TL;DR – Zoo Tycoon 3: Ultimate Animal Collection is an enjoyable if shallow experience, that’s a big step back from it’s predecessors. If you haven’t played either of the previous Zoo Tycoon games, then you’ll probably have a good time and be confused as to why so many people have been so mean to such a light-hearted and pleasant game. On the flipside, if you have played the previous games then you’ll probably be baffled by a lot of the design choices that have been made. For what it’s worth, this is a cross-gen game and as a consequence had to run on the mighty Xbawx 360. Which I can only imagine totally munted most of the game, due to that consoles worrying low RAM and overall hardware budget especially when you consider that you can switch from a birds-eye “tycoon” mode overview, down to 3rd person and back again at the press of a button. As for the game itself, I thought it was fun and had enough content to justify a purchase especially these days now that prices are so low. The campaign mode has 30 scenarios, plus a further 20 challenge scenarios alongside the sandbox mode and of course the ability to play with up to 4 players online managing the same zoo. So there’s plenty here and on the Xbox One version which I played, the game is pretty stable, looks decent (if a little basic) and provides a bit of challenge across it’s later missions. It’s just a shame that so many features are missing.
Quick Note: Firstly Zoo Tycoon 3 is just called Zoo Tycoon because historical revisionism is BASED. Secondly there are two versions available, the “Ultimate Animal Collection” and the base game. The base game, despite it’s name is actually cringe and you shouldn’t buy it. The ultimate animal collection adds a decent amount of content, has no build limitations on each map (i.e. you can build as much as you want) and once you’ve bought either version, you’re locked in so the marginally cheaper base game is a trap.
Zoo Tycoon 3 is another one of those Xbox One “exclusives” that are also available on PC, but which I’ve picked up for the glorious epoch defining Xbone because used copies are cheap and I like having physical discs. This initially made me uninterested in the game, because it had a bunch of DLC and I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of money on extra content that Microsoft will inevitably nuke at some indeterminable point in the future. Luckily for me and my fellow eccentrics, Microsoft decided to re-release the game with all of it’s extra content as “Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection”. This is version I’m looking at today and frankly thank God I waited because that build limit sounds like an absolute nightmare.
As for the game itself, it’s fun. Not ground breaking and arguably not even a good sequel, but considering the relatively niche that the game represents (or at least did before Zoo Tycoon imitators became a sub-genre of their own again) I was happy to blitz through the campaign missions over the span of a couple of days. These missions are generally pretty fun and have some unique twists, although I must confess that they do get a bit repetitive towards the end – especially with the DLC missions which don’t add anything new to the mix. The way these missions work are simple, you are given a small zoo that invariably sucks. It doesn’t have zoo keepers to keep the animals happy, it doesn’t have janitors to keep the feckless hairless apes from littering everywhere and often it doesn’t have animals in the right exhibits or toilets or something like that. So you start by zooming around, fixing all of the amateur mistakes and then need to start cracking on the mission objectives themselves. These often take the form of “raise zoo fame to X level” “keep the animals happy” “keep the guests happy” and sometimes interact with the new gimmick features this game has (more on that later). The gist for basically all of them is to stabilise the park, get profit rolling in and then purchase the right animals or just keep building up the zoo to tick the various mission checklists. It’s more fun than it sounds, but as mentioned the game isn’t ground breaking or revolutionary. Essentially you’re just playing a series of sandboxes, but with a somewhat strict timer attached to force you to spend money on the right things in generally the right order. Towards the end of the campaign, the game loves to hoist objectives on you that just take a lot of time so there’s some waiting involved which can be a tedious to be honest.
The other thing that’s tedious about this mode is the way that building things works in Zoo Tycoon 3. You see everything outside of a handful of basic structures – and I do mean basically everything – requires it to have been researched. You research it by trying to build the item and then being told you have to wait between 10 and 150 seconds for it to research (which costs money by the way) before you can build it. No, you can’t queue research so you need to say “I’d like to build a janitors office” and then wait a minute doing something else before you can build one – then realise you can’t build something else, so you need to wait for that to be researched. By the time you’re on mission 26 of 30, this starts to feel like padding because you’re researching the same things again and again and again like a medium Grasslands exhibit so you can have more than 3 antelopes. Why have more than 3? Because if there is less than 4, they get lonely and aren’t happy which means you are losing value from them. It also means they’re not happy, but they’re not real so moral qualms are an irrelevance. This might not sound like the spirit of the game, but you’re running a zoo for animals too dumb to survive so don’t blame the player blame the game. In this case the game is Zoo Tycoon 3 and it’s fun, but repetitive.
