Planet Zoo is simply wonderful; a bright and breezy park builder that gushes with enthusiasm for its charges. There’s depth to spare here, pushing further than either of Frontier’s most recent management games have, and it leans into its own identity, with a keen eye for the importance of education, animal welfare and preservation.

Nearly flawless, Planet Zoo is a masterpiece of tycoon simulation, and is one of the most relaxing, engaging, and fantastical pieces of entertainment of 2019. It's a showcase of fun mechanics, and it really draws from the wealth of experience in Frontier Developments as a developer. It's impossible not to recommend this to anyone who has even a passing notion about the genre. Get this!

Planet Zoo is a complex and deep sim management title that’s carefully crafted to offer hours of meaningful and educational enjoyment.

Planet Zoo is the culmination of the best parts of Frontier’s previous efforts, but is far more than the sum of its parts. Hundreds of creatures, both cute and deadly, need homes, and it’s up to you to help them thrive and survive. While a few bugs hamper the overall experience, this is another simulation game that’ll keep me building sprawling and ever evolving parks for hundreds of hours to come.

Quotation forthcoming.

Planet Zoo is a new step in simulation games that is backed by a large community and has enormous potential for expansion.

I suspect that many players will have an uneven time with Planet Zoo. At times, it's pretty straightforward and provides the player with plenty of feedback so they can improve their zoo. Other times, the game has you digging around in areas that are unnecessarily tough to figure out, with tutorials that barely touch on the feature (if at all). The thing with Planet Zoo is that it is so charming and appealing that the fun parts outweigh the frustrating ones. It's not a perfect game in the genre, but it is one of the best ones you can play right now.

Planet Zoo is a beautiful zoo simulator that shines in options, depth and challenge, and it gives you the possibility to build true gems. Every now and again Planet Zoo drops the ball when talking about smaller animals and building options, but the messing around is more than worth it.

Planet Zoo may be the most detailed zoo simulation ever. Every facet of the zoo - from the habitat of the animals to the release of endangered species into the wild - is in the player's control. This can be overwhelming at first, but luckily the career mode offers a good tutorial. The most impressive thing about the game, however, is the design and realistic behavior of the animals themselves.

Planet Zoo is a very entertaining title for the fans of strategy genre, as good visuals, smooth gameplay, great customization features and a huge amount of animals and insects to play with in the Zoo, make it one of the best strategy games of 2019.

Even with occasional design quirks and bugs holding it back, I adore this game as is. Similar to Planet Coaster, I think it'll get better over time, and Frontier will surely flesh out the species list with DLC packs. But even if that doesn't happen, I'll be satisfied. Some of us have been waiting decades for a game like Planet Zoo to come along and scratch our Zoo Tycoon itch. Now that it's here, I can't get enough.

Planet Zoo is a true zoo-sim, full of details and love for the nature.

I played the game almost non-stop for several days and I feared that after this kind of marathon I will forever hate it but it didn’t happen. Planet Zoo educates and entertains – in marvellous scenery to boot. [01/2020, p.62]

Planet Zoo is a wildly satisfying park-builder with a menagerie of lovely looking animals.

Planet Zoo is a great management game that lets you impose your own goals and always gives you something to strive for. With incredible graphical fidelity, a huge overlapping array of mechanics to balance and incredible detail, the only issue is the sometimes annoying controls.

A tremendous game that really pushes the boundaries. Both an excellent educational resource, and a superb time sink. This would be a perfect-scoring title if it wasn’t for a few too many bugs and stability issues, but I still recommend it incredibly highly.

It seems impossible not to enjoy the construction and management experience proposed by Planet Zoo.

In the here and now, Planet Zoo is the best zoo management game around and it’s not even close. It also features far stronger management systems than Frontier has ever achieved before, culminating in a fantastic package for tycoon and animal fans alike. There’s a lot to love here, even if the scope for creativity can’t hope to match Planet Coaster.

Frontier succeeds in doing what we all wanted with Planet Zoo: to offer Planet Coaster's freedom of expression and creation, paired with a worthwhile management game. Icing on the cake, they also bring a game full of caring messages and pro-animal activism, contrasted with a cold observation about the capitalism involved in the animal rehabilitation. Despite some problems related to the construction or the interface, it's beautiful, it's complete, and we can spend dozens of hours perfecting our park or taking care of the sad little fur balls.

Planet Zoo has instantly awakened memories of carefree childhood.

