Planet Zoo developer Frontier is apparently celebrating the festive period by releasing new animals, props and scenarios in its first bit of DLC. And by 'celebrating,' I mean selling it for £8/$10.

The Arctic Pack, due out on December 17, introduces new animals, like the polar bear and arctic wolf, into zoos, along with a pair of themed scenarios, Mexican and Norwegian biomes, and hundreds of foliage and scenery items. I've been thinking about making a beartopia, so this is excellent timing. 

Alongside the paid DLC is a free update that gives everyone a few new features that aren't quite as exciting. There's an aging slider to slow down the animal's life-cycle, you can see immediate family members in the info panel and you can keep an eye on your zoo with new heat maps. Everyone will also get new nature assets and enrichment items, along with fixes and tweaks. 

Frontier also released some zoo stats. 62 million animals have been born in these digital zoos, apparently, but less than 15 million of them have been set free to frolic in the wild. Check out the infographic below.

Planet Zoo received a sizeable update today that apparently contains more than 400 fixes and updates, including plenty of squashed bugs and a bunch of new options that will let you further customise your sandbox zoos. After having a great time during beta, I've cooled on it since launch thanks to some bugs and management woes, so I'm hoping this will help me get my zoos back on track. 

There are lots of little tweaks, like suspended grazers now being able to serve up to four animals instead of one, UI fixes and scenario improvements, but the headline attraction is the new list of Sandbox mode options, which you can check out below.

• Power usage
• Water treatment
• Fence degradation
• Predation/fear
• Death by old age
• Staff happiness degradation
• Staff energy degradation
• Animal welfare needs
• Maximise guest happiness
• Freeze guest needs

The guest limit setting has also been added to both Sandbox and Challenge modes, along with unlocked assets from scenarios. 

Planet Zoo is a very playful, chipper game, so dead animals cause a dramatic change in tone and, frankly, make me very gloomy, so I couldn't be happier with the ability to let them live forever. As it should be. This update specifically lets you stop them dying of old age, though they can still die for other reasons. Luckily there's already an option to cancel death entirely. 

The Sandbox mode is where you'll want to go if you don't want to worry about cash or other limitations, letting you run free and design whatever kind of zoo you fancy. Challenge mode was added after beta feedback and is essentially the same as Franchise mode, but it's offline and doesn't let you run multiple zoos. 

Update 1.0.3 is available now, and you can check out the rest of the patch notes here. 

Gazing down on the first tutorial area of Planet Zoo I get the feeling that Frontier really wanted to display the work that they have put into its zoo simulation game from the get-go. Goodwin House is spectacular. The intricate visitor pathways, the neat row of gift shops, the delightful choo-choo train that circles the entire zoo—everything was precise and orderly. It's organisational perfection. Quaint, peaceful, and refined. 

I was being shown the ropes by Nancy, a true veteran and zookeeper juggernaut, who was explaining how to make the hippos happy by balancing out the terrain type in their enclosure. After we were done, Nancy quickly moved on, because she is a beast and stops for no one, but I stayed with the hippos. It's quite amazing how Frontier has made all the animals look so realistic. I then had a thought—a teeny tiny thought. "Free him."

The lighting strike of chaotic impulse that we've all had with management sims hit me. What if I just deleted the pool ladder in the Sims 2? What if I made a rollercoaster so intense that it made everyone who rode it barf up their lunch? In Planet Zoo, what would happen if all the animals were just suddenly free? 

I would finish my tutorial with Nancy, gain her trust, and when she had gone to get a cuppa, that's when I would strike. An inside job, the perfect crime. Nancy if you’re somehow reading this, I am so sorry I betrayed you, but it was too fun an opportunity to miss.

I completed the tutorial, and when Nancy went to get her well-earned brew, I swept back to the hippo's habitat. As quick as a flash, I highlighted a partial section of the habitat's barrier and deleted it, creating a gateway to freedom. Go free hippos! Run wild!

