Review: Zoo Tycoon

Score: 35

Ah, the cute cuddly polar bear on the game's cover. So kind and soft and.... it'd tear your throat out in an instant if it got the chance, in real life.

There's the same sort of dichotomy with Zoo Tycoon as a whole. On the one hand, it's a superb idea for a game and there's little to go wrong. On the other....

...On the other, just about everything that could be gotten wrong has been done wrong. From the appallingly low res and zoomed-out graphics (hard to tell which animal is which) and half-hearted sounds, to the clumsy d-pad only control system (why, oh, why, wasn't the zoo itself used on the lower touch-screen?), Zoo Tycoon is a stinker of a game.

Then there's the gameplay itself, with six month timescales for each 'project' in your new zoo. Except that if (as is likely) you finish well within the six months, you have to sit and twiddle your thumbs until the game decides that the time has finally passed. And, when managing the animal pens, you're basically spoon fed what to do to make each animal happy.

Is Zoo Tycoon fun? It's so far away from being fun that I'd rather be stuck in a cage with the 'cute' polar bear from its cover....