Create the Zoo of your dreams with the biggest, most detailed environments ever utilizing intuitive yet powerful controls designed for Zoo Tycoon fans of all ages.Get up close and personal with nearly 200 visually stunning animals from around the globe.This zoo simulation will charm animal lovers of all ages. Let your imagination run wild with Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection! Choose from almost 200 visually stunning animals and the largest, most detailed selection of environments ever, then build, manage, and maintain your dream zoo alone or with up to four players.
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I loved playing with my baby chimps… but it’s always faster and easier to use the controller to manipulate the animals than Kinect.The wildly popular Zoo Tycoon series gets set to crank up the excitement, challenge, and fun of building the ultimate zoo.
While it can only be used with chimps and big cats, they can distinguish when you’re blinking or opening your mouth and mirror your actions. Feeding and washing animals with Kinect can be frustrating because the camera didn’t always pick up my movements, but the facial recognition is incredible when it works. You can build three Kinect-capable interactions in your zoo, but they only work for specific animals. But you can still only research one thing at a time which seems limiting when you have extra people waiting around for certain things to finish researching.Īgain, though, it all comes back to the animals, and in theory, Kinect offers a whole new way to interact with them. It’s also fun to ride around with friends in buggies in third-person view. Everyone can contribute to tasks for completion, so getting objectives done is easier than ever. Multiplayer allows you and up to three friends to work together in any of the three modes, but unless you’re using headsets it can be hard to coordinate.
The only goals are to enjoy yourself, the animals, and build whatever you want at your own pace and progression comes at a rewarding pace. Freeform Mode is the only place where Zoo Tycoon spreads its wings and refreshingly lets go of the confines of money and research. But if you’ve ever balanced a checkbook, the difficulty here doesn’t live up to the mode’s name. Challenge Mode tests your ability to make the most of your resources by plopping you in a location with a set budget, along with periodic objectives. Their rewards are just as thin, with only a couple of decorations and a location to unlock for use in the other two modes. I expected Campaign Mode to roar louder than the other two, but its 20 levels all feel too similar to one another – and to the tutorial – and boredom sets in quickly. Having to sit there and wait for a lion exhibit I want to finish researching so that I can research the lion, as well as all of the individual enrichments, one at a time, is a major frustration. Researching can take anywhere from five seconds to two minutes, but you never know how long until after you select it, and you can only ever research one thing at a time. In Campaign and Challenge, you have to research just about everything, including animals, concessions, facilities, decorations, scenery, exhibits, all the way down to how you advertise your Zoo, before you can build or do it. Yet it's research, which is undoubtedly important for real-life animal conservation efforts, that's the worst part of Zoo Tycoon. There’s no option to build multiple instances of the same item either, so if you place one tree (or anything) and want to place a second, you’re forced to go back through the menus every time. That nostalgic process is made harder than it needs to be by the cumbersome menu design, which makes it aggravating to move from one build option to another. There are nice page-turning sound effects and some extra educational information, but that's where the praise ends.įor example, to keep your animals happy you’re required to place animal-care options like a feeder and bathing station in every exhibit, along with some enrichment options for them to play with. While menus are a consistent and important part of every sim, especially the older Zoo Tycoon games on PC, they’re poorly designed for the Xbox One. It’s also the first time you get a taste of the inefficient menus you must consistently flip through to conduct zoo business, no matter which of the three modes you’re playing. This is where you learn to swap between the neat third-person exploration mode and the top-down Tycoon mode.
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You learn how to become a zookeeper through 10 in-depth training missions that clearly explain the most important aspects of the job – building exhibits and managing the layout – while not overwhelming you with details.