Great creative outlet for some, and acceptable tycoon.
Game effectively has three layers:
Creative - design not only layout of your zoos and animal habitats, but build every part of the zoo yourself - building details elements and so on. I'm not a creative person, my sense of aesthetics hung itself long ago, and I dont remember the game presenting me with decent tutorial on how to start creating my own blueprints. Still, amount of community content in Steam Workshop shows it's possible, so there is that.
Management (as in, keeping zoo open - staff, money and so on)? It's there, but not that much of a challenge. Soon after completing first few career scenarios which presented me with necessary basics, i jumped to Franchaise mode - building few of my own zoos with option to trade my animals online. Started off small, necessary staff facilities, and two exhibits with a bug and a snake. Then drink and food vending machines, and that was all i needed to maintain acceptable money levels, especially because bugs breed quickly, giving me free thousand dollars every few months just from selling excess animals. Then, just added more vending machines and donation boxes along with more staff as I expanded the zoo with more habitats and exhibits, and before i noticed i had half a million i had no idea what to spend on. You can train your staff, hire more, build new structures, but at no point have i encountered major problems with non-animalistic side of managing (played on medium all the time).
Finally, animals. Housing them is easy - snakes, bugs and other small animals have few needs when placed in exhibits - set the humidity and temperature right, research more layout options, and they are all set. Creating habitats for larger animals is also a breeze - you can find their space requirements on species' zoopedia page, then adapt the terrain and flora of their new dwelling according to needs presented on their status window - whether they need more long grass or what types of plants you need to filter when placing them. Make sure they have somewhere to eat and drink from, and place some food and entertainment enrichments, and animals are all set. You can just admire them enjoying their lifes in your zoo - Frontier did amazing work when it comes to graphics and animal behaviour, so its a pure pleasure. Then what? You can further improve the habitats (visually), continue zoo growth, or breed champions (exhibit animals have two genetic parameters, fertility and longevity, habitat animals also have size, immunity and fur colours), all while dealing with day-to-day problems your zoo may have.

But the game isn't perfect. Creating paths can be painful, especially if you want to create a square to which you want to connect all required staff buildings. Animal AI can be annoying as well - I made shared habitat for few African animals, notably Sable Antelopes and Common Ostriches, with overhead walkway for zoo guests to watch animals from. That was before I learned about a species characteristic when dealing with people - those two are kind of shy, so may get stressed when being watched. My mistake, but habitat was too big to think about removing the walkway, so i created some shelters for them to hide if they get stressed. But something had to go wrong. Every once in a while I have to manually move stressed animal to one of said shelters, because despite falling welfare, they will stubbornly lay just in front of the crowds.
But my biggest complaint goes to Franchaise mode, where you can sell and buy animals from other players. The animal trading interface is terribly unresponsive - rarely acquisition of new animals is smooth, most of the time i have to click a few times on filter button to apply my chosen filters. Same goes for purchases - few seconds of repeated clicking on buy button before game decides that I did bought the animal. I get that netcode is hard, but game has been out for over a year, and yet from what i gathered around the web, it's not just my problem. Choice of animals isn't really that good either - Frontier does add new animals onto the market, but often their genetic makeup is meh at best. Better animals can be bought from other players for conservation credits - special currency gained from releasing animals to wild or from selling your animals to other players. Problem is, some species are sold by few players, and others have many sellers - who put atrociously high prices on their animals, or sell you animals that are weeks away from meeting their end. People, i guess. (There is a sandbox mode too - it's Franchaise mode, but entirely offline). Finally, you are unable to have all of the amazing amount of species in the single zoo, although it's more of a technical limitation rather than hard limit made by the developers - at some point your machine won't be able to handle it. Also, there are no Red Foxes or Ducks. I like ducks ._.

In the end, im having fun. If you want to create good looking building shells for other players, get creative landscaping the perfect zoo, work for that buzz of breeding a 100/100/100/100 animal with white fur, or simply want to watch well animated animals, give it a try, and get a wolf.
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2333547854