Planet Zoo 2 lets you take care of awesome animals at a global scale

There's nowhere else in life you can safely drive a golf cart into a hippopotamus habitat.

As a new recruit into the Fauna and Ecosystems Network company, you have a pretty great job. You just have to maximally take care of a massive, growing roster of meticulously-modeled video game animals. You get to do so across the whole, wide world in two different ways: running zoos, and maintaining enormous wildlife preserves. You have tons of money and reality-defying terraforming technology at your disposal, and all you have to do is navigate a UI so intense it wraps around your screen like a Super Game Boy border. Not the worst hand to be dealt in the world. After all, you could be a digital aardvark reliant on cartoony zookeepers for peace and comfort.

Planet Zoo 2 wastes no time showing you what it is when you boot it up. Starting the campaign mode gives you some quick and dirty dialogue from the leader of FEN, and a few minutes later you’re driving a golf cart-like vehicle through a wildlife preserve up to a family of hippos to take some pictures. Then elephants. Then Zebras! Then, you zoop over to a different location and get to tinker with a premade zoo. Mess around with the pathing tools, set up an aardvark exhibit, rehome a squad of giraffes, then onto the next project. This thing moves fast, and it knows you’re really just here to watch animals be adorable and weird in the highest definition gaming technology can allow. One of the new features for this sequel is birds (the other big one is marine life), so of course the first one you get to meet is a big ol’ shoebill.

I don’t have a ton of experience with management sims, but Planet Zoo 2 did a good job easing me along. I was able to choose from a few “difficulty” settings to start the campaign, which essentially governed how much the UI told me where to look. If I hadn’t used this I definitely would have been overwhelmed, as interacting with the menus uses every part of the controller buffalo. That complexity, though, is because of the depth involved in zoo management. The number of little (and not so little) things you have control over is pretty wild, from the foliage of individual exhibits to the shapes, colors, materials, and boundaries of the flooring paths that communicate to visitors where they’re allowed to stand. Even installing barriers is an intense process, as you have different ways to control the shape of each piece, from a pseudo-automated bending tool, to a more intricate drawing tool.

I did find myself growing frustrated trying to use these tools to tinker with very small details, such as trying to get clean edges on flooring that ran along the barriers of exhibits. Even swapping from a mouse to a controller I wasn’t able to fully draw in details where I wanted, but I wasn’t being punished for being imperfect anywhere outside my own mind. But it was pretty clear, especially in my first zoo, when an area was already designed by the game versus the new parts I installed.

While zoo management felt familiar in the sense that I’ve seen other sims like this before, the preservations felt like Planet Zoo 2’s distinct reward for taking care of the animals competently. These areas were a joy to explore, thanks to their size, detail, and the way I’d see animals presented living their best lives instead of hanging out in enclosures. It was also funny to push the little cart thing to its limits, ramming into makeshift ramps and seeing the thing tumbling over itself next to a pack of confused antelope or curious elephants. But aside from the visual wonders and silliness, there was a sense of fulfillment in moving a group of giraffes from captivity to a space more of their own, and seeing them just hanging out in a space several times larger than what they had in the zoo.

There’s so much to do in Planet Zoo 2 it feels impossible to see all of it, especially since the campaign is only one way to play. Like you’d expect from a management sim there’s a whole sandbox mode in which you can start everything from scratch, rather than the more guided campaign experience. So if you truly want to make a “Planet Zoo,” that’s where you’ll be spending the rest of your life, probably. I got to see and interact with all kinds of interesting animals in the time I’ve played so far, and now I’m left wondering just how much time I’d have to spend fighting menus to see them all. And it might just be worth it.

Planet Zoo 2 is available on October 13, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this article.

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