To alleviate the tedium, the game has a bunch of mechanics that are largely gimmicks but do make it great for kids and the young at heart. There’s a scrapbook (or was it snapshot album? Something like that) feature which encourages you to take cute pictures of every animal in the game. Then there’s the ability to make interactive exhibits for each animal enclosure, so that you can feed the elephants bananas or make silly faces with the chimpanzees or blast water at the rhinos. These are cute if insubstantial and I fear that a decent chunk of the development budget went towards these. The issue isn’t even that they’re not entertaining, but all animals act the same and the interactive mini-games are exceedingly shallow so if you’ve blasted a hippo with water blasting a rhino is the same experience. One last thing that’s slightly more worthwhile is the fact that you can breed your animals, which gives you a chance of getting an albino variant. This doesn’t do anything, but because Microsoft hates the achievement hunters it has spawned like poachers in the Serengeti you need every albino animal to get 100%. Oh and to have taken a picture of them too. There’s also the ability to release your animals to the the wild, which gives you some occasional notifications about how they’re doing great but otherwise doesn’t really do anything. I mean you get a slight boost to your Zoo’s fame, which is the main metric by which you unlock things (after researching them of course) but it’s barely a mechanic. You’re basically just selling them but instead of getting cash you get fame aka XP. The big fat main gimmick though is that you can switch from the overview mode, to a 3rd person mode and wander around your own Zoo. You can even drive a buggy around! No, you can’t run people over though.
Which brings to mind all the other little restricts that the game has undertaken to make everything appropriate for the kids. Even then, considering how morbid most fairy tales are (let alone the AI generated YouTube nightmares investing the platform) I can’t help but feel this is a little misguided. You can’t release the hungry hungry hippos by demolishing the fence for instance. In fact there’s no way to be anything but a benevolent zoo keeper, the game won’t let the animals hurt each other and you can’t starve them because they get swiped confiscated by less evil zookeepers. The whole thing is exceedingly twee and you’re never going to see a notification about how your released animal got killed by a fat dentist on safari. It’s not a big issue, but it also accompanies a big restriction in how much freedom you have. Because every exhibit has been pre-created, you can’t actually create a custom area for your animals – instead there are a selection of pre-made ones you are given the privilege of building. So if you want to make a sick custom lion exhibit then you can get the heck outta here. This means the game does feel kinda shallow, because you’re just slapping together various pre-made assets and outside of deciding where to place them you don’t get much say. To compound this issue, one of the main requirements guests have is that you have a good variety of animals. Which is understandable. But there are only just over a dozen species that can get in the main exhibits, with most animals being reskins of those (for example there are quite a few bears that uh… all have the same animations and needs and wants and dreams and aspirations). Most animals get shafted and are put in “mini-exhibits” which only allow between 2 and 3 (rarely 4) of them to be in a little fountain or patch of rock at a time. Can you customise these? Hahahaha NO!
So the meat of the game is less about running the Zoo you envisaged and more about the simulation of running a zoo. Or alternatively, of bumbling around your zoo like a dorky guest. Speaking of which, if you wander around for a bit you’ll notice that the various NPCs that are generated all have a handful of animations at most. Plus the skyboxes aren’t great. Which are small problems I admit and fully understand, but considering how neutered the zoo building is I think it’s a fair point to mention. I can only assume that you can’t build your own exhibits, or have a ton of different animals (like dinosaurs or aquatic life as per previous games in the series) because Zoo Tycoon 3 lets you bumble around the park in full 3D including Kinect support (WOW) with interactions instead of relying on one camera angle and sprite work. Which means that once the novelty of the gimmicks wear off, you’re relying on the core simulation aspect of Zoo Tycoon 3 to carry the experience. Alas the simulation is honestly pretty basic.
