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Published
by Mastertronic
Developed by NovaTrix GmbH
Release Date: Out Now
Price: £9.99
Arriving
after the fantastically popular Zoo Tycoon, Wildlife Park
was in many ways the more complete and challenging game.
In fact whilst Zoo Tycoon in some ways felt that it was
gentle paced to appeal to more casual gamers Wildlife Park
actually managed to deliver a real challenge. We reviewed
Wildlife Park when it was first released and awarded the
game a well deserved 8.9/10. What we have of course is the
Wildlife Park Gold Edition that not only includes the great
original game but also the Wild Creatures expansion pack.
As we have already reviewed Wildlife Park (you can read
the review here)
we'll take a look at the Wild Creatures expansion pack.
Wild
Creatures, which installs as a stand alone game, offers
a 10 scenario campaign (2 of these are tutorials), 15 new
animal species, new plants and equipment as well as the
ability to train your animals. The Free Play mode has also
been improved allowing you to configure a variety of details
before you begin. The most striking feature of the game
is the Breeding-Back ability that your zoo now has. Breeding-Back
is basically the ability to breed a once extinct animal
species by using similar animals that are alive today. For
instance using a mammoth's DNA and an Indian elephant it's
possible to have baby mammoths in your zoo. One of the Zoo
Tycoon expansions, Dinosaur Digs, allowed you to have dinosaurs
in your zoo but at least the developers have managed to
think up the interesting concept of Breeding-Back to make
the whole thing of having pre-historic animals in your zoo
slightly more plausible. On the whole the Wild Creatures
expansion is a solid addition that compliments the original
game.
Graphically
Wildlife Park and its expansion are 2D isometric affairs
that look OK and do the job quite nicely. You can zoom in
if you want to but to be perfectly honest the graphics do
look pixelated and quite poor when zoomed in so the chances
are it's a feature you won't use much. The animals look
and animate quite impressively though and whereas in Zoo
Tycoon 2 the animals almost have a slightly cartoon like
appearance, in Wildlife Park it's obvious that the developers
attempted to make the animals looks as realistic as possible
which I personally prefer.
It's
quite amazing just how many strategy games you can now buy
that are less than £10. To be perfectly honest though,
most of these are rubbish. There are some gems to be had
though and I would certainly class Wildlife as one of these.
Zoo Tycoon may have sold a lot more copies but in many ways
Wildlife Park is a more comprehensive game and offers more
of a challenge. We said in our review of Wildlife Park that
the game is very deaf gamer friendly (there's no speech
in the game at all) and it's exactly the same for the Wild
Creatures expansion. There's months of fun to be had with
the original game alone and coupled with the expansion pack
it's a real bargain that strategy fans should not miss out
on.
Overall
Game Rating: 4.5/5
Wildlife Park was a much underrated game when it was first
released and with it now being bundled with the expansion
for less than £10 it's an offer that's too good to
miss.
Deaf
Gamers Classification:
(Click
the letter or here
for details)
There's no visual clues for the
audio but all information is in text (there's no speech
in the game) so you'll be fine.
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