You start off with a big empty lot and all the building tools you need to start construction of the housing areas for the animals. In designing the living area for the various animals - you have around 40 different types of animals to choose from - you want to design each area to most resemble the natural habitat of each species. The zookeeper will guide you on the type of environment each animal needs - Bengal tigers need rainforest trees and lots of vegetation or wolves who need a coniferous forest - and you select the specific trees and vegetation and lay out the physical terrain.

Once you've built your exhibits, you then build concession stands for your visitors, hire staff who tend to the animals, act as tour guides, and maintain the grounds. Once you open your zoo, the guests come and the resulting revenue allows you maintain the zoo, as well as purchase new items for your exhibits, improve your staff's abilities, make new animals available for adoption, and buy more advanced buildings and structures, such as the reptile house or petting zoo.

Make sure you don't let your animals get out of the cages or your guests will go berserk. If you don’t make your animals and guests happy, you will not be successful zoo manager.

The program allows you to either work with set scenarios with specific objectives that start at an easy level and as you succeed, unlocks more choices as well as becomes more challenging, or you can work in a "free form" mode where you are presented with wide open spaces and a fixed budget so you can build whatever you want.

if you are familiar with the first version of Zoo Tycoon, this the second generation of the program offers these changes. The visuals are now rendered in 3D graphics making it much more visually engaging. As the zoo keeper, you are now able to actually enter into the animal areas you have constructed and get a close up view of the your work and the animals. The tools that you have to construct the areas and terrains for the animals has also been enhanced allowing you to create much more elaborate and interesting environments for the animals than you you could before. With these changes, the underlying structure and modes of operation of the program as very similar to the earlier version.