Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa

good.

Played this in my childhood, got the Steam version which is the same except there seems to be a bug where none of the music or voiceovers play. I saw some people mention the same issue a year ago and nobody has said a fix for it yet. Overall great game, exactly what it says on the tin. Control animals, manage ecosystems, it's great. If you haven't played this before, $2 is a great deal for this game. Fix the sound issue and it will be perfect.

Had this game as a kid, as many similar reviews agree. Loved it a lot, it's a simple mechanic that's fun to play. However it is super old and thus looks the part, with sort of crusty textures and models. Doesn't bother me though! The thing that bugs me is while playing I thought "hey, didn't these poems used to have voice overs? Wheres all the music?" Started to think I'd imagined that. But looking it up on YouTube, sure enough, I found someone who clearly owned the disk where the poems have voice overs! So it seems like either in optimizing this game for Steam they removed voices/music, or they messed something up and bugged it out. It's really a shame. The game is so quiet! Well, at least it's really just a $1.99 plus tax.

this game made me hate flamingos, 0/10 jokes aside, venture africa is pretty good and provides a substantial amount of content for its price tag. missions can be challenging, especially on hard mode, and balancing your ecosystem can take some pretty serious strategic effort at times. if you're like me and had this game as a kid, you probably still find it challenging on the harder difficulties. it actually takes an INSANE amount of effort to get all the achievements. the atmosphere of this game is really nice and some of the maps are surprisingly pretty considering how poorly the rest of the graphics aged. this game can look pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ a lot of the time, and there are some bugs...but sometimes the nostalgia is worth the sacrifice. for an almost 15 year old game that literally costs Two Dollars, i don't mind any of this necessarily. as some other reviews have mentioned, the level music and voiceovers are completely amiss here, which is pretty bizarre and really takes away a lot from the atmosphere. you can watch them on youtube, but experiencing the goofy poems and commentary from the two main characters (who have pretty decent voice acting) as you go along the missions is part of the fun imo, even if they're super cheesy. plus the way their story ends is actually surprisingly cute the thing that does bug me about venture africa is that the animals don't really have any behavior patterns outside of eating, drinking, and finding mates. there's not even any sexual dimorphism when it comes to said mates, because i guess their budget was limited to one model per animal? this may seem overly critical for such an old, cheaply made game, but when games like zoo tycoon predated this one, and the animals from that game had needs other than eating and breeding, it just makes this game feel...sort of shallow? simple minded? like why don't they play...or groom themselves? at least the hyenas make an active effort to raise their young by bringing them food (the only animal to do this, interestingly) speaking of doing nothing but eating and drinking (they don't even crap...), the food pathfinding can sometimes be really garbage. why can't this spring hare see the grass just a few meters away...why can giraffes traverse practically the entire map to find a single tree to snack from but my vultures keep dying because they have to be Extra Polite and take their sweet time landing to finish up the last bit of a corpse? please at least have a different corpse-stage where it's mostly just bones so my scavengers can actually eat. it's virtually impossible to have a functioning ecosystem include all of the predators and it can get seriously annoying on harder levels lategame to have a balanced system at all. and the flamingos are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid and will die left and right because they refuse to drink the water right in front of them i feel kind of stupid being so critical of a game that came out when i was 4 and probably had a very small budget, but this is a full review after all my final thoughts: you'll probably have lots of fun with the mechanics and challenges of various levels. the AI isn't the best, but it can be really fun to watch your scenarios grow from just a few animals to hundreds. although it's not the prettiest game by today's standards, i still appreciate a lot of the colors and atmosphere. the fidelity isn't...great. several people have brought up crashes, and while i haven't personally had this problem, i see nothing to suggest it's been fixed. i recommend watching the voice acted poems and chats on youtube since they're inexplicably missing from the steam release. overall, this game is honestly a steal for just 2 bucks. if you're looking to have some fun in a video game africa from the polygonal days of 2005, pick it up!

2 male lions can breed in the game. Inclusive and ahead of its times I would say.

I played this game a lot when I was a kid, unfortunately this version of the game has a lot of small changes that kinda cut down on the nostalgia (various little UI animations and elements are removed or changed, background music and voiced lines are gone, text also seems really small for some reason). From doing some digging though it seems like most of these changes were made well before it was put on Steam (or at least, I have a downloaded version that says 2014 that has most of these). Regardless, I'm still really enjoying revisiting this game and getting to experience it again even if its not quite how I remember it. There are some old games I wish I could play that were never made available online and are impossible to play without the CD and an old PC to run it on, so I'm glad this one at least is available in some form. In terms of bugs, the only ones I've noticed so far are just some display issues on background/sky which doesn't interfere in gameplay, and that sometimes when selecting animals or flora nothing shows up at first and you can't place them. This has only happened to me near the start of levels and if I wait a minute or two it starts working like normal again. A bit annoying but not game breaking (I think it may just be lag, though it doesn't cause the game to stutter). There is also gameplay footage on youtube you can also pull up to listen to the music, though I do wish it was still in the game.

Crashes immediately upon start. No info anywhere about how to fix it. Sucks because this was my favorite game as a kid and I'd love to revisit it. Maybe you'll have better luck than me :(

I used to play this when it first came out and I seen it on steam and decided to go back to my childhood it was a good game back then and it still is

It is a pretty fun puzzle game that you can play in your free time.

A real gem, unique in gameplay and atmosphere. I love building and managing the ecosystems in this game and running through the levels watching the populations grow. This game was relatively advanced for its release date, and is still fun despite the aging. I only wish there were more games like this, where you manage ecology, grow the flora and fauna of a region like this. It feels so rewarding in this too, and with a chill story backdrop