The hippos' reaction wasn't exactly what I planned—they continued chilling quite happily in the water. Relaxed, sleepy, and not the slightest bit bothered by my act of resistance. Feeling a little betrayed, I decided that I needed to think bigger. I paused the game and went round to every animal enclosure, highlighted the entire perimeter of every habitat and deleted it, one by one. This should get the party started, and it certainly did. 

As chaos ensued, I watched on like an omnipresent David Attenborough. At first, there was a quietness, a calm before the storm and suddenly alarm bells started to ring. I knew exactly which animals would give me the chaos I craved—the lions. Being the curious bunch that they are, they soon left their enclosure and started running about the zoo, to the horror of the crowd. Animals don’t attack the visitors, but it was pretty funny seeing a busy crowd completely dissolve at the scare of being eaten by a lion.

After watching the lions freely roam around (and the zoo's veterinarians comedically attempt to recapture them), I wanted to check in on the snow leopard, who I had named Shelly, to see how she was doing. As I moved closer to her habitat, it soon dawned on me that her place of residence was right opposite the zebra and giraffe enclosure. You don’t need to have passed A-level biology to know how nature takes its course. 

I rushed over there to find that not only had Shelly made her way into the zebra enclosure but that she seemed to be hanging out with them as they wandered the zoo’s highstreets. One of the zebras, Shirl, had taken a particular endearment to Shelly and the two stayed side by side. It was quite wholesome. Its possible for animals to attack each other in Planet Zoo, but because of Shelly and Shirl’s chemistry they became animal BFFs.

Out of all the animals, it was the two giant tortoises that had the right idea. They left their enclosure and were slowly making their way up the stairs and to the zoo’s main exit, with Speedy the tortoise leading the march. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see them reach their goal, as Planet Zoo had enough of my shenanigans and crashed on me. Like that’s going to stop me. 

Booting up again, I decided to explore Panda Park, the next part of the tutorial. After repeating the same process—again, so sorry Nancy—I deleted the barriers of every enclosure. The pandas, although being the main attraction of the park, could not give less of a toss and sat around eating bamboo as onlookers gawped at them. 

On the opposite end of the scale, to my complete surprise, were the saltwater crocodiles. Quicker than the lions, Amisha, an eighteen-year-old fully grown croc, went from chilling calmly in her lake to dashing straight out of her habitat and bolting down the zoo’s main street. Who knew that crocodiles could move that quickly? 

Streets barren, gift shops empty, alarm bells still ringing, I let the animals of Panda Park roam freely, although it didn’t last long. Some of the animals started to get hungry, uncomfortable and stressed. I’ve had my fun, and now it’s time to finally become a virtual zookeeper that Nancy can be proud of. 

There's a lot going on in Planet Zoo, and with so many options, menus, animals, employees, and guests to keep track of, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. As someone who has seen several of my zoos falter, fail and implode, I'm here to stop you from making the same mistakes I did.

Here are a few tips and tricks for creating, managing, and running a successful zoo.

Remap 'pause' to the spacebar

By default the spacebar is mapped to the 'angle snap' toggle, but trust me, you're going to want to pause the game more often than you do just about anything else. Even on the slowest setting, time passes deceptively quickly. If you let the game run while you spend 10 or 15 minutes crafting a habitat, you might find dozens of babies have been born, adult animals have died of old age, or other issues have cropped up. Get in the habit of pausing often, and tapping the spacebar is the most natural way to do it.

Start slow and think small

My impulse was to build a habitat, drop a pair of animals into it, make sure they were happy-ish, and then immediately begin building another habitat to expand my zoo just as quickly as I could. But it takes quite a bit of time to start seeing profits match your efforts, and if you build and expand too quickly you're going to sink quickly into a money pit. Every habitat and exhibit takes a surprising amount of resources to keep running.

So take your time. Start small, and only expand when you're making a profit or at least just breaking even. Don't build too much, adopt too many animals or hire too much staff. Check your budget tab regularly to see where you're making money and where you're losing it, too.

You can add windows to walls

You can build solid walls to keep animals in their habitats, and glass walls so people can gawk at them, but solid walls with windows built into them look much nicer (and somehow feel more realistic) than just a big blank pane of glass. There's an easy-to-miss option to add windows to solid walls (scroll down a tad in the box on the lower right) that allows you to build windows into brick and wooden walls.

