Anilrgowda

Ever wanted to raise a stingray? WildLife Zoo gives you the chance. This animal park simulator lets you drop in lots of creatures like crocodiles, leopards, polar bears, and dolphins, build attractions to reel in customers, and generate a profit to expand your operation. It's a formula that's been used plenty of times in the past, and Wildlife Zoo doesn't really break new ground. Overall it's a solid game, though it's got a clunky interface and some gameplay elements are awkwardly implemented. If you're absolutely craving a park simulation experience you can't really go wrong here, but you won't find much to get excited about.

Booting up the game reveals two modes of play: mission and freeplay. Twenty scenarios await in mission mode, which are accompanied by a cursory narrative that defines the specific victory conditions of each. Mission objectives range from revitalizing an impoverished park, raising and training a certain number of a species, or successfully researching a new strain of animal DNA. For the most part, the missions boil down to a tutorial for freeplay, giving you experience with climate control, terraforming, pond construction, economic management, proper deployment of employees, and resource production regulation. Once you're familiar with all the game has to offer, you can head off to the freeplay and build your own park from scratch on a number of maps from all over the world.


Building a park revolves around keeping the animals happy. You build a fenced pen, drop in animals and provide for their needs. Each animal prefers different kinds of food, which requires you to build a different type of resource production facility. Employees like trainers, trash collectors, doctors, and researchers can be hired to keep animals and customers happy. You'll need keepers, for instance, to keep food trays stocked and scoop up animal refuse. After your pen is set up, you can open the front gate to customers and build structures based on what they request. Food shops, lookout towers, plants and trees, and special ornamental structures like pyramids and fountains can be put in to keep the consumers interested and willing to spend money. A number of different advertising campaigns can be activated to keep new faces flowing in.

Once your basic infrastructure is set up, gameplay revolves around training and mating your creatures. Mating is easy enough, as long a creature's needs are taken care of and there are members of their race and opposite sex around, it'll happen. The training is a little more involved. Investment in this means animals will sell for higher profits should you decide to pawn some off. Each training facility you construct has a training level associated with it, meaning you start off with low level structures like a tire punching bag and progress to jumping through hoops. You'll also want to install items like telescopes, lookout towers, donation boxes, ATMs, jeep stations, and aquariums to squeeze as much money as possible out of your park. You'll also need to monitor the plant life in the environment, since much of it has requirements for soil composition and shoddy plants affect your customers' opinion of the park.
Unfortunately making your park profitable isn't as streamlined as it should be. There's a financial panel you can bring up that gives a basic breakdown of costs versus expenditures, but there's no way to manipulate finances from this screen. Instead, you need to go around to every bathroom, concession stand, and soda machine and tweak the prices through their own pop up interface. This can be somewhat of a pain, as you're not able to simultaneously view both the overall financial pane and the individual structure's pricing menu simultaneously. Should all financial management options been combined into one comprehensive menu system where you get a clear idea of how the changes made affect monthly income, this aspect of the game would have been more fun.
The game's overhead camera isn't as precise as it could have been, which becomes especially apparent when trying to modify topography. Though the game gives you a number of ways to customize how a landmass appears, it's often a trial and error process. Since you can never get a directly overhead view, trying to dig a hole turns out to be an annoyance since the bottom is often obscured by the sides. This gets particularly annoying when trying to position fountains to fill the recess with water, since each different fountain has a specific fill level that needs to be coordinated with where it's placed. There's a first-person perspective you can head into to explore your park, which is a nice extra but it's really easy to get caught on environmental obstacles.

Those issues aside, the game does have some nice features. The encyclopedia, which provides detailed information on every species of plant and animal in the game is a useful tool. Buttons that let you undo and redo your last action can also be handy in case you accidentally drop down a million dollar research facility when you meant to build a trash collection station. The A.I. for creatures and customers seemed generally responsive, though occasionally we'd find someone complaining about wishing they had something that was sitting right next to them.


Wildlife Zoo doesn't look all that good. Animals and people could have used more detail, and many of the background environments are pretty boring. A few of the buildings have interesting designs, but not many. Despite the generally low level of detail, this game gets choppy all too quickly as your park gets populated. The sound effects aren't going to capture your attention, though you only hear them if you zoom in close to the action. Zoomed out is where you'll spend most of the time playing, and there you'll hear some decent musical tracks consisting of tribal drums, strings, wind instruments, and the occasional chant.
Closing Comments
While Wildlife Zoo doesn't really do anything new, it's a decent game. Its graphical blandness is stretched over some enjoyable gameplay, though hampered by an inconvenient interface. There are plenty of animals to drop into your park, which helps keep things interesting, especially once you get a bunch of active pens and have to manage finances, employees, customers, and the surrounding greenery. If you're not in dire need of another animal park simulator, however, there's little in Wildlife Zoo to win you over.