Planet Zoo 2 Review: A Bigger, Wetter Zoo With Some Day-One Rough Edges

Planet Zoo 2 showed up this week as the sequel nobody doubted was coming, and it does the obvious things well: the roster grows, aquatic and flying animals finally get their own dedicated systems, and the building tools that made the first game a hit on YouTube are back and sharper. Frontier Developments has also leaned into letting players release animals into customizable Wildlife Reserves, which is a nice nod to the conservation framing the series has always wanted to have. After going through the game's current batch of Steam user reviews, the picture that emerges is a genuinely improved sequel that's landed in a slightly unfinished-feeling state, which tracks with it being brand new on the store this week.

Pros

• Full aquatic and flying habitats are a real structural upgrade over the first game, not just a skin — several reviewers call out fish and bird exhibits as the standout new feature.
• The building and terraforming tools carry over everything people liked about Planet Zoo and add refinements, with more than one reviewer comparing the improved toolset favorably to Planet Coaster 2.
• Animal welfare and habitat-care systems are described as deep and rewarding by players who've put serious hours in, with one reviewer at nearly 50 hours still finding new things to manage.
• General first impressions are positive even from players poking fun at the game rather than seriously critiquing it, which is its own small signal that the core loop is fun enough to joke about rather than rage-quit over.

Cons

• The animal roster is a recurring sore point: multiple reviewers specifically flag the absence of South American, North American, and Oceanian species at launch, which feels like a strange gap for a zoo game built around variety.
• At least one reviewer reports the game failing to even reach the main menu when its online/authentication service is unreachable, which is a rough first impression for a single-player-focused management sim.
• Graphical issues tied to ray tracing show up in reviews, alongside complaints about uncontrollable mouse acceleration specifically in first-person mode.
• A $49.99 (or $64.99 for the Deluxe Edition) price tag for a launch-week game with acknowledged content gaps is a harder sell than it would be for a more complete package.

Performance & PC

Frontier lists a fairly demanding minimum spec for Planet Zoo 2: Windows 10 or 11, an Intel i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB of RAM, and a GPU in the RTX 2060 / RX 5600XT (6GB VRAM) class or better, with DirectX 12 and 40GB of storage (SSD recommended). That's a notably heavier ask than the original Planet Zoo, which lines up with what reviewers are describing about needing a fairly modern rig to get smooth frame rates with large zoos and lots of animals on screen. The complaints that show up most in actual reviews are ray-tracing-related graphical glitches and a specific, annoying bug where the mouse accelerates unpredictably in first-person mode, which makes walking through your own zoo feel worse than it should. The more serious report is of the game being unable to load past the main menu when it can't reach its backend service, which points to a management sim that's more dependent on a live connection than players probably expected for what's largely a single-player experience. There's no Steam Deck rating visible yet and no Linux-specific complaints in this batch of reviews, likely because the game is too fresh for that data to have accumulated. Expect Frontier to patch the worst of the first-person and ray-tracing issues in the coming weeks, as that's been their pattern with past launches.

How it compares

Transport Fever 3 is the closest recent neighbor in spirit: both are big, systems-heavy management sims aimed at players who like optimizing something complex over dozens of hours, though Transport Fever's focus is logistics and infrastructure rather than animal care.

Stardew Valley sits at the other end of the spectrum in scope, but it's worth mentioning because it shares Planet Zoo 2's core appeal of a relaxing, long-tail management loop that rewards patience and incremental upgrades rather than twitch skill.

Graveyard Keeper 2 is another management sim with a narrative hook layered on top, and like Planet Zoo 2 it's betting that players will stick around to see systems deepen well past the opening hours.

Summary

Planet Zoo 2 is a genuine step up from the first game where it counts most: the building tools are better, the new aquatic and flying habitats add real depth, and the welfare systems give dedicated players plenty to chew on dozens of hours in. But it's launched with a roster that's missing entire continents' worth of animals, some rough first-person control bugs, graphical hiccups tied to ray tracing, and at least one report of the game refusing to boot without a live connection to its backend. None of that is unusual for a big management sim in its first week, and Frontier has a track record of patching these games into shape over the months that follow launch, the same way the original Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster 2 both improved considerably post-release. Right now, though, it's a strong foundation with visible gaps rather than a finished product, and the asking price doesn't yet account for that. If you already love the series, there's enough new here to be worth digging into immediately. If you're on the fence, giving it a patch cycle or two and watching for the missing species to get added costs you nothing but patience.