Animals. Stick a bunch of them in a cage for a few weeks, film the results and you can be assured they won't be pretty. Little monkeys chattering behind each other's backs, fighting, bawling, or pelting each other with fruit. In fact we find it's best not to watch Big Brother at all; it's even worse this year, so you're much better off having a nice cup of tea and playing a zoo management sim such as this.

It's not all about zoos, though, as you'll also be tinkering with wildlife parks, setting up safari routes through packs of lions and sweeping herds of wildebeest (we've no idea how they learned to use a broom either). And while a substantial twenty-mission campaign, plus a free-reign sandbox mode, should keep your long-suffering elephant poop-shovelling staff busy for many an hour, Wildlife Park 2 has some shortcomings.

The most obvious of which is a lack of teeth in the challenge department. We should make it clear at this point that this is clearly a game aimed at the family, so it's not supposed to be overly taxing. But it is supposed to be a management sim on some level, yet it completely lacks any edge for anyone but the kids and, more to the point, only the younger kids at that.

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The campaign missions are just too simplistic. While they embrace some interesting scenarios, such as trying to stop a loose giant crocodile from eating other animals, the solution is obvious and unsatisfying. Just whack down four high security walls to form a pen, pick up Toothy and drop him in, problem solved.

Most of the mission goals revolve around keeping the animals happy by clicking on them, examining a list of their needs and then fulfilling them. Monkeys want plentiful supplies of fruit and veg and a tree to climb, so it's just a matter of placing these items in their pen. Food production is one of the management processes, but it's a very straightforward matter, as there's no tightness with money or ball juggling to be done.

In the end, even in the later scenarios of the campaign, you just feel like you're following a list, clicking and placing stuff over and over again, with no real decisions or thought processes. It's a shame the developer couldn't have introduced difficulty levels, with this default easy level for younger players and something a little more stringent, with actual budgeting required, for the slightly more advanced gamer.

Nonetheless, it's undeniable that constructing your park is entertaining on a simple, world-building level, and you can go to town placing tons of different buildings and animals, all of which are admirably rendered in the 3D graphics engine. The game also has educational elements, as the food chain is replicated (bigger animals will chomp on smaller prey), mating and births happen, and an animal encyclopaedia is provided.

There's a great variety of park styles to experiment with in the free-form sandbox mode. For example, you can choose an aquatic theme and build a water park, complete with an aquarium and vast lakes stocked with killer whales, sharks and scenic waterfalls. And it is possible to set yourself a low initial budget to try to challenge your building skills. It's just a shame that there aren't any hard and fast targets provided by the game itself, or rival zoo keepers to beat.

If you want a simple and fun world-building experience, with educational elements tacked on top, then Wildlife Park 2 delivers just that. But it lacks any real punch on the management side, to the extent that older children may find it a touch undemanding.