Planet Zoo 2: fish, birds, thirty thousand players, and a server that will not answer

Thirty thousand people are playing Planet Zoo 2 as I write this sentence. The game came out forty minutes ago.

And the only two negative reviews it has both say the same thing: the game will not launch.

Let us start there, because that is the information you need today, not in three weeks.

Today's problem

One player writes it with a cold anger I entirely understand: it is unacceptable for a game to refuse to reach its main menu because it cannot talk to a third-party server. And it is equally unacceptable for that server to be unreachable at the moment the game launches.

He adds that he will never update his review. You can find that rigid. Personally I think the question he is asking is the right one.

Planet Zoo 2 is a building game. You can spend three hundred hours in it without meeting another human being. Requiring a working connection to external infrastructure to reach the menu is a design choice, not a technical inevitability.

As I write, the problem appears intermittent: the vast majority of the thirty thousand people connected are visibly playing. But if you buy today and hit a stuck screen, now you know it is not your machine.

This is the kind of thing fixed in a few hours. It is also the kind of thing that should never have existed.

Now, the game, and it is very good

With the launch dealt with, let us talk about what Frontier built, because it is substantial.

Aquatic species arrive. That is the major addition, and it was the first game's most glaring absence. You build freshwater or saltwater aquariums, with colourful shoals of fish, blacktip reef sharks, hawksbill turtles.

One player sums up the general feeling better than I can: there are fish and birds, and in his humble opinion they should have been part of the first game. He is right, and that is precisely why this second entry justifies itself.

Flying species too, for the first time.

And the Wildlife Reserves. That is the other big idea: you no longer merely exhibit, you release your species into customisable, expansive reserves. Animal conservation moves from being an indicator to being a destination. In a zoo game, that is an elegant answer to the moral question the genre has always had to ask itself.

What early players notice

I read the reviews from people who had the game in advance, and two things recur.

The leap in animal detail is real. Natural movement, expressive emotions, authentic herding behaviours, animals that actually graze on the vegetation you planted. One player with forty hours describes an incredible step up from what he was used to, while noting the game still feels immediately familiar to him, which he presents as the biggest compliment available.

He is right: in a management sequel, not disorienting your audience is as hard as impressing them.

The Planet Coaster 2 inheritance shows. Several players note that the construction systems and especially the pathing carry over improvements from Frontier's other series. For anyone who suffered with the first Planet Zoo's paths, that is excellent news.

The reservations

The animal roster is already dividing people. One otherwise enthusiastic player says he is disappointed by the species list at launch. That is this series' eternal argument, and you should know what to expect: Frontier sells expansions, lots of them, and the house habit is to ship a solid base and then fill it in over three years.

Another player announces it bluntly: he will buy every single expansion, as he did for the previous ones. That is honest, and it describes the contract.

Performance demands a machine. One player reports struggling to hold sixty frames per second. For a game of this kind, where you end up running thousands of visitors and hundreds of animals, that is the point to watch over time.

And there are only thirteen reviews. I say so because it is the truth: the game came out less than an hour ago, and I am not going to build a reception analysis on that. What is solid today is what the game contains and what people with early access were able to verify.

Who should buy it

If you liked the first one, the question barely arises. The fish, the birds, the reserves and the fixed pathing answer exactly the three or four complaints you have been making since 2019.

If you have never touched the series, know what you are getting into: this is a demanding building game, where you spend as much time sorting out barriers and visitors as watching animals. The curve is real.

And if you collect management games without ever finishing them, this one will cost you a winter. Fifty euros, and construction depth sufficient for people to spend years in it.

One player wrote, about this game, that it was his version of GTA VI.

That is ridiculous. It is also exactly what hundreds of thousands of people feel who have been waiting years for this, and who do not have a press conference to say so with.

Frontier now needs to fix that server, and explain why it was there.

Got your aquarium already? Show it on the InsertCoins Discord, we are opening a gallery.