Planet Zoo is undoubtedly the most authentic zoo simulator you can play, perhaps to an extent that will deter some people. While micro-management and organization can be frustrating at times, the beauty of your creations, welfare of your animals, and happiness of your guests makes all that effort worthwhile.

If your passion is building in videogames and you love animals, Planet Zoo is one of your best options if you have a PC.

Planet Zoo is a great tycoon made in the age where tycoon games seem extinct. And it's pretty much the best game for animal lovers. But not for every animal lover. Patient and talented builders will create new and improved parks, achieving new levels of satisfaction. Others (and by this I mean almost everybody) will become bored after a few hours.

Planet Zoo is the best zoo management game ever. If you're an animals lover, you can't skip it. There are pathfinding issues that can break immersion sometimes, easily forgivable and forgettable. Cute, handsome, deep, intelligent and with a gigantic lifespan, Planet Zoo is making the Tycoon genre great again.

Planet Zoo, considered as a Zoo Tycoon spiritual successor, proposes a fun experience in where you can manage your own zoo, care your animals, improve the facilities and surprise your customers.

When creating a business sim that attempts to capture the subject matter, a fine line needs to be walked. It can’t get too deep in the weeds of minutia without offering real explanations, nor can it make those explanations boring. On the other hand, it can’t make it too simple, as the subject matter is a huge draw to a specific audience. Planet Zoo pulls off the act and manages to be a great time for it. Plus, people will accidentally learn about the subject matter without ever feeling like they are playing a dreaded “educational” game. There are myriad technical issues that keep the title from being perfect and some of them are biggies. Based on Frontier Developments’ track record, these will be smoothed out in the coming weeks and months. Once this is done, Planet Zoo is arguably the best of this type of game to date.

Planet Zoo is a nice heir to Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon with colorful visuals and a rich gameplay. Still, the game lacks any kind of birds or sealife, but i guess that's what DLC's are for.

Overall, Planet Zoo is a decent zoo simulator that gives the impression of being easy and light-hearted, but goes a little bit too deep into micromanaging and bogs the gameplay down much of the time. Slower pacing, clearer instructions and some randomized landscapes for your own zoos would work wonders and make the game more enjoyable to younger gamers as well. Future updates will probably address some of these issues and also fix the tutorials that sometimes miss that you have already done what you were asked to do and fail to move to the next step.

Planet Zoo is a great journey to the world of exotic animals, kept in captivity for the eyes of others. It is a complex, generous and beautiful game with lots of interesting ideas. The tax for its generosity is bad controls and higher hardware requirements. [Issue#300]

Mistakes, creature deaths and restarts are likely to happen here to gain the most out of Planet Zoo, but like real life, no one really magically makes a fantastic zoo on their first go, and with the lessons learned from Jurassic Park Evolution, Frontier Developments has made Planet Zoo a better game than its dinosaur filled predecessor, and is by far the best zoo management/builder you can play today.

Despite the odd issue, Planet Zoo is easily the best modern zoo management title available today.

Planet Zoo is another great game of Frontier Developments. The way it modernize the Tycoon genre, is really interesting and a most have to all the fans of this kind of games.

Planet Zoo is the best zoo management game that you can find. It has a lovely and colourful technical approach, and a lot of content, but suffers from weak ergonomy, tutorials, and pathfinding.

For all its problems—and there are many—Planet Zoo is one of the most satisfying builders I’ve ever played. Maybe not on the management side, which is still a thin and easily manipulated veneer. Guest opinions are weirdly arbitrary, as is cash flow. If you’re looking for a “difficult” builder, Planet Zoo ain’t it. I’m here to build my dream zoo though, and for that there’s no better option. After 30 hours I’ve yet to acquire some of the rarer animals—lions, orangutans, gorillas, rhinos. I’m also far from exhausting the themes, having barely touched the “New World” and “Indian” sets. There’s a lot here.

Planet Zoo will first make you remember Zoo Tycoon and then happily forget it when you realize you’ve got yourself a new game, as good as its ancient predecessor.

Planet Zoo is a fantastic zoo management game that I wholeheartedly recommend, whether you’re looking for some Zoo Tycoon nostalgia kicks, or simply love animals. It’s admittedly not a massive leap forward from previous zoo games, but the conservation focus and gorgeous visual polish revitalises the genre for modern audiences.

Planet Zoo has turned out to be a complete, satisfying product, capable of entertaining a wide audience, thanks to its intuitive interface, accompanied by intriguing graphics and a complete localization in Italian.

