smooth edge. The designs of all the in-game assets really brought the game to life. The animal assets and animations used to look great. I would be lying if I said I didn’t smile when I first saw a little rabbit hopping around the enclosure I just made. Zoo Life Visually, the game uses a 16-bit visual style and while we’re usually not huge fans of this, it’s the best way to convey all the visual info you need. We still maintain that the original Civilization is the best one because the 2D pixel visuals make everything clearer and that’s the case here. There’s an absolute torrent of visual information to deal with and so doing this in isometric 3D or full 3D wouldn’t have worked. And yeah, the music is a little annoying but this is more of a ‘put on a podcast’ kind of game anyway. To play this game on PS5, your system may need to be updated to the latest system software. Although this game is playable on PS5, some features available on PS4 may be absent. See PlayStation.com/bc for more details.

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The biggest issue for us is with the gene-splicing mechanic though. Any two animal types can be combined into hybrids. They’re popular with visitors but can’t be bred and so don’t really add much to your long-term expansion plans. We used the gene-splicing facilities instead to clone rarer animals for breeding which is way more important and, also, not entirely at odds with the game’s conservation-based theme.