YMMV / Zoo Tycoon

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Santa Claus and a Witch appearing for Christmas and Halloween for the first game. They fly across your screen for a split second on the in-game Halloween and Christmas. If you're quick (or if you pause the game), you can open the foliage menu and buy special plants- a jack-o-lantern on Halloween and a Christmas tree on Christmas. Waiting until December 25th in-game is the only way besides cheating to get a Christmas tree, which is the preferred foliage of the reindeer.
• Breather Level:
  • In the first game, Inner City Zoo and Revitalize Burkitsville Zoo are significantly less challenging than Saving the Great Cats and Endangered Species Zoo, despite all being classified as "Intermediate" difficulty. While the latter two are brutal enough to be That One Level, the former have lower goals to make to compensate for their handicaps; a skilled player could easily build six exhibits in Inner City Zoo and still have plenty of room left over, while the decrepit exhibits of Burkitsville Zoo aren't all that difficult to renovate.
  • Conservation Zoo is fairly simple compared to the other scenarios classified as "Advanced" difficulty. While you are restricted on the species you can display in your zoo, the objectives aren't too difficult to meet for a player who's already gotten that far in the game in the first place. There's also no time limit, so you have unlimited time to create eight exhibits.
  • This pattern is repeated in that game's Marine Mania expansion pack: three of the four "Intermediate" scenarios are fairly easy, with one of them being a puzzle scenario and two being fairly standard zoos with no real gimmicks. The fourth, "Free Admission", is one of the nastiest scenarios in the entire game.
  • Take the Plunge and The Ocean's Biomes from the second game's Marine Mania expansion pack, which have fairly simple goals ("adopt 10 different marine animal species" and "adopt species from each major marine biome", respectively) and are also far more generous with cash grants than most other scenarios; "Take the Plunge" gives you tens of thousands of dollars just for reaching (very modest) guest amount milestones, while "The Ocean's Biomes" gives you fifteen thousand dollars for each animal that counts towards winning the scenario.
• Broken Base: The 2013 reboot. Some fans hate the fact it is on the Xbox as opposed to the PC, others are just happy to have a new Zoo Tycoon at all. Further broken by the fact that the new game has 101 animals on the Xbox One and a comparatively paltry 65 on the Xbox 360. Xbox One exclusives include fossa, both of the available species of mongooses, and every single antelope except for one, which is a DLC. (Notably, the game doesn't include any species of zebra, a standard zoo animal. Future DLC, most likely.)
  • Remedied, at least a little, by the 2017 remaster. It is still Xbox One exclusive, but now there is over 200 animals with the addition of a large amount of Australian and South American animals. There is still the issue of PC users being left out, though...
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Regardless of how beautiful or detailed a pre-made map may be, expect one of the first actions when loading up a scenario to be bulldozing everything except for the initial path (If there is a compost building on the map, it's also usually left alone). The reason for doing this is that it gives you more money to start out with and allows you to arrange the zoo however you wish.
  • For scenarios, animals such as lions, bengal tigers, and saltwater crocodiles are often used because of their affordability, high popularity with guests, and how easy it is to construct an exhibit with high suitability for them. Furthermore, in the second game, expect every player to adopt common peafowls for their quick reproduction rate and release them into the wild for an early fame boost.
  • It's a common practice to avoid using bathrooms and food courts all together, as the restaurants fill all of the needs that those do without the need for trash cans, benches, and tables. They're also available from the start in most, if not all scenarios and often make a large profit, making them even more appealing to use.
• Creepy Cute: The killer penguins from Zoo Tycoon 2. They may have razor-sharp teeth, Glowing Eyes of Doom, and an appetite for anything that breathes, but they're still penguins.
• Funny Moments:
  • In the tutorial for the first game, you're eventually given the objective to delete a section of the lion exhibit with the game telling you they are quite tame. After doing so and watching the lions attack the guests the game essentially tells you "Never listen to us". This leads to an epic Brick Joke in the tutorial for the Dinosaur Digs expansion. After your first dinosaur, an Allosaurus—a notorious giant carnivore of the Jurassic, mind you—hatches and you start furnishing its exhibit, the game tells you to delete a section of the fence once more, claiming the Allo must be happy enough not to attack guests. After the Allo breaks out and (possibly) starts eating guests, the game says "There you go listening to us again..."
  • In Zoo Tycoon 2, if a guest views a killer penguin and then decides to give you a donation, instead of the default "I'm giving the zoo a donation" message they'll think "If I give the penguin money, you think it might be nice to me?"