You can make animals immortal in sandbox mode

As someone who has accidentally allowed animals to starve to death, contract diseases, and sustain horrible injuries, let me tell you: it's heartbreaking. If you play on sandbox mode you can turn all that off. Obviously it's not realistic, but it might make you happier. And while your human staff members don't age and die, they do sometimes quit. You can turn that off too, and force them to work for eternity in your immortal, undying zoo.

You can game the bronze objectives in career mode

Completing the first series of objectives (bronze) in career mode unlocks the zoo and map in challenge and sandbox modes. That lets you move onto the next career mode zoo. The nice thing is that once you've satisfied any bronze goal, it's considered done forever, even if you immediately begin failing that goal a moment later. 

Example: in one career mode zoo, there was a bronze goal for my zoo to make a profit and another goal to get my employee happiness over 70%. These are hard to accomplish at the same time without lots of balancing and tweaking. So I just lowered the employees' pay to rock bottom until my profits satisfied the first goal, then immediately cranked their pay up to the max to make the employees happy. 

Even though overpaying my employees plunged me into negative profits, it didn't matter because I'd already accomplished the profit goal first. Obviously this doesn't work if you want to continue the career mode to achieve the silver and gold goals for that zoo, but for unlocking the map quickly for use in other modes or for moving onto the next career mode zoo, it works just fine.

Shared habitats are good for everyone

If you're looking to save money on construction costs and get a lot of value from less land, acquire animals that can share their habitats with different species. Giraffes, buffaloes, warthogs, gazelles, and many others are actually happier occupying the same habitats with certain other species—the in-game Zoopedia will tell you with whom they benefit from living. It's easier for your staff to manage these animals when they're all together instead of spread out all over the place and it makes it clearer for your guests to see and learn about different animals without getting tired from walking too far. And the animals like each other. Win-win-win.

Your employees need separate habitats, though

If you've ordered a mechanic or vet to do research or a zookeeper to handle some important task, you may wind up waiting a long time, and it's not always obvious why. Your staff members may be bottlenecked because they can't simultaneously use small facilities. While one zookeeper is chopping up food, or a mechanic is studying new zoo technology, anyone else will have to wait patiently outside, peering in through the window if it's the only small facility available. (Research can unlock larger facilities that can be shared by more than one employee.)

It might also be down to guest congestion. If your employees are slow getting around, think about building them their own dedicated staff paths so they don't bump into guests.

Guests love buying dumb hats

Raising admission fees for a small zoo will draw complaints. Food and drink stalls are hit and miss. People, shockingly, don't like paying to use the toilets. Donation boxes placed outside habitats are great earners, but your guests still typically leave your zoo with hundreds of unspent dollars in their pockets. How can you drain it from them?

Big dumb hats. Balloons, too, but mostly, big dumb animal hats. Before you even start putting in Chief Beef burger huts and drink stalls, get souvenir shops researched and make sure everyone can buy a big dumb hat. They will, in droves.

You can adjust how quickly you need to pay back loans

Making a profit with your zoo is hard—and it's the kind of hard where I'm honestly expecting a post-launch patch to make it a bit easier. At the moment, though, loans can help keep you afloat, and you can adjust the monthly repayments from the loan menu.

I'm not really advising you do this, because I've currently got a $50,000 loan on my park that is going to cost me over $215,000 to pay back over the next, um, 34 years. But the point is, if you take out a loan, you can adjust how long you want to take to pay it back, which can help you out with lower payments in the short term even if it doesn't do you any real favors in the long term.

You can kick people out of the zoo

Some of your guests will be dicks. There may be vandals, litterbugs, and even pickpockets hiding among the nice people who just want to look at your zebras and giant snails. I've never specifically spotted anyone doing something wrong, but if you do you can sic a security guard on them and kick them out. Or, you can just do it for fun. Just make sure they buy a hat first. This goes for individuals or groups, though, not protesters.

