Planet Zoo 2 Review
Turtles were getting stressed out by guests hammering on the glass like they were at a Bass Pro Shop trying to wake up the catfish, and the fix was signage telling people to knock it off, and that one small design problem told me more about Planet Zoo 2 than any trailer did.
This is a game about the exact point where animal welfare and human money grind against each other AND UNDERSTANDING HOW TO MAKE SURE you have a varied zoo is just as important as understanding that variability doesn't mean throwing fish in the alligator pools
What's this another review. Yep I was really unhappy with the number of people not pissed about the last reviews so I figured let's do another one because maybe people arguing about fish flake nutrient options will get the fires stoked.
I review games
I buy copies even if devs give me codes
My money is on the line
And I don't take it.
Frontier Developments opens the gates on October 13, 2026, nearly seven years after the original, landing on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S the same day, which after years of watching this industry drip-feed platforms like a diner rationing ketchup packets is a post apocalyptic scenario is almost suspiciously timed.
It's $49.99, and the games made some huge changes including hangs on three additions, fully aquatic animals, birds flying loose inside aviaries you build yourself, and Wildlife Reserves that yank conservation out past the gift shop into actual wilderness. Most sequel feature lists turn out to be one mechanic wearing three different trench coats.
These three actually reshape how the game plays, and I say that holding the corpse of my own failed zoo, a magnificent disaster called Jeremyassic Park that failed because sure Nature finds a way. If nature can be described as a Noah's Ark amount of pissed off animals belting it for the high ground.
Let's begin
Story
Let's lay it down. Like the prior game you are a zoo creator and keeper, managing the day to day, financial, logistics, and nature is metal moments of a zoo.
Career modes let you learn as you travel the world helping out zoos with troubles, building new elements, and researching reserves.
Career mode pins a badge on you for FEN, the Fauna and Ecosystems Network, which is one part nature documentary and one part temp agency for people who cry at panda footage, and it runs you through assignments across zoos and reserves around the world. That is the official story.
The real story of any management sim is the one you author through your own bad decisions, edit out with paths that don't lead into dead ends, and hopefully publish with a big old high star rating from guests, and this game hands you the pen early and dares you to use it.
Mine started innocently. I built a wicked zoo, all sorts of amazing animals, real showpiece stuff.
But I named my zoo Bobbiton and just like john I went off half cocked.
Then a zebra got out. No worries, I boxed it up and dispatched a mechanic to walk it back to the enclosure.
While I was watching that, another zebra escaped, except nothing was being leapt over, they were just running stupid fast, an equine version of dog zoomies, so I raised the fence, which usually works and did, except for the chimps, whose barrier my now overworked mechanic, already bitching about money, had to go repair too. Boxed them up.
Seemed quiet.
Then all hell broke loose, and I mean literally. A chimp got into the wild dog park.
The dogs did not care for the company but the pussies ran, leaping or possibly teleporting through a fence, and behind them came a human tide, a mass influx of sweaty zoogoers sprinting for the exits, tripping, shoving, gunning for the parking lot.
I cannot confirm whether that alliance was design or the single oddest moment I have ever captured in a simulator, but for one stretch the dogs and the chimps appeared to be working together like a YouTube video of the monkeys in India riding dogs around, chasing the crowd out the front gate. Oh wait, now the zebras were out.
Oh wait, the ostriches were pissed because another dog had snuck into their habitat. And thus began the downfall of Jeremyassic Park, because I never recovered from spending nearly all my money right before the coup.
A management sim earns its keep when the collapse feels this specific and this personal. And that wasn't even me trying to build the multi species habitats which warn you to watch which 2 species you put together which sounds like a fucking challenge to me.
Gameplay
The mode structure is familiar in the right ways. Franchise links your network of facilities together with animal trading between players, Sandbox is the unrestricted creative mode for the freaks who spend four hundred hours on one entrance plaza, and Career provides the directed objectives, and all three feed the same management systems with different purposes, guided goals, a growing organization, or pure obsessive arranging of a single habitat.
If you are like me you will lose entire evenings to that third one and there is no shame in it.
The Wildlife Reserves are a huge change. Instead of an animal's story ending at a release command, you release animals from your zoo into these broader restored landscapes, ripping out invasive vegetation, placing suitable trees and rocks, meeting welfare requirements before the animals ever show up, and afterward you can walk the whole property on foot or cruise it by jeep watching your released giraffes live their best lives.
The opening reserve runs African wildlife, a Sumatran Rainforest reserve appeared in the September presentation, and Frontier is partnering with the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums to ground the habitat and welfare design in real zoo practice.