• Game-Breaker:
  • Restaurants in the first game. They completely fill a guests needs, can accommodate several guests at one time, and are so popular that they'll easily turn large profits. And to top it all off, the Complete Collection version gives you two buyable restaurants right from the start of each new game. Restaurants are still considered Game Breakers in the sequel as well, but they're much harder to unlock this time around outside of sandbox mode.
  • Compost buildings in the first game, which generate profit each time a pile of animal poop is cleaned, with no upkeep cost. The building doesn't need to be accessed by either staff or guests, so it can be placed in the far corner of the zoo so that its foul stench can't bother guests. As a result, most players incorporate this into their zoos, as there is no reason not to build one (besides a Self-Imposed Challenge).
• Genius Bonus: The Deinosuchus, while otherwise rendered inaccurately in the second game, has a gimmick shared with the whale shark that allows it to reach immense sizes after a certain number of in-game years, which references the legendary crocodile Gustave, a Nile crocodile who had grown to immense sizes in the wild by virtue of his immense age.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the first and second games, it is possible to buy a male animal just long enough to let it breed with a fertile female, then undo the purchase action so it vanishes and you get your money back. Pregnancy, if achieved, doesn't go away when you do this. The only downside is you can't purchase any other animal or thing before he gets the female pregnant. If you do, the undo option will get rid of that animal or item instead of the father animal. This means you may have to wait quite a while before you can do anything else.
  • It is always amusing when you place a predator in a prey animal's enclosure, and the prey animal responds with a happy face above its head, indicating the prey animal's happy with your decision.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the first game, one of the endangered species you can research is the white Bengal tiger. Nowadays, it is recognized that the vast majority of captive white tigers are the result of extensive inbreeding, and many zoos refuse to keep them or are outright banned from doing so because of animal cruelty concerns.
  • In tandem with Values Dissonance, animal-based shows, particularly orca shows. In more recent years, and especially after the release of Blackfish, the public is much more skeptical about the treatment of animals that are featured in shows. SeaWorld, the subject of the aforementioned documentary, has halted its famed orca shows altogether and pledged to keep no more orcas than the ones they already own.
  • The practice of elephants painting pictures, as depicted in the game, has become this now that an article claims that elephants aren't actually enriched by painting.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Some animals are now considered less endangered than they were when the second game came out. For example, Przewalski's wild horses are currently considered "endangered" (rather than "critically endangered", as they are in the game) and giant pandas are considered "vulnerable" rather than "endangered". Some of these, like the Przewalski's wild horse, even owe their lowered endangerment status to captive specimens being reintroduced to their natural habitats, just like what you can do in the game! Of course, for some species (such as great apes), the opposite is true and they're considered more endangered than they were in-game.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the first game, Emperor penguins will tap-dance if they are in a highly comfortable exhibit for them. Hmmmm, Tap-dancing penguins, huh?.
  • The Dinosaur Digs scenario that has you rebuilding "Jurassic Zoo" became the premise for Jurassic World.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Killer Penguin in Extinct Animals. Imagine the Killer Penguin Easter Egg from the original in the form of a demonic rockhopper penguin, and instead of simply being capable of killing all herbivores, can also kill any animal in the game. It cannot be sold, and it can sometimes replace the scientist in the cloning mini-game, and the worst offender of it at all is during challenge mode, you can end up being tricked into adopting an Implacable Man of an animal by a free penguin being offered to you for your zoo.
• The Scrappy: There are a few animals which are rather strongly disliked by the fanbase. Most creatures from the first game and its expansion packs stand out particularly, given their obnoxiously nitpicky requirements about their exhibits. Emperor penguins and orcas require a LOT of rocks, for example, and flamingos have a ridiculously short lifespan despite living over fifty years in real life.
  • Dinosaurs in the first game have a bad habit of reducing plants in their exhibit to rubble if their exhibit is unsuitable(read: in the yellow, and many dinosaurs have very high suitability requirements). This lowers the rating of the exhibit as "X does not like the Rubble" begins to count against the overall exhibit along with needing more plants. As such, the situation can drastically intensify and perpetuate even if the player tries to solve it, locking the player and the dinosaur in a downward spiral of placing more foliage and reducing it to rubble, and meanwhile the dinosaur just gets angrier and angrier. They also require giant exhibits and don't like company, not to mention being exceedingly expensive to start with. And let's not forget their infamous ability to break through literally any fence that isn't reinforced—a Coelophysis has no problems shredding right through iron bars.
