Frontier has just released a South America Pack for Planet Zoo, featuring five new animals and over 250 new pieces of scenery, building, and foliage pieces to add a jungle touch to your game. We took a look to see if it’s worth the investment.
New Animals
There are five new animals: Jaguar, Llama, Giant Anteater, Capuchin Monkey, and Red-Eyed Tree Frog. The Jaguar and Llamas need to be housed alone, but the Anteaters and Capuchin Monkeys will live happily together, along with Tapirs that are already in the game. The Tree Frog is a small exhibit animal that fits nicely alongside them.
These animals are a huge feature of this pack, and for many players, will be what sells it. As we’ve come to expect from Planet Zoo, each animal is unique, well designed, and realistic. In order to help them feel at home, there are also new foliage items in the pack, best suited to their needs. The Jaguars, in particular, are a standout as they look amazing and each one has individual markings.
Scenery And Locations
For those building a zoo from scratch, the new South American setting is beautiful, but awkward. It’s set in some picturesque mountains, which look stunning, but offer only a long, narrow vista to build in. This can make things difficult when trying to build a sprawling zoo, so save that idea for a different location.
In terms of decor, the aesthetics are bamboo and jungle temples. The pre-built facilities are vibrant and tropical feeling. They make use of bamboo walls, as well as a new range of rain forest-themed motives and multicolored patterns reminiscent of South American culture.
There are a few temple-themed scenery items and many smaller building pieces that would allow you to create a jungle temple feel. These are combined with tropical feeling rain forest trees and plants. It’s all very Indiana Jones, but if you hate bamboo, you’ll be in for a bad time.
Differences In Direction
When compared to the Arctic Pack, this pack has an extra animal, albeit a small exhibit one, and more scenery pieces. The biggest change, however, is the fact that the Arctic Pack contained two new scenarios, set in Norway and Mexico. The Norway scenario saw you build up an animal sanctuary in snowy Scandinavian Fjords and the Mexico scenario asked players to rise to the challenge of keeping Arctic animals comfortable in a warm climate.
While the new animals are beautiful, this pack is definitely more focused on those who build franchises or sandbox zoos. Still, if you can look past the lack of scenarios and just at the animals the South America Pack has some stunning animals that are sure to bring in the visitors.
A PC copy of South America Pack was provided to TheGamer. Planet Zoo, along with the Arctic Pack and South America Pack are available now for PC.
If you want more help with your zoo planning make sure to check out our other Planet Zoo articles.
