Build a zoo anywhere
Let's Build a Zoo is a Construction and Management Game developed by Springloaded and published by No More Robots. It was released on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2021. A DLC expansion called Dinosaur Island was released in 2022, followed by Aquarium Odyssey in 2023.The player is tasked with creating a zoo, and fulfilling requests from various visitors, investors, conservationists, and corporations. Occasionally, you'll get messages called Critical Choices that require you to select one of two options before continuing, and depending on your choice, you'll be rewarded with money, morality points, or new animals. Then things get weird. You can turn your zoo into a sustainable farm powered by wind turbines, or a polluted industrial complex where you kill your animals to make products from them. Either way, you can also create hybrids using gene-splicing.
This game contains examples of:
Base Game
- Aliens Steal Cattle: One newspaper article is about flying saucers abducting cows from a zoo. You can make this happen yourself by unlocking the crashed UFO decoration and placing it.
- Animal Gender-Bender: Animals don't have sexual dimorphism, meaning you can have (for example) male "cows" with udders or hens that look like roosters.
- Artificial Meat: The improbable lab turns beetroots into fake meat that's indistinguishable from the real thing.
- Black Comedy: The newspaper articles that pop up when you reach certain milestones contain a lot of jabs at corporate greed, such as the CEO of a power corporation complaining about renewable energy because it means less money for them.
- Cartoon Penguin: The default penguin variant is black and white with a round head and orange beak. Averted with the other variants, though, which look like specific species.
- Constantly Lactating Cow: Fertile cows will produce milk as long as they're in a barn or battery.
- Creature-Breeding Mechanic: If you have at least one male and one female animal of the same species in an enclosure, they have a chance to breed with each-other. Usually the offspring will look like one of the parents, but there's a rare chance they'll produce a different variant instead. You can speed this process up using the nursery.
- Delivery Stork: The nursery building has a large sign depicting a stork carrying a package.
- Fed to Pigs: There's a Critical Choice where a crime boss asks if you can dispose of a dead body by feeding it to your animals. Accepting it gives you evil points.
- Karma Meter: You gain good morality points when you perform certain actions that benefit your employees, animals, customers, and the environment, and evil points when you perform actions that harm them. The more points you have in a given side, the more of its facilities you can use.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The CRISPR machine allows you to gene-splice two animal species together to create hybrids with the head of one species and the body of another.
- Palette Swap: Every animal has 10 variants. While some of them have slightly different base sprites, most of them are recolours of the default.
- Polar Penguins: The penguins in this game prefer to live in Arctic enclosures.
- Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: After you buy some double-decker buses, you unlock the quantum accelerator, which bends reality to... add extra seats.
- Tech Tree: You can unlock new decorations, facilities, enclosure types, and other items from a grid using research points, which are gained every few seconds as long as you have researchers. You can only unlock something if it's adjacent to something you've already unlocked.
Dinosaur Island
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- Desmatosuchus' description calls it a dinosaur, even though it was an aetosaur, a group of archosaurs that are more closely related to crocodilians and went extinct at the end of the Triassic.
- The "pterodactyl" is noticeably less realistic than the other pterosaurs; it's bipedal, and despite the name, looks more like Pteranodon.
- Velociraptor and Dilophosaurus are once again based on their Jurassic Park counterparts.
- Tsintaosaurus has a unicorn-like crest, which has now been disproven.
- Extinct Animal Park: This expansion allows the players to obtain various prehistoric animals; despite the name, it's not just dinosaurs and their contemporaries, because there are various ice age mammals as well.
- Fossil Revival: It's explained at the beginning of the campaign that they've discovered a method to resurrect animals from newly-unearthed fossils.
- Kids' Show Mascot Parody: One Critical Choice is from a purple dinosaur named Bernie, who wants to corrupt your zoo with subliminal marketing by selling merchandise there. Accepting his offer is the evil choice. You can also hire mascots in Bernie costumes.
- Mammoths Mean Ice Age: Woolly mammoths are most comfortable in Arctic enclosures.
- Misplaced Wildlife: Minmi is only known from Australia (which is even mentioned in its description), yet its fossil is dug up from Germany.
- Phonýmon: One of the Critical Choices about a multi-media franchise called DinoMonsters, that's about tiny monsters that fit in your pocket, made by someone called Satoshi. The associated image even looks like the original "Who's that Pokémon?" Eye Catch from the English dub of Pokémon: The Original Series.
- Shout-Out: One Critical Choice, called The Builder, is from a client named Bob, who wears a yellow hard hat, blue overalls, and an orange chequered shirt. He talks about using dinosaurs in construction, based on a cartoon he saw, which might be a reference to The Flintstones.
- Snowy Sabertooths: The sabertooth prefers Arctic enclosures. This is despite the fact that their fossils are dug up in South America, suggesting they're the tropical-dwelling Smilodon populator.
- Taxonomic Term Confusion: All of the animals in this expansion are referred to as dinosaurs in generic text (eg: when your palaeontologists complete a dig), though this is averted in each species' description.
