You have to make sure that your visitors are completely and totally happy so that they'll recommend the park to their friends, but to reach that level of happiness you have to focus obsessively on every detail and cater to their every whim. It doesn't help that the game has an almost baffling economic system that keeps you wondering just how it is your park makes any money at all. However, the later missions have you struggling to make a profit just to keep solvent. Many of the early missions give you an almost unlimited amount of funding, so it's easy to spend your way to success. Wildlife Park comes with 20 missions that represent both extremes on the difficulty scale the early missions are incredibly easy, while the later missions become frustratingly difficult.
You can also hire a variety of staff members to keep your park in order, including janitors, gardeners, veterinarians, animal keepers, and animal trainers. Some animals have special needs, so you can put in scratching posts, climbing trees, and even instructional mating videos to help those endangered pandas procreate. To tailor the habitats, you control everything from the temperature, the kind of surface, and the hardness of the floor, to the kind of food the animals eat. There are 45 different kinds of animal species, representing virtually every region of the world, including aquatic life. Thankfully, you can use a wide variety of tools to customize each animal habitat so that you can keep your little beasties comfy. For instance, care and welfare of the animals is a top priority should you mistreat your animals, you risk the wrath of animal-rights protestors.
Wildlife Park offers a few twists, though. Once again, we have a game that looks like it was directly lifted from the mother of all theme park games, RollerCoaster Tycoon. As it is, Wildlife Park comes off as a poorly designed and badly paced imitation in an already crowded genre.Įlephants and giraffes get along together-just make sure not to throw a hungry tiger into the mix.
It's just too bad that we've seen this done already in Microsoft's Zoo Tycoon. Wildlife Park is a game with an interesting take on the theme park tycoon formula: design and build a wildlife preserve from the ground up, but with an emphasis on taking proper care of the animals as well as the visitors.