izigame.me

Right now, in its current state, I cannot in good conscience recommend this game. I’m well aware this is early access, and it's not the first early access/beta I've played, so I don't feel my expectations are unfairly high. I honestly expected a small amount of dinos, scenery/buildings, staff, and visitor needs. The latter 2 are completely absent though.
My suggestion is only to buy this if you want to support the developers or you like to build things a lot. If you're looking for a management game, then I think you'll find yourself disappointed like me.
I was pretty hyped after just missing the alpha access previously to get this finally, but I quickly found myself disappointed by the lack of management features. I persisted in playing for 10hrs+ to give it a chance, as I really wanted to love it. But I've decided to leave it and come back later as some of the bugs and the lack of management features are too much for me.
The Bad:
-Game breaking bugs
>>>Dinos spinning and stuck unless you move them
>>>Items magically duplicating themselves perfectly on top of one another, so you're wondering why items won't change color
>>>Items duplicating but aren't selectable or deletable unless you hard restart the game
>>>Preview images becoming completely white so you can't see what items are what, which again requires a hard start to fix
>>>Graphical bugs and things clipping, moving, and end flashing depending on the distance you're zoomed in or out
>>>Visitors randomly on top of buildings even with no way to get up there
>>>And most importantly, the one that was the last straw for me was my dinos magically getting outside of my fences despite using the correct type of fence + fence damage not being a mechanic. I had a zoo of like 50-60 dinos, and suddenly 10 or so started showing as outside of their enclosure, somewhere outside which I moved back. But many were actually still inside their enclosure, and despite moving them, they remained stuck outside + starving.
-Poor performance
The dinos look amazing, but many other graphical glitches are happening. The fences look awful, especially the metal ones. Textures and layers flash and clip depending on your zoom. My computer is pretty high-end, and the amount of resources + shadow quality is pretty poor.
-AI is lacking
>>> Dino AI does very little like eat/sleep/drink/poo. The eating and drinking seems poorly done, as most of my dinos prefer to starve to death/die of dehydration even if there is food/water right in front of them. They also don't interact with each other, hunt, socialize, assert dominance, or even care if you mix herbivores and carnivores. They don't even attack fences or try to break out if unhappy.
>>> Vistor AI is as bad as Jurassic World Evolution or even worse. The visitors are basically zombies. They just walk around and don't do anything. No sitting on benches, generating rubbish, looking at the dinos, eating/drinking, or using the toilets. They don't have any actual needs, so adding food or drink shops are just there to look good and generate income. They also end up randomly on top of buildings where they shouldn’t be able to even get to, clip through many objects like benches/stairs, and have weird pathing where everyone clumps up on one side of a 10m wide path and no one uses the other half.
-Lack of management features
>>> No staff at all. This means no security, no vets, no cleaners, no engineers. All you do is place a few dung beetles and click a clean-up button every so often. There's no need to manage salaries, job tasks, patrol routes, deal with animal sickness, breaking fences, damaged power supplies, vandalism, or anything really.
>>> No visitor needs. They don't really care about anything, whether it's food, drink, litter, seating and while the tutorial tells you visibility is a thing, it doesn't actually seem to have any impact as it always seems to be sitting at 100%
>>> No dino breeding - no baby dinos, it's literally the same as JWE1. You create dinos, place them in an enclosure, maybe fix up the need bars and just leave them to it.
>>> No notifications, warnings, or consequences in general. The game won't warn you even if a dino is outside an enclosure or practically starving to death because it's stuck in a glitchy spin.
-Lack of content/annoying things in general
>>> There's very little content at all. I know it's only early access, but even if you take a "build a nice looking zoo" approach and try to ignore the lack of management options, it feels like there isn't much in the way of modular objects or basic items in general.
>>> No challenges/goals in challenge mode. It just feels like sandbox, but you need to dig up fossils + keep an eye on the money. That's it, really.
>>> UI is better in many ways than Planet Zoo but still has many clunky issues. Sometimes clicking on a close/cross icon will close things. Sometimes it won't. Exiting out of groups feels more difficult than it should be, and some objects seem impossible to select despite being in front of other objects that *are* selectable.
>>>No dino-pedia. This feels super basic that it should be there but isn't.
>>>Lack of lighting. I feel like the zoo I created was in perpetual darkness, making it very difficult to see anything or build even with the light tool turned on. This really needs tweaking as the light does nothing when zoomed out, making building anything a real pain. At least give us the option to switch to daytime when the game is paused for building purposes...
>>>Adding aviary animals was not explained or intuitive at all. You have to build the aviary and then *double-click* to get the right menu up. I was single clicking and only getting the edit group option so this took forever to figure out.
The Good
-Yes, there are a lot of bad things, but there is also a lot of potential. I just think it's important people know exactly what is lacking first to make an informed decision rather than just buying into the whole "oh, it's so much better than Planet Zoo/Jurassic Park Evolution 1/2)
-Dinos look fantastic, and there is a good starting selection. There are even some aviary animals!
-The building tools are very innovative. With the scaling tool, you open up tons of new possibilities when the amount of modular items becomes more varied.
-Pathing and fence building are much easier and less clunky. I no longer feel like I need a science degree to know how my paths will end up
-Foliage brush is amazing and makes adding a variety of realistic-looking plants/trees a breeze
-Interesting dino facts when clicking on them is a fun addition, though I do feel this should be more of a “polish feature” that gets added once all the basic features are done.
-Good consideration of some UI features, like when clicking on items within a dino's need window, it opens up the toolbar for the right tools/items to help solve it.
I've tried to persevere with the game and give it a chance despite my disappointment in the lack of management features, as I'm more of a micromanager than a builder.
Overall, the game has a lot of promise, and the development team seems to generally care about doing things the right way and using new innovative techniques, unlike other games I've played. I'll be leaving this in my library and coming back in a few months when hopefully, I can change my review. But right now, as it is, even as an early access game, $30 seems like too much for the amount of basic management features missing.