If you split a habitat, move the gate first

When building habitats I tend to err on the side of caution. So if the Zoopedia tells me a western lowland gorilla needs 780 meters of space, I'll overcompensate and build a habitat that's got, like, 2,900 meters of space. I just don't want to risk my gorilla being unhappy, you know? But later I'll need to find room for other animals so I'll want to divide that habitat up a bit.

It's easy enough to draw some barriers through the middle and turn that huge habitat into two smaller ones. But before doing that, make sure the gate winds up in the same section the habitat's current resident is in. If you divide a habitat in half and the animal is in one half but its gate is in the other, Planet Zoo will decide the animal has escaped. Even if it's just sleeping peacefully as the bear in the above image is.

The difference between a roller coaster and a ring tailed lemur is that when one has a problem it's a mild irritation and when the other has a problem it's a cause of unbridled panic and overwhelming guilt. There are stressful components to every management simulation game, but where Planet Coaster's mechanical breakdowns make me worry briefly about profits, Planet Zoo's biological breakdowns make me feel like a neglectful, abusive monster who should be dragged off to jail and never allowed near another living creature ever again. 

 Planet Zoo has several official modes—Career, Challenge, Sandbox, and Franchise—but its two actual modes are Things Seem Fine and Oh God What Have I Done. My elephants, giraffes, orangutans, panda bears, and dozens of other beautiful creatures can starve to death or die of dehydration if I'm not careful. They can contract diseases or get injured by fighting one another for alpha status. They can feel fear and stress and lack of privacy and the effects of isolation. They can overheat or get too cold. They can kill each other if you put the wrong animals together in the same habitat. At one point I saw protesters carrying picket signs in my park. It was because my giant burrowing cockroach's glass box was slightly too humid for its liking. I couldn't even keep an ugly bug that eats dead leaves happy, and I instantly felt terrible about it.

Planet Zoo isn't just a management sim, it's a survival game. In fact, forget that I just compared it to Planet Coaster. At its most stressful, Planet Zoo is more like Frostpunk or Prison Architect. None of the lives you're in charge of actually want to be there, and making a mistake puts those lives in danger. This is mostly a good thing—stressful experiences can be a weird sort of fun, and heart-wrenching guilt should be a feature in more games. But some of the stress of Planet Zoo is due to parts of the game not working that well. 

Gibbon Architect 

Take my current zoo, which I've named Zoo Bisou. It's still small with only a few habitats—two bears, two wolves, two nile monitors (giant lizards), one Galapagos tortoise, plus enclosed glass exhibits featuring two tarantulas and two snakes. I've been getting notifications for a while now that my bear's habitat is a disease risk because it's not clean, but repeatedly sending one of my zookeepers over to vacuum up enormous bear turds hasn't made the notification go away. After several frustrating minutes I finally make a guess that the issue might be the small river running through the back of the bear's habitat—even though the water looks fine ('Water View' mode doesn't show any alarming red danger zones). I install a water purifier and the disease risk notification vanishes, but Planet Zoo didn't make it clear that the water was the problem, and it should have.

And in the time it took to figure that out, I now have nine giant lizards instead of two, because one gave birth to a huge litter—so I have an overcrowding problem in that habitat. I also now have roughly 20 tarantulas (not only did my original pair give birth but their offspring have matured and reproduced incestuously), three more snakes, a new wolf cub, a new bear cub, and some protestors picketing because my turtle is sad that it doesn't have any toys. Plus, one of my zookeepers is complaining that he can't find his way to the staff room, which I discover is because he's somehow fallen through the map and is wandering around underground. Taking the time to solve one problem gave literally everything else in the zoo time to develop their own problems.

This combination of legit problems and game flaws isn't a complete disaster. The spiders giving birth means I can sell a bunch of them for cash, useful since I'm not currently operating at a profit. I can make my lizards' habitat a bit larger and start feeding them birth control pills so they don't produce another unexpected litter. I release my surplus snakes into the wild, which earns me conservation credits that can be spent on rarer animals, and I put a vet to work researching the tortoise to find out what kind of toys it likes—something I wish I had to option to do before I adopted the tortoise. (Unfortunately, research can only be undertaken when you've actually got the animal in the park already, which feels pretty irresponsible.) My underground zookeeper, meanwhile, has quit in frustration, so I drag him to the zoo's exit (he can't find it himself, naturally) and hire another. 

