Planet Zoo 2

If you're the kind who can't go to bed until you've torn out an elephant enclosure's moat and dug it again three times, this one's for you. Frontier released Planet Zoo 2 on 13 October 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, all on the same day. The first game came to PC alone at first. This time the console crowd doesn't have to wait in line. This piece is based on the game's own systems, its patch notes and what players are saying on Steam.

The skeleton of our game is familiar. You build a zoo again, and again you walk the tightrope between the visitor's wallet and the animal's welfare. Here's what's different, point by point:

WATER: Fully aquatic species are new to the series. You build freshwater and saltwater aquariums yourself, piece by piece. SKY: Flying birds are new too, along with an aviary (bird enclosure) system for them. WILDLIFE: In a section called Wildlife Reserves (nature reserves) you run conservation projects and release the animals you've bred into the wild. CAMERA: There's a first-person camera now. You can wander your own zoo like a visitor.

All told there are more than 130 species. On paper that's a pretty packed box. Getting aquariums and aviaries into the same game finally answers the first game's most-asked "why isn't it in there" question (think of all those reader letters begging for dolphins).

The game is split into three modes. In Career mode, FEN (Fauna and Ecosystems Network, the game's conservation network) hands you missions. Franchise mode is online: you buy and sell animals and work toward shared goals with the community. Sandbox is for people who want to build without worrying about money. Sitting on top of all that is a conservation network called Planet Hub.

The real business is on the building side. Nobody can argue with Frontier's skill at this. You get piece-by-piece construction, blueprints (ready-made building templates), terrain and foliage brushes, and nine themes, four new and five old. Frontier Workshop now works across platforms too. So someone on PlayStation can download a roof a PC player made. That's exactly what this magazine has always loved: players making something with their own hands and sharing it. Under the zoo costume, this is a pretty serious design tool.

But of course, there's another side to the coin.

In short, in a zoo game, the animals still can't walk properly.

The game came out on 13 October, and patch 1.0.4 arrived inside 24 hours. The patch notes say plainly what was broken: crashes caused by scenery groups, hub transitions and blueprint multi-select, an unstable Franchise mode, FSR/DLSS settings that didn't apply, and key bindings that reset themselves. Animals were escaping their habitats, and breeding wasn't working the way it should. The day-one patch tried to fix all of that. But Frontier's own statement admits the job isn't done. Animal movement across terrain, enrichment (the toys that keep animals busy) placement and escapes are all still being worked on. In short, in a zoo game, the animals still can't walk properly. The patch also brought a small economy tweak: it cut the interest on low-tier loans. Which tells you the early-game debt trap was squeezing players pretty hard.

Steam users point at the same spot. As of 28 October, 61 percent of the 3,351 reviews on the store page are positive, and the tag is "Mixed". That number probably only counts English reviews; the total is around 4,100 and still climbing. Most of the complaints are about bugs and crashes. Hardly anyone objects to the idea of the game. They object to how it runs. Then there's Denuvo on PC. And the minimum specs are nothing to sneeze at: 16 GB RAM, an RTX 2060 or RX 5600 XT, 40 GB of space. An SSD is recommended (retire that old drive in your case now).

Critics, on the other hand, gave it a much warmer welcome. OpenCritic shows an average of 82 from about 30 reviews, and 87 percent of critics recommend it. The Metacritic score on the Steam page is 84. Most scores sit between 8 and 9.5 out of 10. The one clear outlier is PC Gamer's 60/100. Their main complaint there is that the game buries the player under a load of fine-tuning. The praise gathers in obvious places: the variety and behaviour of the animals, the aquariums and aviaries, the visuals and the deeper building tools. The faults they list match Steam's: launch bugs, models clipping into each other and a clunky interface.

The gap between those two pictures actually tells you something. The critic measures what the game wants to be; the Steam player measures what actually ran on their screen that week. Both are right. If your save crashes in the middle of a hundred-hour career, a beautiful aquarium is cold comfort.

Price has to go into the sums too. The standard edition is 49.99 euros, the Deluxe 64.99 euros. Are the six species Deluxe adds (the Axolotl and the hammerhead shark among them) plus a few signs worth fifteen euros? I say no. The standard edition will do; you can think about the rest later.

I'm keeping the score at 74. Not higher, because a save that crashes in launch week, animals breaking out and a graphics setting that won't stick will break the backbone of any management game, however ambitious it is. Frontier itself says the job isn't finished. Not lower either, because water and sky really do add a new dimension to the series, the building tools are among the best in the genre, and the bugs are in the workmanship, not the idea. Bad workmanship gets fixed with patches. If you loved the first game and kept saying "if only it had fish", you can buy it now. If you want a stable game, wait a few more patches. The game isn't going to run off anywhere (the animals might).