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.The Wargamer

Minimum Req.: P3 733 MHz, 256MB RAM, 16MB video card, DirectX 9 comp video card
Reviewed On: Athlon 2800 2.2 GHz, 512 Meg RAM, ATI Radeon 9600

Tycoon style games have become common over the past few years. Generally I don't think this is a bad thing; there's a charm to economic micromanagement when it's done right. With that in mind I went into Zoo Tycoon expecting to be mildly entertained. Zoo Tycoon 2 once again (unsurprisingly) puts the player in charge of the daily operation of a Zoo. I never had the opportunity to play the original, so I was going in with few expectations.

The newest game in the franchise has three primary game modes: Freeform, Challenge, and Campaign. Freeform is the sandbox mode; unlimited resources and everything is available. Challenge is also a sandbox mode, but the player starts with limited resources and must earn more advanced buildings and increasingly exotic animals to care for. Campaign has individual missions, each with a different theme to it. One mission has the player transforming a down-on-its-luck zoo into a major attraction, and another requires the player to get two particularly picky exotic animals to mate and produce offspring in captivity.

Accomplishing any of these tasks requires mediocre planning and a rudimentary understanding of enclosed shapes. Apparently anyone who can draw a closed-in polygon (with help) and plan their life well enough to not starve to death will probably be reasonably successful in the zoo management business. The game is intended for young audiences and casual gamers, and I doubt readers of this review fall into either category.

Marketing demographics aside, based on Zoo Tycoon 2 there is not much to do as a zoo manager. Design a few pathways, draw a few boxes, hire a few zookeepers to shovel poop, and call it a day. Though it is possible to go down into the zoo in 1st person mode and perform the zookeeper duties yourself, I found the idea of paying money to shovel steaming piles of dung in a game unappealing. So with zookeepers taking care of menial tasks,

there isn't that much "hands on" the player can do. Unlike other games of this genre, Zoo Tycoon 2 doesn't even allow concession/gift shop/drinking fountain prices to be set; there's only a setting for "low" or "high". What exacerbates the shallowness of the game play is the lack of a time compression option. Once I mastered designing the most efficient moneymaking zoo (an easy task when the game gives recommendations for everything) much of my time was spent simply waiting for the requisite amount of money to roll in. The inclusion of a time compression option would have made much of this time unnecessary. I suppose the designers intended me to wander around my zoo in first-person mode taking pictures and picking up litter and poop, but I wanted none of that. This is about the time I realized something that I had known my whole life but never actually put it to words: zoos are very boring. Animals lie around or occasionally get up to get some food or to just walk around. One particular campaign mission's main objective was to capture a picture of a zebra running and playing with a scratching post. I sat around for forty-five minutes waiting for one of the three zebras to rub its back against a scratching post so I could hit spacebar and end my suffering.

This naturally led to one result: deviance. The marketing guys that made the Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 commercial got it right: people play these games to do twisted, cruel things to imaginary capitalists. Unfortunately, Zoo Tycoon 2 gave me no such pleasure. I put 100 American beavers in a small cage with a brown bear and waited for the carnage - nothing. Ok, how about a zebra and a cheetah? Nothing? I got it! A male silverback gorilla right between the concession stand and the bathroom! I watched in dismay as the silverback calmly sat down and scratched himself in the middle of a loud, crowded, and unfamiliar environment. I wasn't expecting to see the animals completely flip out like ninjas but some kind of mayhem would have been appreciated.

Zoo Tycoon 2 is the first in the series to go 3D, and with lukewarm results. While the cartoon-y look to the game is clean and colorful, it's not terribly interesting. Animals and customers move about believably, but I did notice an inordinate amount of clipping issues: animals extending outside of walls, customers getting hung up on terrain and spinning around in circles, etc. While this can destroy the immersion in the game, it is also amusing at times to sit back and watch a zoo that's occupied by morons. I doubt that was the intention of the designers, however. The menus are also large and colorful, and while that made navigation easy, it felt like I was operating a game with a fisher-price interface.

Aside from a few hitches in pathing and clipping, the graphics do a decent job. The camera interface was counterintuitive, however. Perhaps the designers were weaned on Macs, but even that is no excuse for almost never using the right mouse button. The camera controls being relegated to the keyboard gets old very quickly. Fortunately, the pace of the game is so slow that camera placement isn't critical, so most of the time it's little more than a nuisance.

Overall: 4/10
Zoo Tycoon 2 became a chore to play with startling quickness. Its dull pacing and shallow gameplay lost their appeal after roughly three or four hours in. I imagine if the concept of zoo management was given a more robust 3D engine and real attention to detail it could be just as entertaining as any other of the tycoon style games but as it stands right now Zoo Tycoon 2 is an amusing diversion for young or casual gamers, and little else for the rest of us.

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