Animal kingdom

With the exception of Sandbox mode where you have a bottomless wallet and the ability to turn off things like animal sickness, injury, and death, Planet Zoo is an extremely busy an occasionally exhausting sim. exhausting. Everything needs constant attention all the time—not only keeping your animals healthy but your staff happy, managing your budget and zoo's reputation, and dealing with day-to-day concerns like preventing guests from vandalizing park benches (by hiring a security guard and installing cameras) and making sure habitat walls don't get so dilapidated they crumble and allow a tiger to terrorize the park (the guests won't get mauled, but they do leave the zoo in a hurry). This is also the reason the sign I'm building at the entrance of Zoo Bisou currently only consists of a Z. I just haven't had time to finish it. There are always incestuous spiders and unhappy tortoises to sort out.

At times all this stress and guilt and micromanagement makes me feel like I should just play in Sandbox mode, and I've tried. But honestly, it's just a bit dull in there without all the worries. In Planet Coaster, there's a real enjoyment to be had from building a nice park and just sitting back to watch the guests ride the rides, but Planet Zoo doesn't give me the same feeling. I enjoy watching my animals, but I don't enjoy watching my guests watching my animals. Seeing visitors screaming on a Hammer Swing or a Hellion Ring or custom roller coaster is way more fun than watching them briefly stop walking to stare through a glass wall at a bored bear or a sleeping red panda. Lovely as Planet Zoos animals are, they just don't pack the excting punch of a custom coaster.

But the animals are really beautiful. Their sounds and animations are wonderfully done—apart from a few glitches when they're trying to climb things or move between different environmental features, at which point a leg might stick out at an awkward angle or they might stutter-step around. They seem real enough that it feels genuinely good when you see you've made them as happy as imprisoned animals can be. And seeing babies appear, even if they're spider babies—even if they're far more spider babies than you were expecting—feels good too, because it means you've made your creatures comfortable enough that they're willing to make more of themselves.

Zoo d'état

The number of options you can fiddle with in Planet Zoo is impressive. You can place prebuilt structures, but you can also build them yourself out of individual parts in the same comprehensive but occasionally finicky fashion as in Planet Coaster. Personally I don't have the patience for building elaborate custom exhibits, but seeing what creative players have done with Planet Coaster makes me excited to see what they'll create with Planet Zoo's extensive tools. Management options are pretty deep, too, and you can assign your workers to specific shops or zones or individual habitats, which is a must when certain areas get continually messy or dilapidated. You can even dictate exactly what each employee's responsibilities are (one person's entire job could be just vacuuming up enormous bear turds, if you wanted).

The layers of micromanagement extend all the way down to elements like which colors of balloons you sell in a particular vendor stall and how much to charge for each individual color, and Planet Zoo will even show you the profit margin for each. I don't typically need or want to dive that deeply into the menus, but I have found it useful when I needed to wring out some extra profits during a budget crisis. (Also, you can pop the guest's balloons by clicking them on them, but I haven't seen anyone go back to buy a replacement.)

Hopefully post-launch patches will arrive to fix some of the issues I've had with unclear notifications, subterranean zookeepers, and a few other glitches. I'm happy to endure the stress and guilt over the lovely creatures of Planet Zoo, but I definitely don't need more of it than I've already got. 

I have sad turtles. Planet Zoo's beta is underway, and for the last couple of days the welfare of these glum walking shells has been my responsibility. I'm not ready to be a parent, as evidenced by the legion of furious protestors demanding that I do something to cheer my gloomy friends up.  

Obi and Kamaria the Aldabra giant tortoises were the first animals I added to my brand new zoo. The first problem they had with their habitat was literally everything. It had the wrong grass, too much grass, not enough sand, not enough water, no shelter—I was underprepared. I fixed it up sharpish, though, adding a pond and a cave and all the right flora straight from their native habitat. That should keep them happy, I thought.   

The massive shelter was too small. The pond became fetid. There were too many people watching them. The turtles moved to opposite ends of the enclosure very, very slowly and sulked, alone. 

