Wildlife Park PC

Keeping the animals happy is the name of the game.

Wildlife Park is a Zoo Tycoon style sim game, which sees you placed in charge of running a zoo. You’re placed in charge of everything from buying animals to building their enclosures, building shops and setting out the paths for visitors. It’s pretty standard management game stuff here and all viewed in a typical isometric (although rotatable by 90 degrees at a time) viewpoint.

The game boasts around 40 different animal types, each with their own unique needs and wants. There are loads of furniture items for the enclosures like scratching posts and sparring bags, as well as water pumps and feeding troughs. You can also employ a range of staff including vets, animal trainers and animal carers. Along with a variety of shops and paths this game just about covers all of the bases that you’d expect it to.

Management by numbers

The elephants playfully fight with each other.

Whilst Wildlife Park contains all of the features that you would expect to see in a management game it brings nothing new to the genre at all. The management options fall short of those found in rival products, such as the Theme Park series in particular, in the level of control that you have. This is most notable in a couple of places: I’m used to being able to pick up my employees and place them where I think they’re needed but Wildlife Park removes this ability. You can still direct the employees to a specific area but you can’t pick them up.

Another notable exception is a lack of control over the shops in your park. You can set the sale price but no other parameter. I would expect to have at least some control over salt in the fries, fat in the burgers or ice in the drinks. These aspects are, of course, aside from the main task of looking after the animals but, being a manager of an animal park, I would expect to have a little more control.

Time will not wait for me

Breeding pandas poses its own problems as they can require some video assistance.

One of the first problems I encountered with Wildlife Park was a bug in the fast forward feature. Time in the game runs past fairly slowly, especially when you’re waiting for something to happen, such as an animal to give birth or you’re short of money. A fast forward feature is included, as is standard in these types of games, but it paused the game for a fraction of a second and then sped it up for a fraction of a second resulting in time running slower, for about a second, every time I pressed it and then returning to normal. This needs to be fixed urgently as the game plays painfully slowly without this feature.

My other main gripe was with customers turning away at the gate. The visitors inside my park all had a happiness rating of 100% but, even with the gate price set to free, customers were still walking up to the gate completely satisfied, turning around and leaving completely satisfied without entering the park. This seems to me to be another bug and is again quite crucial as it seriously affects the amount of money you can make on the gate in this game.

Gripes aside

The trainers work on the seals whilst the whales enjoy themselves.

Anyway, now that I’ve been through the problems with the interface we can get down to the serious business of the animals. The game is divided into two sections: freeplay and campaign. The campaign eases you through a series of missions where you are given specific targets (make so much money or reach a visitor satisfaction level of 100%). You are then given a park, sometimes open to the public and sometimes not, and some of the resources needed to complete the task. Once you achieve your goals you move on to the next task. The tasks become progressively more difficult starting with making an animal comfortable in its new surroundings through coping with disasters in the enclosures and keeping the animals happy so that they perform.

Freeplay is more like a traditional management game where you have a park and limited finances and you must make it profitable and make it grow in the number of animals and the size of the park. Both of these game modes are severely hampered by the bugs in the interface but are quite promising once these problems have been patched.

Seeing is believing

The range of animals you can keep in your park is quite extensive.

The graphics are no better or worse than what you would expect of this type of game. The sprites are pixellated when you zoom in but at a normal distance they are clear and crisp. The animations are a bit limited but given that the animals only walk around, swim, eat, sleep and mate there aren’t that many animations you would need. The sounds are also standard fare; they do the job but I have come to expect more than just generic muzak and weak sound effects. Uninspiring though the graphics and sound might be they provide a usable interface for managing a wildlife park, which is, after all, the name of the game.

An uninspiring attempt

When it's raining the animals retreat indoors.

You might have gathered from this review that Wildlife Park is generally an uninspiring title. It covers all of the basics in the management sim genre and does them well. The bugs in the interface really spoilt the game but once they’re sorted it could proudly stand alongside most other titles in this style. The lack of innovation will stop it from being considered a great title though and the reduced management controls will appeal to novices, but even they will find it limiting when compared with the leaders in this genre.