Preview – Let’s Build a Zoo [Beta] PC

I’ve never been much of a ‘simulation’ person. Besides the early Roller Coaster Tycoon titles or Theme Hospital I’ve never been much of a fan; the overly-granular complexity and time-consuming management of a billion different things has kept me at bay for a long time. As I’ve grown older I’ve become more discerning with how I spend my game time. I want fun and I want it now, which has me pass up on most RPGs these days because I can’t handle the repetitive mechanics and sluggish build-ups in their 60+ hour campaigns. Let’s Build a Zoo is a sim, but it’s one that doesn’t seem to demand too much from the player via time limits and random calamities. Instead it’s calm and relaxing, almost zen-like in how it lends the player the freedom to build things out how they would like to instead of how they need to. It’s also incredibly cute, using colorful pixel art with bouncy animations and the hook of DNA splicing to allow different species to be ‘stitched’ together to create all sorts of nonsensical animals. This is absolutely my type of sim game.

Of course there are still targets to meet and bills to pay but, from what I played, the experience is much more forgiving than other games with similar systems. It’s a game I would love to simply have running on a secondary monitor as I went about my day, letting me dip in and make small changes as I saw fit without needing to worry too much about not meeting profit margins and having all my wonderful creatures pay the ultimate price. I’m sure it will get more challenging the deeper you go but as far as I can tell it focuses on leaning more into the fantasy-fulfilling side of building and operating something so outlandish as a zoo instead of the realistic side, that I assume is actually full of spreadsheets and meetings. Whilst there were a few issues with getting the hang of the systems and disappearing employees, the only real downside to playing the Let’s Build a Zoo Beta was that it ended and I’m not even sure when it’s targeted for release. Hopefully the full game will continue to be as joyous and engaging as the small taste I had because you can bet I’ll be waiting for it at the finish line.