I thought the turtles would be easy, but how can I be mad at them when they look so damn cute? So I rebuilt their shelter (twice!), changed the shape of the enclosure, researched new items and fine-tuned my employees' routines. All the while, the protestors were chasing away my other guests, so my cash was evaporating. 

My warthogs weren't nearly as fussy. I bought two of them and got their enclosure right the first time, having already unlocked some enclosure enrichment items through research. I was able to pretty much leave them to it, entertaining guests by rolling in the mud and pooping. Unfortunately, I was so busy with the turtles that I forgot to teach them about safe sex. The warthog population exploded.

At its peak, the small enclosure housed more than 30 warthogs, and it turns out that 30 warthogs produce a monumental amount of shit. There was too much for the keepers to handle. There was too much for the warthogs, as well, who started to die. It was awful. To top it off, there was an unrelated ostrich death. Why would anyone let me run a zoo? 

Determined to turn it around, I put all my warthogs on contraception and released the older ones into the wild. The conservationist points helped me clean the blood off my hands. Things seemed to be calming down and the zoo was finally running smoothly. I was flush with cash, the protestors were all gone and—aside from the occasional badly behaved lemur—the zoo had never been in better shape. It was right about then that the piglet got shot.

Look—nobody wants to shoot an adorable piglet, even with a tranquiliser gun, but it escaped and could have easily eaten a very small child. Not my finest moment, I'll give you. I think it somehow managed to sneak out the door when the keeper entered the enclosure, but I raised the wall a bit just to be sure. I don't know a lot about warthogs—who's to say a piglet can't jump two meters over a brick wall? 

All that really matters is that I cheered those damn turtles up. My vets had been studying them intently, learning all sorts of details about them and unlocking new items that could be used to bribe them. No longer depressed, they started spending time together, discovered they had a lot in common and started an extremely cute family. So cute, in fact, that I was completely cool with them ruining my painstakingly balanced enclosure. 

You know who I never had any problems with? Bears. They scratched themselves, lazed around the pool and snoozed—that's it. Bears have got it figured out.  

They were meant to be my big ticket item to get the donations rolling in before I could afford something really prestigious, like a lion or a labradoodle. Unfortunately, I built their lavish enclosure a bit too far off the beaten track, leaving many of my guests unaware that a life-affirming experience was just down the path.

None of these little mistakes or disasters has been enough to tank my zoo, which continues to draw in the crowds with a long list of glum critters, but they've been enough to keep me very busy over the last couple of evenings. Planet Zoo's menagerie is lifelike and charismatic enough that I could happily spend hours just watching my enclosures, but it's reassuring to see that the simulation also conjures up plenty of management challenges. 

Planet Zoo's beta is kicking off soon, though lamentably only for zookeepers who have preordered Frontier's management game. If you're waiting until November, you can still get a sliver of the beta experience by watching the beta gameplay trailer above. 

The beta will let early birds check out both the career mode, where they'll jump around solving zoo problems and taking on challenges, and the franchise mode, where you get a zoo and run it as you see fit. 

As ever, the stars of the trailer are its animals, from the cute warthogs scratching each other to escaped rhinos terrifying guests. At Gamescom, Andy Kelly also had to deal with an escaped rhino in Planet Zoo,  so check out his preview for some tips.

Frontier is hosting a Reddit AMA on Planet Zoo at 3 pm BST/10 am EST today, so if you've got any burning zoo management questions, throw them into the pile. You might net yourself a copy of the Deluxe Edition if you do. 

Planet Zoo's beta begins on September 24 and runs until October 8, while the full game is due out on November 5.

The latest Planet Zoo video discusses the importance of creativity and simulation in Frontier's forthcoming game, and their role in informing features like the ability animals have to climb player-made structures. But fast-forward to 3.16 in that video and you'll see something else pretty neat: Aardvarks.

We know that Planet Zoo is going to feature a wide array of creatures from Brazilian wandering spiders to reticulated giraffes, but aardvarks are a new one for the list. The adorable burrowing mammals are shown in the video to demonstrate how players will need to create habitats that suit specific animals in their zoos, with walls that can be heavy-duty brick or one-way glass, and enrichment items like feeders that make animals work for their meals to prevent boredom.

