Planet Zoo
Worth it · Strategy · 2019
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $44.99.
- Length
- 34.8h
- Value
- $1.29/hr
- Reviews
- 91% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) / AMD Radeon R9 270X (2GB), 16 GB of storage. Windows only.
Build a world for wildlife in Planet Zoo. From the developers of Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon comes the ultimate zoo sim. Construct detailed habitats, manage your zoo, and meet authentic living animals who think, feel and explore the world you create around them.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $2.24, set in June 2026. Its cuts run 70 percent off as a rule. There have been 73 in the 7 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 2 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Planet Coaster ($11.24, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats Planet Coaster 2 ($49.99, scores 31).
81 from critics against 91 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
17 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 813 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 51 percent of the 3,199 reviews written there were positive, against 91 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 34.8 hours. Doing everything runs 101, 2.9 times as long.
Still 2.5K concurrent players, 7 years in.
The drop-off
98% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
2,497 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Practically every system in this game is frustratingly unintuitive, especially if you're like me and prefer to dive straight into Sandbox Mode. The worst cases being the fences and paths...arguably the most important things for a zoo to have, and the things that should definitely be simple to use, yet here I feel like I have no creative control over what the fences and paths are doing, so I just end up with a zoo...
pathing in this game is infuriating, how can you be a game dev and play your own game and not realize most important part of your game (pathing) is a pile of ♥♥♥♥. Come on people, as a dev how can you actually walk away from this game to a finished product and then have years to make a better way and DO NOTHING. Sad really. Also why is it snowing in may in Florida? Really stupid feature.
Honestly, might be one of the best games I've played, and I don't even like these type of games. The building your own park or zoo isn't my cup of tea but this was great. To put into perspective; In within the first 2 days of me downloading the game I've had about 18 hours. I got the game on steam sale when it was 2.15 quid for the deluxe edition but honestly if you really want to play the game, even if you buy it...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Planet Zoo scores 73/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/703080/planet-zooThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 6, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.