izigame.me

While I can say the game's prehistoric animals are some of the best ever made for a video game design-wise, the rest of the game has not impressed me so far. Yes, I know it's in Early Access, but for the time being, the game is just not ready or technically stable. I have attempted the tutorial several times and have never been able to complete it due to some bug or glitch happening. If you can't even get through the intro stuff, what's the point? Also, the framerate is horrible. It's like it's locked to 30 fps or less so the game moves so slow. I have an Alienware M15 R5 with an Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics card and an AMD Ryzen 9 5000 series processor. My laptop should be able to run a game like this at 60 fps+. Also, the modular building, while it allows for creative freedom, is irritating for building neat-looking parks just like it is in Planet Zoo. And like PZ, the controls of said building are poorly explained in the interactive tutorials and instead they shove a bunch of text instructions your way instead of giving you tutorials that actually guide you through the controls to get you comfortable with the building system. The control scheme for this game, compared to other similar games like Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Planet Zoo, is somewhat unintuitive. The UI and other interfaces, while they look clean and well-organized, are also quite counterintuitive at times. It feels like I have to execute ways more commands just to send out fossil expeditions and create animals than I ever have to in JWE2 or indeed way more commands than are needed to adopt animals and place them in enclosures in Planet Zoo.
At this stage, this game is not ready and it's not stable. Bugs and glitches galore can ruin everything in a heartbeat. I do understand the PK devs wanting to get their animal roster and game content/features nailed down which is why they are pushing all that so hard, but as with other EA games that have followed similar development styles this comes at the cost of performance and polish in the more immediate term. It looks good, but functions with about the same grace and coordination of a Triceratops on stilts. I purchased the game earlier this year to support the developers, but I wouldn't recommend trying to seriously play this right now unless you can deal with the frustrating lack of technical polish and performance. It just makes for a frustrating gameplay experience (especially if you're like me and can't finish even the opening tutorial). Overall, I like the concept of a game that merges the prehistoric animal park builder aspects of Jurassic World Evolution 2 with the realism aspects and creativity of Planet Zoo, but the current product is far from finished and is not in a technical state I can recommend people play right now unless you are dedicated to influencing the future development of this game in terms of content and features, and finding all the bugs, glitches, and optimization problems to report to the devs. In conclusion, buy if you like the game's concepts and want to support the devs for when the game is fully finished, but only play it if you are serious about influencing game development and reporting issues to the devs to be fixed.