To situate your animals correctly, you need to first tap them with the stylus as they lumber blockily about in their enclosures, and then tap the question mark icon in the menu that appears to find out what they like. In addition, you can choose what sex of animal you want to put in the cage, with certain pairings resulting in offspring that you can either rear yourself or reintroduce to the wild. These range in glamour from the frumpy camel to the exotic unicorn, and for those of us with a strange obsession with large reptiles, dinosaurs also make an appearance. There are 36 animals available in total, many of which need to be unlocked. Once you come to deal with the fact that you can abruptly fail missions with little warning, you should zoom through the Campaign mode fairly quickly. That said, Zoo Tycoon 2 isn't the most involved management sim, and belongs in the hands of younger or less able gamers. There are employees to pay, animals to feed, enclosures to maintain, patrons to gratify, new items to research, and an ever-changing budget to manage by making the right investments in staff and infrastructure. Of course, this summary doesn't come close to conveying the sheer number of considerations you have to balance. To keep them entertained, there are animal performances, culminating in the grandiose Dolphin Show. To keep them comfortable while they amble about and spend all their money, you can build public toilets, benches, and an assortment of other amenities. If you do a good enough job, customers start to trickle through the gates, and to maximise the opportunity presented by their presence you can build shops, donation boxes, and fast food kiosks. To accomplish this, you need to build enclosures, put animals in them, create pavements, employ keepers, and so on. You take control of a zoo with the aim of making it profitable. While we're not ready to put pennies on the eyes of the whole management genre, this is a video game in severe danger of obsolescence.

To our grandchildren – may they one day rest in peace – 'zoo' is just another word for 'torture prison', and we are all monsters.

It won't do them any good to know that we grew up believing zoos were essentially benign. When our grandchildren discover that we used to go to places where animals were held captive for our amusement, they'll flee from us, possibly tripping, breaking a wrist or gashing a knee.

Zoo tycoon 2 unicorn