Planet Zoo 2

Bugs are the most widespread complaint: 30% of all reviews and 49% of negative ones talk about bugs, glitches, broken features or an "early access" feel. The list is long and varied: animals unable to reach habitats ("no path"), Zoopedia values like "-217835 mm" of space, sold or released animals that stay in storage, flowers that render without heads, objects floating in the air, guests fleeing escapes that never happened, power cutting out across a zoo and sandbox settings that reset. "Nearly 10 hours in, and I feel like an unpaid beta tester," wrote one. The tone is mostly disappointment from fans, and some expect patches to fix much of it soon.

Negative reviewers raise Franchise mode far more often than positive ones: 23% of them mention it, against 6% of positive reviews. Three problems stack up. On launch day the servers dropped connections, so trades hung on "connecting" and some players could not get in at all. The player market had almost nothing for new zoos, and the few starter animals were often old or unable to breed: "you will be sitting there waiting on the market smashing the refresh button every second for about 20 minutes". The accreditation tiers lock most species, including Deluxe Edition animals buyers paid extra for, until players run several zoos and reserves at three stars. "Warthogs for 10 hours. Yippee," one reviewer summed it up. A minority likes the structure ("I do love the accreditation feature, which locks the cool animals behind improving your zoo."), while one reviewer asked for the tiers to go or at least get a toggle. Another drew a line for readers: "If you play Career or Sandbox and don't touch Franchise mode, my review effectively ends here."

Climbing animals clip through trees and rocks (worse than in the first game, one veteran thought), and birds and big cats escape through solid barriers. Animals get crated and uncrated in an endless loop, which 11 reviews describe, keepers spin in circles inside aquariums, and some species use borrowed rigs that do not fit, such as the otter on beaver animations and the tamarin on the lemur's. "Everything in this game seems to ignore anything else having a physical presence," one player wrote. These reports come mostly from players with several hours in. A few found it funny ("it's actually hilarious watching a lemur moon walk through the crowd").

Reviewers who mention the redesigned interface mostly complain about it. They describe menus within menus, full-screen trade and research pages that hide the zoo, shop prices that now need a separate pop-up per item, opening hours set with arrow buttons instead of typing, shelters moved into blueprints, and a "Return to Hub" button easy to hit by accident. "Every single action requires going into eighteen different sub-menus," one wrote, and another blamed console-first design. A smaller group finds the new UI cleaner ("the UI overhaul alone is magnificent"), and several say it becomes fine once learned.

Roster or missing-species talk appears in about one review in ten, at the same rate in positive and negative reviews. The criticism is about which animals were chosen more than how many. Players list missing staples such as the cheetah, peafowl, kangaroo, sea lions, okapi and Siberian tiger, and almost nothing from the Americas or Oceania, while there are two giraffes, two wildebeest and six butterflies. One wrote "Build the zoo of your dreams!*" with the footnote "*as long as the species are from Indonesia, Europe, or the Serengeti." Some tie this to a fear that Planet Zoo 1 base animals will be sold back as DLC and ask for them as free updates instead. Defenders point out the roster was public before launch and that DLC was always expected.

Crashes and freezes appear in 16% of negative reviews. Players describe crashes when placing an aquarium staff door, donating animals to reserves, selecting heating units or water pumps, auto-saving and closing the game. Some had their whole PC freeze or restart, and a few could not launch at all. The damage comes from lost progress: "Game crashed and lost 4 hours worth of work". Others lost a Franchise save or the zoo's guest arrival point. Players asked for an autosave interval setting and a quicksave, and a few advise saving constantly.

Price comes up mostly as a multiplier on the bugs: at the prices reviewers quote (about €50 to €65, or up to 90 AUD for the Deluxe Edition), players expected a finished game. "Definitely not worth $90 for the deluxe, and even $70 for standard is cutting it close," one wrote. Day-one paid extras also irritate: Deluxe animals players cannot use early in Franchise, and a small paid pack of custom donation boxes, which one reviewer called "a €3 mini-DLC on day one that locks an entire shop category behind a paywall". Other players call the base price fair for what is in the box.

Map complaints come mostly from builders. Some maps feel far smaller than Planet Zoo 1's (one player found the tropical Asia map "a beach that's not even wide enough to have a proper lemur enclosure on"), the North American grassland looks African, and several biomes share the same terrain. Sandbox players object to entrances and preset buildings they cannot edit or delete: "Why would I spend hours designing the perfect zoo if there is a big building in the middle which I can't delete".

Keybinds come up in 13 reviews, nearly all saying that rebinding fails or reverts to the defaults after a menu opens or a map changes. For one player with accessibility needs that was reason enough to refund. Others object to the missing edge scrolling, heavy camera smoothing and mouse acceleration in first person, which made a few of them motion sick within minutes.

A few players object to needing a Frontier account and an online connection for Franchise mode and the in-game workshop, to repeated privacy-policy prompts, and in one case to Denuvo DRM. One reviewer could not reach the main menu at all while a third-party server was down.

Several players call the avatar creator thin, with a handful of hairstyles and no regular glasses. That stands out more because the game puts the player on screen in first person and in reserves.