A unique take on the FTP zoo genre – Zoo Evolution: Animal Saga Review

This isn't the normal free-to-play zoo game, it's more of a mix of the normal FTP zoo games you find on the App Store and zoo tycoon. I've been playing two weeks and I think I've played long enough to write a good review (which is saying something since most FTP games are easy enough to review after two days.) I'll start by explaining the game before I get into my pros and cons to the game. Like most games in this category you buy an animal, you breed two of the animal to get more, collect money from the habitat and buy more animals. Saying all that is a bit of an understatement however since it's not entirely that simple here. In this game you buy two animals and breed the third but in order to get the fourth you have to research the ability to have all four at once. Once you get two of the same type of animal to level 20 you can fuse them to get a new version of the animal and it makes more money and it breeds faster. You can also release animals to get DNA points which you use to make fusions. All of that takes awhile. I'm not sure what happens if you keep leveling an animal since my highest right now is only level 25. Another strange thing about the game that I haven't really figured out is you can name the animals and gives them traits. According to the game, getting four purple colored traits gives you a shiny animal, but I haven't been able to accomplish that yet. This game also has buildings that generate revenue. You can upgrade buildings by stocking them with new things, like the balloon shop can have polar bear balloons and panda balloons. It's amusing, but not as efficient as the animals at making money. Alright, so here is my list of pros and cons to the game. PROS: This is a long term game. You won't be filling your zoo quickly, but you'll have lots of other things to do in the meantime. With a million things to research, random events that happen (like catching thieves), and planning how to spend your food and DNA points, you'll feel like you're really making a zoo of your own and not just collecting a ton of animals. Except for handful of special mascot like animals, so far it looks like all animals are obtainable with in game money. The every other day lotto in the game has given me rare animals and I've seen those mascot animals in the list, so in theory you could get all animals without paying anything! Good for us, bad for devs. The graphics are cute and watching some of the animals can be entertaining. I'm not harassed about Facebook! Finally a game that realized Facebook isn't for everyone. The daily quests are mostly fair. You can get cash if you complete them all, but it's hard to do sometimes. When you start you choose a biome to get unique animals, which is neat so you and a friend could have access to different animals at the start. I chose desert but according to the game I can eventually get them all. CONS: This is minor, but I kinda wish I could see some of my building upgrades. I would love to see people actually walking around with the balloons. I was sad when I bought the balloon stall and nothing changed with my zoo patrons. Another minor issue - there are no genders in the animals. From a dev perspective I understand why, but it's weird to have two obviously male deer breeding. While I put as the first pro that it's a long lasting game, it's also frustratingly slow at times. Getting food for me is the hardest part of the game, and I'm serious when I say it's taken me two weeks to only have a level 25 dolphin. Speaking of food, it would be incredibly helpful if the devs could update the UI to show how much food an animal wants. I end up wasting food just to figure out how much to feed it to finish leveling. This is annoying since food is such a scarcity for me, I can't really waste it. Overall this is a very unique zoo game for the App Store. If you enjoy this type of game I highly recommend it, but give it some time before you decide to quit or not. Like I said, they designed this for a longer term game and it's focused on the whole zoo, not just collecting animals. I'm playing on an iPad Pro version 10.3.3 and the only issue I've encountered is lag when feeding animals (which again can cause me issues since i might waste food tapping again thinking the first tap didn't take.) otherwise a very good game; great job devs!
Review by LordSmapy on Zoo Evolution: Animal Saga.