Imagine being able to build from scratch a classic, nice, pixelated zoo to be drawn to the dark side and slowly shift it into an animal-killing factory – don’t worry you’re not forced to join the dark side, but it is quite fun, that’s for sure.
From playing hours of My Cafe on my phone back in 2016, and keeping it in my heart as the best management game to exist, I was blown away by Let’s Build A Zoo and I can safely say that my lovely My Cafe has long been dethroned.
As a fiercely competitive Valorant player who just cannot seem to be able to keep that Diamond rank, there are times where I need some time off.
Enter Let’s Build A Zoo.
Developed by indie company Springloaded, the game is pretty simple; you build your zoo from scratch and watch it grow to become the biggest and most profitable zoo in the world with a wild variety of organic and genetically modified animals.
Starting from the bottom, your job is to make your visitors happy by making your animals happy — if you want to.
There are two paths you can take on this game: the good or evil one.
With the good path, you essentially make all the right choices whilst taking good care of all your animals and employees.
But with the evil path, you pick all the wrong choices, such as not reporting the black market dealer and actually buying an animal from ‘questionable sources’, or putting your dead animals in the processor to gain more money off their meat.
Depending on which sides you take, you get exclusive furniture and perks through research points which is the building that helps you receive more goodies as you grow.
For example, when it comes to paying the bills, you can either be good and get environmentally friendly windmills for your electricity, or have a machine that illegally uses the light coming from street lamps by stealing from the government and having the electricity for free.
There are honestly so many options you can do here.
The uniqueness of the game that I love the most is the complete freedom to decide the fate of your zoo, so if you want to mistreat your animals and ignore your visitors’ complaints, you can do it. Although that would mean having to deal with protesters, which you could get rid of with a few thousands dollars.
When I launched my first zoo, I wanted to take the evil path straight away, but due to a friend who was spectating me, I had to take the right path.
So I got my first bunnies, built an enclosure for them and actually took care of them. When the first critical choice appeared, which happens often, I had a lost Labrador which I could either keep by disguising it as a lion and earn evil points, or pay $50 to advertise his disappearance and find its owner and take good points.
Of course, I chose the latter.
As my zoo grows, I start trading my animals for new ones in a repeat cycle as well as getting a new science related building ‘CRISPR Splicer’ where I can only genetically modify two different species, and weird enough this option is neither good nor evil so you get it regardless.
I would definitely recommend it to anyone who’s into management games. The game has now DLCs as well, so you can have either an aquarium or dinosaur specific zoo.