What this actually does is turn a release from a menu click into the beginning of a whole new management task, conservation as a place you visit and maintain rather than a checkbox you tick while a stat goes up, and that connection between the detailed work inside the gates and the larger wilderness beyond them is the clearest identity this sequel has.
These are massive, lower-staffed locations where animals live in territories without fences, and you zone and shape the land for each group and keep the ecosystem balanced, and there is something almost meditative about it, a completely different tempo from the zoo itself.
Time backs all of it up. Seasons vary by biome and drive weather probability, temperature, and the entire look of your properties, temperate sites cycle spring, summer, autumn, and winter across longer in-game years, and welfare now affects fertility, so weak conditions during a breeding season can defer conception until the following year.
Your screwups have a calendar now, which is a quietly brutal way to make you care about January.
Aquariums push the construction system underwater and get weird in the best way. Blacktip reef sharks, hawksbill turtles, ocean sunfish, and shoaling fish lead the charge, with the big animals getting individual welfare tracking while shoals are managed collectively like one very opinionated organism.
Depth preferences spread activity through the habitat, creatures navigate in full three dimensions through underwater arches, staff literally get in the water for maintenance, and pumps supply freshwater, brackish, or saltwater depending on who is living there.
The wrinkle I genuinely respect is the guest problem, because stressed turtles mean you are placing signage to discourage people from pounding the glass, and suddenly aquarium design is a balancing act between visibility for paying customers and not torturing a hawksbill for profit. That is real aquarium management distilled into a placing-a-sign decision.
Aviaries take the same strategies and tactics vertical. You set boundaries and supporting poles and the mesh covering generates to fit, so no more praying the roof math works out, and birds like the toco toucan and secretarybird fly and perch through the whole volume while suitable species share walk-through paths with your visitors.
Vary the heights and the roof shapes and these things become genuine architectural statements instead of sad net cages, and vertical arrangement mattering is a bigger deal than it sounds for a builder this detailed.
Construction keeps piece-by-piece building alongside ready-made blueprints, object scaling, adjustable colors, pathing tools, foliage brushes, terrain brushes, four new scenery themes joining five returning ones, and Frontier Workshop now serves cross-platform blueprints straight in the construction browser, so you can handcraft your masterpiece habitat and then shamelessly download a stranger's gift shop, which is the correct amount of effort to spend on a gift shop.
Paths get area-fill paving, stamped plaza presets, and a dedicated border tool, so no more junctions that look like a drunk octopus got loose with a compass.
Landscape stamps slam down dunes and rolling hills fast, terrain paints respond dynamically to angle and elevation instead of smearing around like ketchup on white bread, a curl tool shapes ground yet another way, expanded foliage brushes fill bigger environments, and you can rough out a habitat's whole silhouette before sweating the individual rocks.
The business loop braids animal welfare, guest satisfaction, and finances, and Zoo Reputation now splits into four readable categories, Animal Husbandry, Sustainability, Guest Education, and Guest Experience, so when your rating is in the toilet you finally know exactly whose fault it is, including whether you remembered recycling and renewable power like a functioning adult.
Marketing is its own little sideshow, you take fancy photos of your top bonobo and plaster him on banners, shirts, and underwear with the zoo's name on them. Past basic welfare sits a new Thriving state that demands species research and an environment meeting tougher needs, and it pays out longer lifespans and fatter visitor donations, so quality of care and your finances finally shake hands.
My favorite flip is staff facilities, because the original treated keeper buildings like radioactive waste you buried behind a hill to protect guest ratings, and now visitors enjoy watching keepers and vets work, turning the guts of the zoo into part of the show like an open kitchen.
Research spreads across animals, zoo management, animal improvements, and diseases, and you can send staff out to train so they get faster and more selective when three emergencies hit at once and they have to choose. Speaking of disease, constantly researching what makes a hyena get the turbo shits while also making sure some 18 year old employee makes hamburgers without giving the whole park dysentery is a balance you will always be fighting.
Animal raising goes all the way down to food, mating, tracking how many times a wild dog fucks before he gets tired, and then ending up with too many of the little billy bastards and putting them all on birth control to slow the roll. The Planet Hub lets you hop between zoos and reserves mid-play while managing trading, storage, and research.
Path fixes are in though I still found ways to flummox the system with my Escher level desire to put 2 next to one another and somehow they wanted to test the boundaries of 3d space. But the additions here with aviaries aquariums and the like are awesome.
Research has changed in many ways from the way it was done earlier and I can see that not being on everyone's improvement list
The building side still has teeth. Paths are my kryptonite, either it takes too long or the sensitivity is cranked too high and the pathing tool tries to build a path to the fucking clouds.
Placing items inside habitats sometimes just refuses to look right no matter how you nudge it, like the game needs some kind of morphing system to marry objects to terrain.