  • Tyrannosaurus rex takes these problems up to the extreme; not only does it cost a fortune and it requires one of the largest exhibits of all animals, it also does not tolerate any others in its exhibit whatsoever, in addition to having a very high chance of catching diseases every now and then. It says something that there's a dedicated research program dedicated to making it act like a normal animal; specifically, it increases the happiness boost it receives when a scientist enters its exhibit, it reduces its chances of catching diseases, and it increases its maximum capacity to three like most other dinosaurs.
  • The markhor has certainly earned quite a bit of ire against it. Being from the mountainous Himalayas, they're extremely picky about what their exhibit should look like, and it shows; aside from requiring copious amounts of snow, the most expensive terrain in the game, they also need such an obscene amount of elevation and cliffs in their exhibits, making striking a balance between satisfying them and building an exhibit that doesn't look like the world's biggest earthquake a struggle. And despite the trouble of building their exhibits, they aren't even popular in any capacity. Their info article does give a quite justified warning that "in general, markhors are not the easiest animals to keep happy in captivity.".
  • The Galapagos giant tortoise and its cousin, the African spurred tortoise, introduced on the second game's Endangered Species and African Adventure expansions, respectively. Their slow walking speed means they take a lot of time to reach any food/water container in their exhibit, and since they lack the patience of their real-life counterparts, they get furious at not being able to satisfy their hunger or thirst in time, and unhappy animals obviously means unhappy guests. It doesn't help that in some cases, Galapagos giant tortoises have been known to come with a glitch that somehow crashes the game when you place one on your zoo, further adding to their infamy.
  • Gray wolves, male meerkats and polar bears have a strange yet annoying habit of killing and eating themselves at random, for completely unknown reasons, much to the dismay of multiple players.
  • The guests in both games easily take the cake, thanks in no small part to their sheer Artificial Stupidity. It gets to the point that it's basically become common knowledge that, if you've ever played this game, you've almost certainly sicced a deadly carnivore on the guests or dropped them into a dangerous enclosure at least once just because they were annoying you too much.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The adoption system in Challenge Mode in Zoo Tycoon 2. In concept, it only displays a limited selection of animals, in which you can switch it for another animal if you reject it yourself or place all offered animals. But its especially limited compared to the selection in Freeform mode, as the adoption menu does not list every animal in the game. What's more is the size of the menu directly correlates with the zoo's fame. While you can still keep all unlocked items gained from a higher level of fame on a lower level, menu slots for animals will only stay unlocked as long as you are at the level of fame they unlock for. In addition, some animals are only ever available at those levels of fame, meaning they are re-locked until you make the zoo famous enough again, which can be annoying if you want certain animals but you can't get them when they become locked.
  • Breeding in the original. Animals seem to just breed at random, and they never seem to mate when you want them to.
  • In the first game, the excessive amount of time given to complete some scenarios. In some cases, it's so bad you will spend more time waiting for the time to pass than actually doing the stuff required to complete the scenario! Fortunately, you can make the game play in windowed mode so you can leave it running while you do other stuff, but it's still annoying and ridiculous. Thankfully, the devs seemed to catch on, as some of the missions in the expansions and all of them in the sequel don't have time limits.
  • In the Xbox One and Xbox 360 Zoo Tycoon reboot, the ridiculously low zoo limit that keeps you from adopting more animals, placing more buildings, or placing more items when it is reached. It's so bad, they give you huge maps, but you can't even fill up 25 percent of them!
  • In the first game, the strict exhibit requirements very often make it difficult, if not impossible to keep certain species together and have both be happy, even ones that are often kept together in real zoos and live in the same habitat in the wild. It also prevents you from getting too creative with your exhibits, because each species wants a certain amount of dirt, water, grass, trees, etc, and whines if you deviate too far from the formula. Word of God confirms that the latter was the reason exhibit requirements were removed from the sequel.
  • Not being able to turn the message box off. This is most noticeable if you play the game in a manner (presumably) not intended like many players sometimes do, such as putting 100 tigers in a far too small enclosure or trying to make your own Africa by putting tons of free-ranging animals everywhere; you can make the message box freak out. It beeps continuously with new messages (such as "Giraffe 28 is not in an enclosure", "Tiger 89 is unhappy", etc) and there is no obvious way to turn it off. If you mute the sound you can't hear the roars of all those tigers, and other nice game sounds...
  • In Zoo Tycoon 2, you can't overlap the plants very well. This sounds like it would be a minor thing, but it significantly hinders decorating the zoo for many players.
