Let’s Build A Zoo is a good ole fashioned Zoo simulator. It is up to you to micromanage the hell out of your zoo in order to bring great profits to your coffers! You will be hiring employees to run your various stalls and other systems that you need to keep a full-scale zoo running, janitors, researchers, and more. You can change around their pay which will affect their performance and your bottom line at the end of each week, you can even tweak the prices that your various stalls sell products for. There are a whole lot of moving parts that you can change around to suit exactly what you believe needs to happen to make it perform the best it can. You can unlock new things through a research tree which you spend points you passively accumulate on, and this is the primary method you will unlock new things with.
Of course, the primary attraction of any good zoo is the animals! This game looks to have a large variety of animals, but it really ups the ante with one of the game’s signature features, gene splicing! That’s right, if you ever wanted a hippo with a bunny head, or a scaly rabbit in your zoo this is the game you can do it in! You unlock a genetic laboratory pretty quickly, and from there you can start the slicing, combining animals that you have completed their genetic data into new creations that are sure to attract customers from all over. It advertises over 300,000 combinations as a selling point, and that is not a number to sneeze at.
You can also do some… shady practices in order to get more customers as well. Some black and white paint plus a horse can net you a Zebra that only the most well-trained eye could identify as fake. Not very fleshed out in the short beta I got to play, it seems that a morality system is in this game that will affect plenty of things including your reputation. You can even purchase exotic animals from a Joe Exotic looking guy of Tiger King fame, blond mullet and all. It seems you may be able to get better prices from him if you fall on the negative end of the spectrum with the morality system as well.
Cute pixel art is a plus, the graphics are warm and friendly as well. It is not Metal Slug or anything like that, but the graphics do the job! The Beta that I received access too let me play for about 14 days, and there was still a whole lot of content that I didn’t get to see, but if you ask me Let’s Build a Zoo is shaping up pretty well, and fans of the genre should look out for the development of this one by wishlisting it on Steam or maybe checking out their discord! I certainly ran into a few bugs, and the UI can use some small tweaks, but all in all, I had a positive experience previewing this game! I am excited to see how it will pan out, only getting to play 2 weeks of running the zoo was a tease and left me wanting more so I think that says a bit on its own, check it out!