It all sounds pretty neat, and in-tune with the way modern zoos work. Planet Zoo will be out November 5 on Steam.

Swinging the camera over my zoo, I watch throngs of people wander between enclosures, happily cooing at the animals and slurping soda. But then there's a ripple of panic. I see several guests fleeing in terror, and the fear starts to spread. Something is happening in my perfect zoo. I heave the camera into the air and locate the source of the rumble: an escaped rhinoceros.

Rhinos are dangerous animals, but it's lucky for my guests that Planet Zoo is a family friendly game. In Frontier's more monstrous park builder, Jurassic World Evolution, an escaped animal usually leads to people being eaten alive. But here it just makes them upset, which in terms of running and managing a successful (and profitable) zoo is still bad news. So the first job in this, my inaugural hands-on with Planet Zoo, is dealing with a breakout.

My zoo isn't as perfect as I thought it was, because I'm currently experiencing a severe shortage of vets—a vital member of staff whose jobs include tranquillising escaped animals and returning them safely to their enclosures. I bring up the staff menu, click on the veterinarian button, and drop one directly into the park. It's that easy. More experienced vets demand higher wages, which is one of countless management decisions you'll have to make as you play Planet Zoo. I decide to splash out on a pro to get the job done swiftly.

I plop my veteran veterinarian near the escaped rhinoceros and he immediately springs to action. He pulls out a tranq rifle with a scope and launches a dart into the beast's thick hide. She tries to run away, but it's too late. The tranquilliser kicks in and she slumps into a heap on the ground. The vet seals her in a crate, which magically shrinks to a size he can hold, then he automatically drops it off in the enclosure that was previously assigned to the animal. But before I can release her I need to find out how exactly she escaped.

Surveying the enclosure, it's fairly obvious how it happened: there's a gaping hole in the electric fence surrounding it. I click on the existing fencing and I'm able to easily rebuild it by simply dragging my mouse cursor across the gap to fill it. Happy that all the holes have been plugged, I click on the crate and release the rhino back into her enclosure. Disaster averted. The guests, clearly over their trauma, flock to the area to marvel at the newly rehoused rhino.

And I understand why they're so impressed. I double click on the rhino to activate the animal camera, which lets me admire Planet Zoo's remarkable creatures up close. As she lumbers around the enclosure there's a genuine sense of weight and presence. She really feels like a living thing, swinging her tail, flicking her ears, and sniffing the air. Planet Zoo's animators watched thousands of hours of nature documentaries, and it shows. You're gonna spend a lot of time watching your animals with this camera mode.

Alas, I can't spend all day hanging out with the rhinos because I have more problems to solve. I drag the camera over to another enclosure and see a herd  of pronghorn antelope wandering around a lifeless, dusty field. I click on one, a female called Maple, and notice that the 'habitat' meter on her welfare tab is dangerously low. Animal welfare is one of the most important things in Planet Zoo and the quality of their enclosure is a big part of that.

Luckily I can see at a glance what I need to do to make this space more pleasant for the antelope. A series of meters tells me that I have plenty of sand, but I need more grass, soil, and rock to balance it out. Every species in Planet Zoo has a particular type of terrain it feels comfortable in, which you'll have to cater to if you want them to lead long, happy, and fulfilling lives. I click on the terrain painting tool and begin, well, painting the enclosure. I sprinkle some grass here, some rock there, and watch the welfare meter edge up.

Some animals like snow and you can paint it in your enclosure as easily as grass. But in a hot climate it won't stick unless you use a device called a cooler, which stops it from melting. But back to those pronghorn antelope, which seem much happier now that I've improved their enclosure. I activate the animal camera again and spin it around them, admiring their incredibly fluffy butts. The fur technology in Planet Zoo is really impressive up close.

Now I have some tapirs to deal with. Their habitat is fine, with just the right balance of terrain, but they're bored. This is because I haven't placed any enrichment items: toys, feeders, and other distractions designed to keep the animals in your zoo mentally stimulated. I bring up a build menu containing the game's vast collection of enrichment items, but the tapirs will only engage with some of them. Luckily, however, I can filter it by species.

