Zoo Tycoon Critic Reviews

This is a polished, full-fledged, very fun game. You’ll buy it for your kids so they don’t feel left out of the next-gen joy, but once they go to bed you may well end up spending as much time designing your dream zoo as they do...Maybe more.

Overall, the game may be simplistic on the surface, and lack some of the real in depth creating tools that many PC gamers have come to love, but it could also be that the game is also meant to get the controls into the hands of little ones as well.

The Xbox One episode of Zoo Tycoon has both the strategic elements of the PC games and the cool direct interaction granted by the new Kinect hardware. If you're looking for a deep single player and multiplayer experience with gorgeous looking animal 3D models, this is the game for you.

It's charming and sweet, to the point that I never wanted to stop playing — even when my colleagues demanded we use the console for one of the bigger launch titles.

Simulation gaming with a sense of fun we haven’t experienced in years. Think Viva Piñata meets Theme Park and you’re close. Plus it actually works really well with Kinect. A winning combo.

The game struggles a little over the mid-to-long term: the difficulty doesn't fluctuate much and, soon enough, you're merely turning the cogs rather than responding to thrilling challenges, but Zoo Tycoon is pleasant and engaging, even in its absence of spectacle.

It may ultimately be a little shallow, but it has bags of charm and there is more than enough on offer here to provide hours of animal magic.

Zoo Tycoon is engaging, rewarding, and fun, just don't burn yourself out on it too quickly. It isn't so much for the hardcore sim manager, but for those not looking for a tremendous amount of depth, there's a lot to like with what Frontier offers.

A simulation game fan looking for a hardcore micromanaging experience might want to look elsewhere, but for anyone else, Zoo Tycoon offers a whole lot of fun - with an important and oft neglected side dish of education and awareness raising.

Zoo Tycoon’s biggest crime is its lack of ambition.

Zoo Tycoon has a distinct lack of depth, but if you're capable of sitting down with this simplistic simulator, you'll smile more times than you can count. The simulator fan in me was a bit disappointed by the ease of it all, but the child in me couldn't help but enjoy myself.

Zoo Tycoon is definitely a family friend game that can be played by all ages.

Zoo Tycoon stands halfway between a kids game and a deeper strategic experience.

For all its shallowness, I couldn't help but fall for Zoo Tycoon. While its charms may indeed be too quickly exhausted, they're potent while they last, and there's an overpowering wholesomeness that's difficult to resist. There are a lot of great ideas, wonderful moments and potential memories to be made here that make it more than worth a look, but much like my experiences with real-life animal parks, Zoo Tycoon becomes less likely to delight upon each subsequent visit.

Zoo Tycoon may have taken a best-of-both-worlds approach, but to my surprise and delight, ends up being more successful as a "game" than a mere family-friendly "experience."

One of the few options for kids in the Xbox One initial lineup. They will especially appreciate the animal interactions and the educational side of the game. As a tycoon, it was greatly adapted to a console but fell short on the management side.

If you only know the 'Tycoon'-moniker from those railroading games and expect to find something with complex mechanics and systems to mull over, this is not the game for you. It's a light-hearted and a bit shallow simulation for the whole family. And as such, it succeeds.

With its charming, colorful sandbox of tools, there's definitely a micro-managing itch that Zoo Tycoon handily scratches - we just wish the thrills stuck around a bit longer.

This game is an interesting experiment: it tries to transform the old builder sim in something fast and easy to play. The problem is the game is now too easy and it has several flaws in terms of user interface.

From a mechanical standpoint, Zoo Tycoon works quite smoothly, but a ridiculously low agent cap severely detracts from the game’s longevity.