You see the way that Zoo Tycoon 3 tracks everything is basically just a simple balancing act. You have a “Zoo Fame” level (think of it like XP) which determines the variety of stuff you can buy. To get more XP, you build more things. These things cost money, but fortunately your XP increases the amount of guests visiting which generates more money. Therefore the more things you build, the more money you get to the point that you’d have to start seriously screwing around to actually lose money over time. The catch is that money trickles in, and I do mean trickles in. This is actually how the campaign missions provide their challenge, because the time limit only gives you so much time and therefore income to do everything that’s required of you. For more casual players though, this is an irrelevance. In fact it’s a total irrelevance because sandbox has no money worries at all. You just have infinite money. So the simulation is a total gongshow in the sandbox mode that most people actually care about. As for the campaign, well the money worries are only a factor because of the time limit. As for the rest of the simulation, you’ve got guest happiness and animal happiness. Guest happiness is a global value, represented as the accumulation of multiple factors such as entertainment, animal variety, bathroom availability, tidiness and so on. The problem with this though, is that it’s a global value. So if you have low bathroom happiness, you can build some bathrooms in the middle of nowhere and so long as they’re connected it doesn’t matter. Sure you’ll probably place them around the zoo in an attempt at roleplaying, but it doesn’t matter. Similarly if the tidiness if low, you just hire more janitors. Entertainment low? Build more entertainment buildings. So guest happiness is really just about keeping an eye on some meters that you can see at any time by holding down a trigger, and building whatever is needed. Keep the happiness high and people will keep coming, so you get money to buy things, to get more XP to unlock things, so you can build new things, to get more XP and then get more guests, who will want more bathrooms and so on. As for animal happiness, it’s global within the exhibit. So as long as you have a feeding machine, one interactive entertainment, one animal washer and the right habitat type plus the minimum number of animals to fulfil the social stat you’re all good. Now you do have to repair and restore the feeders and washers… unless you hire zoo keepers which you will, because otherwise it gets pretty tedious.
There are some other things you can faff around with, like advertising (which just increases the maximum amount of guest you can have over your XP allowance) and park research (which uses the same research timers so I never bothered with it) or you can optimise the prices of various things (which again I never bothered with because the defaults are fine and in sandbox you have infinite money anyway). Yet ultimately these can’t cover the cracks at the heart of the game’s simplistic simulation. So the sandbox is restricted, if appreciably good looking in 3rd person and the economy side is basically a sideshow. How can I then say I had fun? Well, the campaign missions are basically a series of light puzzles that encourage you to do all the various faffing. You’ll need to have X number of different animals, to interactive with the elephants and the chimps, to breed kangaroos and then take a picture of the baby, to do these while not letting any guest satisfaction bar drop below green and so on. It’s not an onerous challenge, but it’s still a satisfying one and trying to lay out my zoo with a tight budget and a tight deadline was often fun. Sure the sandbox mode is a let-down and everything else is a bit janky, but the campaign is still enjoyable at least as someone who only played the originals a little bit (I was too busy with Simcity 3000 and Warcraft 3).
So in conclusion, Zoo Tycoon 3 is a flawed game that struggles to compete with it’s predecessors which were made for far simpler hardware. Yet if you can overlook the game’s simplistic simulation and/or haven’t played the previous games much, it’s an enjoyable if shallow little tycoon game. Sure the sandbox is limited by having no economy, but to unlock things in the sandbox you need to play the campaign and challenge mode as otherwise your sandbox will be stuck at a low level forever. As such you need to play the other modes to get to relax in the sandbox, and these other modes provide a modest challenge and some variety. Plus the gimmicks are kind of nice, I mean the animals do look good and the photo mode and interactions are cute… at least for a while. As such I’d recommend Zoo Tycoon with two caveats. The first is that fans of the previous games will be disappointed. The second is that those who missed out on those games, will probably prefer them unless they are literally children. For those willing to give the shot on it’s own merits however, I can’t imagine that they won’t get a solid dozens out of the campaign and close to double that if they care about the challenge mode and want to play around with the sandbox side. Considering that the game is available on Gamepass or for a low price of around a tenner on disc (or Steam sale) it’s hard to recommend people avoid the game entirely. Just be aware that this is another example of a franchise who’s best days are far behind it.