The concept of the game is simple. Create and maintain a zoo. Sounds easy, right? It is far from that, however. You can play the game in two different modes, career mode or in free play. I definitely advise starting a career because the first few missions of the career are the game tutorial. The tutorial proved invaluable to understanding the ins and outs of the game much more than the manual that came with it. The manual, in fact, wasn't much help at all when it came to really playing the game. Everything in it is pretty easy to figure out by just playing around with the interface. But the tutorial includes the real "how to" of the game, along with a few hints and tips. And simply completing the tutorial levels themselves provides hours of challenging entertainment.

The game isn't easy to master. In each scenario you have primary goals that must be met in order to pass, and secondary goals that provide you with bonuses. These bonuses transfer to your reputation as a zookeeper and will eventually help you with how you start in later levels. After the tutorial, you can also earn awards in each scenario that will give you either personal spending money to be applied to later scenarios, or just saved up for creating your own zoo later on. Some scenarios are animal focused, requiring you to have a certain variety of animals and a high animal happiness rating. Others are financially focused, requiring you to have certain attractions and a high visitor satisfaction rating. Be warned, however. You can't ignore animal happiness and have a successful zoo, and you can't ignore the people, providing no where for them to spend money and reason for them to visit the zoo lest your zookeepers quit. As manager of the zoo, you must be all things to all people. You are manager of your employees, head zookeeper for your animals, visitor satisfaction manager, and, of course, chief financial officer.

Just like real life, there are some frustrating parts to this simulated reality. The user interface is restricted to only having one window open at a time, so you can't be reading the frequent messages which pop up alerting you to problems with either animals or visitors while still monitoring visitors' happiness, or managing your employees and animals. Each of those is a different window that needs to be opened and checked frequently. Thankfully you can pause the game and I did so often in order to catch up. Once the zoo was set up, I would often let the game run for a short while in super-fast mode, then pause it to catch up with what changes I needed to make. There is no way to clear visitor lists, either, so you can't know if a complaint is current or been solved. And, unfortunately, I've run in to a game stopping bug that has prevented me from advancing further in career mode. And while there are forums for the game that you can submit reports like this to, getting feedback and updates seems like it will take weeks rather than the days that this rather spoiled MMORPG player is used to.

Graphically I'm impressed with the animals and terrain, but somewhat disappointed in the visitor models. The animals look like the miniature plastic animals I used to play with as a child, only fuzzier. They have different models for male and female animals where appropriate, and separate models for young animals, all that are very realistic to look at and watch as they play in your zoo. Most of the terrain choices also fit well into the world, with grassy terrains looking nearly 3-D in the 2-D world. Where the game fall short graphically for me in the human models. For some reason rather than making real people, the artists chose to use cartoon-esqe models for the humans in the game. This takes away from the immersiveness of the game somewhat, though not so much that I couldn't enjoy playing. It was just odd, like seeing a polar bear in the desert.

As I said earlier, mastering the game has been a challenge, a fun one, granted, but a challenge none the less. There are many times in game when you have animals near starvation in one pen, an overpopulation in another, and so much litter on the ground that your visitors complain about the zoo looking more like a trash dump than a zoo. I've even had such bad money problems that my employees have quit on me!! The scenarios in the game are well balanced with how much money you start with, though if you want to do more at the start of a scenario, you can take out a loan. But be careful because at the end of every month you get a report on spending versus income, and if you go negative too many months in a row, then no one is happy. And some scenarios require you to have a certain profit margin every month in order to pass, so just breaking even isn't good enough. And if juggling money, animals and visitors isn't enough for you, then you can always delve into advertising and try to create a star animal.

In spite of the bugs and problems, I still love the game. I've played it with my children (ages 3, 6 and 9), letting them help me pick what animals to put in the zoo and what those animals need. The game is a little too complex for them to play alone successfully. They like playing around with the Free Game, though, and learning about what each animal needs is teaching them some about different ecosystems. Expect that you will spend many hours playing the game, but know that you can save at any point, even mid-scenario, so even for someone short on time to play each day you could still have fun. I've played through the tutorial and first 5 scenarios on one career path and can't say enough about how much I like this game. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys simulation type games. I even would say that this would be the game to try if you've just thought about playing a simulation game because it is easy to learn, but a challenge to master.