Sim management style games have become one of the most popular and addictive type of games over the recent years for the older and casual gaming crowd. These games let you build and operate anything ranging from amusement parks, shopping malls and even prisons. Each game takes the same premise where you need to create the environment and atmosphere and then keep the inhabitants of it happy and civilized. Wildlife Zoo is the second game in the Wildlife series, the original being Wildlife Park, where you find yourself creating environments for various species of wild animals and keeping them content in their surroundings. Wildlife Zoo expands on the original and allows you to not only take care of wild animals, but bring back some animals from extinction and create a world for them while at the same time, creating a zoo around them to bring in money to pay for the habitats, the animals, the trainers and show them off to the visitors that find their way to you while keeping them happy as well.
Wildlife Zoo puts you in the shoes of a zoologist that is the son of a world famous Biologist that has been off on some hush hush expeditions. While your father is missing, you will need to take his place and will find yourself traveling across the globe helping out friends of your fathers with some of their troubles dealing with animals found in their regions. Some times you will need to help defunct zoo’s come back to the height of their popularity, other times you will need to protect indigenous animals from predators that are roaming around and even some missions will have you creating and repopulating extinct animals from genetic materials. Each mission will have you doing the same thing from the start however and that will be to create enclosures for the animals and making and keeping them happy. Each zoo and habitat will need caretakers to look after the animals as well as food and water resources. The first thing you will always do is set up the animal pens and the hire animal keepers, veterinarians and various other staff members. The keepers will feed and clean up after the animals that are in their range and the vets will cure any of the animals that are sick or dying which often happens right at the start.
Once the animals are enclosed and the help is hired, poultry pens, fisheries and other food sources will need to be built to create sustenance for the animals as they will continuously be hungry and want to be fed. Once they are built and food placed, the keeper will come by once in a while to refill the food leaving you to tend to other duties. Animals will need activities to fill their days and usually want something to jump over or climb. They also like to have mates, so if you have a stable of all males, tossing in a few females will help their mood as well as allow them to procreate and make babies which you can then sell for loads of money to help keep the park in the black. Animals will always let you know when they are unhappy and sometimes it is just odd that the things they are unhappy about are right in front of them. More than a few times animals will complain about having nothing to climb or eat when they are sitting right beside the object they are wanting. It really isn’t too difficult to keep the animals happy when everything you need is easily at your disposal and can be bought and placed easily with the simplistic interface.
Once you have the animals pleased, you will more often then not, need to pretty up the park and eventually bring in the visitors when you feel it is satisfactory to start making money. To make the zoo profitable, you will need to add attractions aside from the animals. Beverage and food booths need to be placed around for people to get refreshments and snacks from. Souvenir shops allow visitors to plop down their hard earned cash, as do gardens, aquariums and watch towers. All these places can have their prices either raised or lowered depending on how much the visitors feel like spending and they will let you know whether they are happy or not. You can check the status of each visitor much the same way you do the animals. You can see their needs, the cash they have and even if they are hungry or thirsty. ATM’s can be placed around the park for when they start to run low on funds as can restrooms and garbage bins to make sure the place stays nice and clean. Animal pens can be turned into petting zoo’s and you can allow the visitors to enter the pens with food for an extra price as well as set up a safari SUV track to allow visitors to ride around the zoo. Once the attractions and facilities are set up, you will also need to add decorations to spruce up the zoo’s appearance. Statues and fountains can be bought and set up as well as trees and bushes for that extra panache.
Although it’s all fine and dandy to make the zoo as extravagant as you want, unfortunately, money doesn’t grow on trees. One of the tricky parts of Wildlife Zoo is being able to make a profit on your park. Everything you do cost money and getting visitors to spend money is the best way to recoup your costs. You can sell animals that you raise as an alternative, but having the continual cash flow coming in makes it worth your while. If you aren’t careful with your exuberant spending, the park will go in debt and will be shut down and you’ll need to start all over. Considering the length of some of the missions, it’s a massive pain in the neck when you find yourself going down hill in a hurry. Thankfully you can speed up time so that the events such as needing to train animals and waiting for animals to do the nasty and reproduce can be done quicker.
There really is quite a lot to do in Wildlife Zoo although at times it can be a snorefest waiting for things to happen that are out of your control. Aside from building a hospitable environment for your animals and plants and making the zoo’s attractive, you can take a break from the campaign mode and start up a park in Free Mode that will allow you to sandbox a zoo with unlimited money and immortality if you so choose, as well as creating it in almost any area of the world. Some of the other features found in Wildlife Zoo are that the weather and animals all act very realistically. If you feel like being sadistic enough, dropping a smaller animal in a carnivorous animal’s pen will have it attacked and devoured in no time. Animations of all the animals, staff and visitors are very well done and each living thing will go about its business whether you are there to interact with it or not. When you want to know more about each animal or plant, there is a built in encyclopedia that can be accessed at anytime to give you the run down of each.
Wildlife Zoo takes the game play from its predecessor and adds some interesting new features to give fans of the series some extra game play to keep their attention. If you consider yourself a sim aficionado and caring for different types of animals makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, this is something you might want to try your hand at. Unfortunately, some people may find the slow pace a little too slow and at times downright boring, but over all it is an enjoyable game for those that like the genre.