Tapirs are natural foragers, so I drop a foraging box. They can snuffle around in here and dig out food, which will have a positive impact on their well-being. I also drop a barrel feeder, which they can stick their snouts in, and a rubbing pad for them to have a lil scratch on. You can place these objects anywhere, but the best location is always near a viewing platform or window. This means your guests will get some enjoyment out of them too.

I'm not done yet, though. A need specific to some species, including my tapirs, is 'coverage', which is increased by filling an enclosure with plants and trees. Some animals, like the pronghorn antelope from earlier, prefer open spaces, but the tapirs like being surrounded by foliage. Clicking on the nature menu I'm presented with an enormous selection of plant life, and I litter the tapir enclosure with monkey puzzle trees and lobster claw plants: species native to the hot South/Central American climate my zoo is currently situated in.

But there are, of course, more plates to spin. But compared to some management games, such as the frenetic Two Point Hospital, the plates in Planet Zoo spin quite slowly. My next job is cleaning my crocodile's enclosure—specifically the water, which has turned a rather disgusting shade of brown. Not only is this bad for the animal, but it obscures the guests' view. I switch to a heat-map that shows me the water quality, and it's currently blazing a dangerous-looking red, illustrating that sorting this out is a priority.

I select a water treatment facility from the build menu, and it's as easy as dropping it in the vicinity of the water to clean it. But there's a layer of strategy to this, because guests will be unhappy if they see the pumps churning away. So you'll have to place it in a way that's accessible to staff, by being connected to a path, but also hidden away. You could build a wall around it, perhaps. Or just obscure it with a scattering of foliage. Out of sight, out of mind. It doesn't take much to upset the roving herds of guests lining the pathways of Planet Zoo, which means you're constantly battling to keep them happy.

The water clears and my croc goes for a swim. A crowd of guests watch excitedly through the glass, and nearby is a screen that gives them information about what they're seeing. The more research you do, the more info appears here, increasing the educational potential of your zoo. Reflecting modern zoos, Planet Zoo is all about understanding animals and looking after them, rather than just thinking of them as commodities to be exploited.

Finally, I get a taste of what it's like to invite a new animal to the zoo. I spend $15,000 on a magnificent Bengal tiger named Farhan, who I discover is a rescue animal. An animal's upbringing, as well as other factors, will affect their size, longevity, fertility, and immunity to disease. Farhan has a 100% rating for size, but only 33% for immunity, meaning he might get sick easily. But when I drop him into my zoo the guests love him. He's a natural at this.

It's clear this demo was set up to give me a taste of a bunch of different game systems in one sitting, but even in this slightly artificial environment I can tell that I'm going to lose hours of my life to Planet Zoo. It combines the deep, freeform, expressive building of Planet Coaster with some really quite remarkable animals. They move, act, look, and sound just like the real thing, and taking care of them has a lot of interesting, engaging layers of strategy, not to mention managing budgets, building the zoo itself, and more besides. This could be one of Frontier's greatest park builders to date.

Players who pre-order the Deluxe Edition of Frontier Developments' upcoming Planet Zoo will get a chance to try it out early. The studio announced the beta and unveiled a new trailer at Gamescom this week.

The early access beta will be available exclusively as a pre-order bonus for the Deluxe Edition, and it's set to run from September 24 to October 8. During that time, players will be able to try out the first Career Mode campaign scenario, and use one biome in Franchise, Planet Zoo's sandbox mode. The beta will provide access to "a selection" of animals from the full game, which Frontier says includes several animals that haven't been revealed to the public yet.

Franchise Mode also lets players hop online to trade animals with other players in order to increase the genetic diversity of their zoos, which is a compelling touch. Once the game launches in November, Franchise Mode will also include daily challenges and community goals, so there's even more incentive to cooperate with other players in store.

The update did not include any information about how to feed guests to the hippopotamuses, but those are details that I'm sure will come in due course.

Planet Zoo launches on Steam November 5.