WildLife Park 2 preview

Wildlife Park 2 is the latest title from Deep Silver and B-Alive which casts you as a zoo manager. The game boasts more than 50 animals from all different species from mammals through lizard and even insects.

It also promises about 20 missions and free sandbox mode. Of course, what's really important with a game like this is the park itself and how you can go about caring for the animals. With realistic water effects and plenty of plant life the environments are promising to be realistic but what's going to set this title apart from the other management games?

The Circle Of Life

Once you get the hang of it Wildlife Park 2 you find out that there is plenty of depth to the animal management. You can control the objects in the animal enclosures from the exercise items to shelter and plants. You can even control the hardness of the ground to get it just right for the plants and animals. The water is something that Deep Silver are pleased with.

Usually you are provided with a pool to start with and from there you can adjust the height of the land to move the water around creating waterfalls and new pools. The animals can have a swim if you create a pool for them and the water will behave as you would expect, seeping away and spreading over even ground. Of course, the animals all need food as well and here Wildlife Park 2 offers you some choice in how to approach it. You can, of course, provide bowls of food for the animals or you can create a more natural habitat with a full food chain.

Employment Queue

Your park won't survive without a few employees and the usual suspects are present in this game. You can employ the cleaners and handymen that you would expect for a park game but you also have a vet and trainer at your disposal. The vets role is obvious enough but the trainer is used to teach your animals new tricks.

You can place exercise items in the enclosures and the trainer will encourage the animals to use them. This can range from a punching bag to a treadmill. As the animals training level goes up they will become used to the new equipment and use it for themselves. They'll be able to use some scenery items without training. For instance, you can place some rocks in a tigers enclosure and he'll jump around over them in a rather camp animation.

Mind Reading

You'll know what your animals want by reading their minds in the tradition of this sort of game. An icon will appear above the animals indicating if they're happy or not and you can click on the smiley or frowning face to get a more detailed breakdown of their needs. If your animals are all starving then they need some food to be added, if they want softer ground then you need to provide it, if they want activity then you need to provide some objects for them.

It's all pretty straightforward – there's no cryptic needs, they tell you more or less exactly what they want and you provide it. This eliminates some challenge as there's no vagueness to their requests as you might get in other games – like a series of emotion meters that you need to work out how to satisfy. The same is true of the visitors to your park. Of course, you need to keep them happy and provide ways for them to part with their cash if you're to succeed but again they tell you exactly what their needs are and you just need to find the correct item in your toolbox to meet their needs.

Shopping

Visitors are where your income will come from so you need to find a way to milk money out of your customers. Charging at the gate is a start and from there its the shops that you would expect to see – drinks and food mostly although there are some lookout posts and binocular stations for the guests to use to observe the animals. It's not all about capitalism though as you can use the money to help out the animals.

You can establish research centres to breed extinct animals and plants. Here's another attraction, being able to bring back extinct and exotic plants and creatures for your park. All of the animals are individually animated making the real ones and the imagined ones a bit more realistic and with all of the animals and plants more information is available about them in the in-game encyclopaedia. This is an effort to make the game even more family friendly as it has some additional information available.

Taking control

The game is viewed from a fixed camera perspective for most of the time. You can move the camera around with the mouse or arrow keys and you can zoom in and out with the mouse scroll wheel. If you zoom in far enough you enter a first person perspective. From here you can walk around completely and view the park from the same level as your visitors. This is of limited usefulness but seems to be the only way to turn the camera when you zoom back out.

Of course, the first person mode does give you a different experience and allows you to sit back and enjoy your creation but isn't very useful from the gaming perspective. The menu system is standard fare with a usual layout for the tools and hiring of staff. The designing of the park will also be familiar to anyone who's played any sort of Theme Park game. The only different aspects here are the path finding techniques in some of the design modes, The fences, for instance automatically join up as you bring them closer together. The paths can also find their way around obstacles. It does help but it's not a big deal.

Take Shelter

Every environmental factor in Wildlife Park 2 has an effect on the visitors and animals alike. When it rains everyone wants to find shelter and generally everyone's unhappy for a while. When it's sunny everyone's happy. It looks like the main problem with Wildlife Park 2 might be a lack of originality. They're boasting about lots of features that most users won't notice. This is mainly around the AI of the animals and their interaction with the environment as well as the water and environmental effects.

That's great but what users are going to be more interested in is the number of animals and the level of control they have over the park. The mission based game is looking good but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly innovative in the rest of the gameplay. That's not to say that its shaping up as a bad game, far from it, it just doesn't really provide anything more than Theme Park did in the 90s. Maybe Deep Silver is keeping something back for the release version but maybe it’s hoping that fans of the genre will want more of the same.