  • The Marine Mania expansion of the second game added some physics to the various ball enrichment objects, making them bounce and roll around more realistically after an animal uses them and allowing you to kick them around in zookeeper mode. While it may look better, it also tends to cause the affected balls to roll into places where the animals have no space to use them and forces you to manually move them back into the open, where the animals will naturally hit them back into the unreachable places again.
  • The ability to pause in both games ended up intersecting with a particular issue in the second game. Placing items or animals in bodies of water, primarily in tanks, makes the water splash. If you end up having to keep the game paused while putting a lot of items down, and then un-pause the game while still in that area, all the splashing ends up producing a massive lag spike.
• That One Level:
  • Zoo Tycoon:
    • Any scenario that requires you to achieve an average guest happiness rating of 93 due to the sheer Artificial Stupidity. You can have a whole row of restaurants available yet guests with critical level needs will blow right past them. And as they do so, their happiness will drop. Granted, with the expansions you can pick up and move guests in front of restaurants, but when you're managing everything else you can't be babysitting them all the time.
    • One such level, "Endangered Species", also requires the player to adopt and breed three different endangered species, each of which has to be unlocked through research. It doesn't help that the cat climbing tree, a toy for the black leopard, is one of the last toys to be unlocked through research. Once the player completes the other objectives, the level turns into a Luck-Based Mission as the player waits to see whether each of the species will produce offspring by the time limit.
    • One of the most difficult levels in the first game (plus expansions) is "Free Admission": not only is the player's primary source of income in other scenarios removed from them, but the main goal of the scenario is to make a net income in spite of this. The circumstances make it difficult to even break even at the end of each month. To add insult to injury, this is one of the few Timed Missions in the Marine Mania expansion pack, and the one with the shortest time limit (18 months). Easy Level Tricks are almost necessary to beat the level for most players.
  • Zoo Tycoon 2:
    • Any scenario that requires the player to build a five-star zoo is a challenge in itself:
    • "The Endangered Species Zoo" requires this be done using nothing but endangered or critically endangered species, which are very expensive. Even worse is that there is a conservation area, which will get in your way as you build and expand. This scenario essentially boils down to a mad rush to adopt as many endangered species as you can before your older animals die off.
    • "Five-Star Sensation" from the Endangered Species expansion pack requires this be done in one in-game year.
    • The first scenario of Zoo Tycoon 2's Extinct Exploration Campaign, "The Hard Way", requires you to build a four-star zoo. The catch? You can't adopt animals and have to rely entirely on reviving fossils to expand your zoo. Aside from the hassle of having to run around finding fossil pieces, many extinct animals are Difficult, but Awesome by nature, requiring plenty of space and expensive fencing, and the scenario doesn't exactly go out of its way to throw cash grants at you.
  • "Carnivorous Kalidahs" from the 2013 reboot (and 2017 re-update). You need to adopt five different baby endangered species. You only start out with around $25,000 yet each baby animal will cost you at least $10,000, making it easy to run out of money fast. Entire guides have sprung up on internet forums for this one scenario.
• That One Sidequest: The earthquake event in Zoo Tycoon 2's challenge mode. Unlike normal challenges, there is no way to decline it - it just happens and the game tells you to deal with the aftermath. Unfortunately, said aftermath consists of fences breaking across the zoo, and earthquakes can occur regardless of your current financial situation. Better hope you've got enough spare cash lying around to patch the fences up quickly or you're going to have to crate away the animals before they get a chance to escape and terrorize your guests.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans are unhappy that the sequel game outright removed many animals (Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, baboons, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Plesiosaurus, woolly mammoths, etc.) and Easter eggs (i.e. mermaids, unicorns, and the gold brick path).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Nile crocodile with Marine Mania or Extinct Animals installed, due to the fact both expansions give us the whale shark and Deinosuchus who can grow to immense sizes with age. Who would've killed to see the idea of having effectively a fictional rendition of Gustave present in one's zoo?
• Unconventional Learning Experience: Similar to how the Age of Empires series can help some people to learn more about history and mythology, the "Zoo Tycoon" series can help some people learn more about zoology and paleontology. Even if there are some cases of Artistic License appearing in the series and moments where the ingame zoopedia presents accurate information for animals, but gameplay ignores that and forces you to do something else instead which clases with the above said (e.g. tigers living in groups akin to lions).
• Values Dissonance: A recent case covered under Harsher in Hindsight; the ability to do animal shows such as the Marine ones in particular falls under this as the public has become far more skeptical of them following revelations of poor conditions for performing animals such as with SeaWorld.

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