Graphics
Seasons do heavy visual lifting here, shifting weather probability, temperature, and the entire appearance of zoos and reserves by biome, and the day and night cycles plus weather run smoothly on top of it. The animals themselves carry the upgrade load, with clear attention paid to animation, fur, feathers, scales, and breathing, which matters when the whole welfare system asks you to read creatures visually.
Performance holds up well with frame generation and a deep stack of graphical adjustments to pull from, and you can crank things way down if needed, or push the total number of bystanders wandering your park up a great deal if your ego requires crowds. Fair warning that a lot is happening under the hood, and the more light sources and complex geometry you add, the more you pay in frames.
Transfers between parks and reserves sit a quick load or two away, which keeps the multi-site loop from feeling like punishment.
Chimpanzees transition between climbing and walking, launch across structures, sprawl on elevated beams, tigers scratch suitable trees and interact with scenery beyond their designated enrichment, and layered animation lets mood bleed into ordinary behavior, so an unhappy tiger goes visibly lethargic and subdued instead of making you play spreadsheet detective.
Frontier's stated goal is that you can recognize a problem, understand its cause, and identify a response just by watching, with animal sound carrying information alongside posture, and the welfare panels are still there for the number crunchers. An enclosure becomes something you read over time through how its residents move, rest, and interact, and that is the line separating people who make zoo games from people who make zoo games.
Luckily the game runs very well even without upscaling or frame gen and even on mostly high end settings. You can dial it way down and it still looks pretty good though the deep sense of menace from zooming on in a komodo dragon is a bit lost when he looks like a last gen texture test in unreal.
At night with the lights out and if your like me who likes to make sure that the humans can't go more than a hundred feet without a neon light blasting at them, you can see the fps take a couple dips. But other than a stutter or two streaming a camera view across a massive zoo it was fine.
Audio
Sound
The functional star here is the animals. Vocalizations carry actual gameplay information alongside posture, part of that readable-habitat design where you diagnose a problem with your ears before you open a single panel.
That is exactly the correct priority for a simulator, sound doing simulation work instead of decoration.
Music
If Muzak in an elevator could have its own Muzak made for it that was played somewhere else it would be this
Nothing grabbed me, and I mean that as a neutral report rather than a slam. I could not hum you a bar after hours of play, which means it either stays politely out of the way or simply evaporated, and for a management game that is the least offensive way to fail to be memorable.
Voice
Other than the voices of various keepers who have run their zoos in the ground and can't figure out how to get things working so they decide to call you, who also knows nothing, most of the voices are just there to tell you the next thing that's broken, or the next issue with the bigger animals attempting to eat the smaller ones, or why zoo goers are pissed They work.
Fun Factor
The spectator sport alone is worth the price of a long session. Watching your entire guest list sprint out the front gates because you are reenacting the Planet of the Apes escape scene never stops being funny, tripping and running and just gunning for the exits, or watching a zebra bound right over that fence you were sure would contain it.
The reserves offer the opposite pleasure, that meditative zoning and balancing of territories, a stillness that contrasts hard with the moment to moment chaos of juggling store and habitat prices against the rising expectations of workers being asked to hoof it across an entire park to capture a fucking troop of monkeys that is animal housing it across the food stalls.
Photo Mode plus first person guest exploration means you can finally admire your own work at eye level instead of god altitude, and yes, that is how the bonobo ended up on the underwear. Losing an evening to the arrangement of one habitat remains one of the most honest pleasures this genre offers.
Final Thoughts
Rough edges exist and deserve daylight. Sometimes something as simple as adding owls to a transfer to a reserve just does not work, and finding out why something is not working is nowhere near as easy as finding out that it can work.
Worse, zero information was posted that my owls had picked up some horrendous sex disease, and the only indication anything was wrong was the reserve taking one look at them, quarantining itself, and quietly refusing forever, a locked door with no note on it.
Some menus also do not feel like they live in the right place, or are never pointed out as important even when they are, and someone else's idea of a nested menu's best spot can make it the least accessible spot, though nothing here is close to unplayable. This is the build played ahead of the October 13 street date, so day one patches may shuffle some of that. I still think its worth buying.
The Deluxe edition adds six species, the Golden Eagle, Golden Lion Tamarin, Great Hammerhead Shark, Axolotl, Blue and Gold Fusilier, and Longfin Batfish, if tropical fish and an eternal salamander are worth fifteen extra dollars to you.
What Planet Zoo 2 actually delivers is a direction, one where every carefully built habitat is meant to lead outward, from a managed enclosure to a living reserve, care and construction and ecological restoration sitting on the same continuum, and even with a zebra-shaped hole in my heart and a zoo named Jeremyassic Park buried in debt, I want to follow it there.
Comments