Planet Zoo is to zoo management games what Planet Coaster is to theme park management games—a spiritual successor to tycoon games of days gone by, with more depth and more freedom for creativity than ever. Some of the more complex elements can take a while to really click, but when they do, Planet Zoo becomes an engrossing experience.

For now, though, we'll settle for appreciating those moments, the ones that outlast the frustrations, where we sit back in our chair and marvel at the results of our own work. And on that basis, Planet Zoo is a triumph. [Issue#340, p.102]

Planet Zoo is a complex, deep simulation game with too much to give, if you can get past the minimalist tutorials.

It’s clear that earlier Frontier games like Kinectimals, Zoo Tycoon and Planet Coaster have been stage-setters for this ultimate zoo sim. Whether you enjoy theme park builders, economic sims or most importantly, creating the zoo of your dreams, Planet Zoo will satisfy you, but be prepared for an order of complexity that the previous games managed to avoid, or at least hid a little better. Although it lacks an “immediate gratification” mode, Planet Zoo is still an amazing tool for exercising your imagination and enjoying your love of animals.

Hands down, it’s the best zoo management game available, so if that’s what you’re looking for then you’ve found it. I think there’s so much more to come for Planet Zoo though. This humble beginning will no doubt grow in something much greater supported by the community. I’d love to see things such as the option for water parks in the future and have no doubt there’ll be plenty of DLC coming over the next few years. As humans, we are infinitely fascinated by nature and it’s great to finally have a digital playground to explore that.

Impressive. Its good heart and dedication to customization makes it a seriously strong sim, and one that fans of gaming management will be wise to check on. With options for structured play and freeform creation, it's hard to see how Planet Zoo could disappoint, in spite of its occasional foibles.

Planet Zoo is an excellent zoo management sim with an impressive campaign and terrific graphics.

Planet Zoo is a complex management simulator, with tons and tons of options, which is why sometimes we miss more tutorials. However, it’s also very rewarding and deep, and this makes it ideal for more experienced players.

Planet Zoo was one of the games I was most looking forward to this year. With several preview events, I just had a good feeling that Frontier Developments was playing to the strengths of Planet Coaster and Jurassic World: Evolution, giving us the best build up simulation in recent times. I wasn't disappointed either, although in my opinion there is still room for improvement. The first campaign missions explain a lot of details, but how I now sensibly design a zoo from start to finish was not explained to me. Also the user interface and the handling could be a little more clear and handy - draping certain items in the enclosures really cost me my nerves! It's also a pity that the franchise mode is currently struggling with server problems and so the heart of the game doesn't work yet.

The Dark Souls of zoo tycoon sims. Start slower than you'd like to, YouTube yet another tutorial, then watch Planet Zoo blossom before your eyes. This is a slow, mindful, niche of a sim that demands more patience and learning than you'd expect.

Frontier delivers a richly detailed and visually glorious zoo creation sim for genre fans, newbies, and animal lovers alike, bloated only a little by a few clumsy interfacing points.

This is more of an animal-based sandbox builder than zoo simulation with management ambition. If you are into aesthetics and love your wild animals, you might spend a lot of time in your personal animal kingdom.

It is undeniably a beautiful achievement that seamlessly ties together wildlife education and environmental consciousness, and the emotional attachment you will create with your animals makes for an engaging simulation unlike any other.

Another strong (yet stressful) management sim from Frontier Developments.

Planet Zoo is an incredible educational tool that also supports conservation which is worth cheering on 100%. The amount of thought given to every detail is astounding but user-interface wise Planet Zoo seems more enjoyable to watch than play especially in Career mode.

Planet Zoo put up a lot of obstacles to my enjoyment, but once I broke through the majority of them, I found that engaging loop of mastery and success that makes simulation games fun. I enjoyed trying to one-up my last creation and surpass my previous revenue and years in business. Unfortunately, Planet Zoo requires an unreasonable level of patience that creates a barrier around its best qualities.

Despite a slow burn in online mode and a bloated user interface that gets in the way of fully enjoying the finer management aspects of Planet Zoo, there’s still more than enough here to get something out of your time with it. It’s got its janky moments, but the animals are all rendered sublimely, the management sim mechanics are smart, and the sensible building controls will encourage and help you to build the best park you can for the animals in your care.

Hardcore management sim fans may enjoy Planet Zoo, but others may find it overly complex and packed with an overwhelming amount of management options.