Benjamin
Charles Maydon
Review
Game: Zoo
Keeper (DS)
[From
RealVG.org, uploaded May 2007]
I don't really understand
where those six hours of my life went. The only feasible explanation is that
they dropped out of the universe and went missing somewhere. I can't actually
think of any logical reason for there being a different explanation. A warp in
the space-time continuum seems a lot better, anyway, than "I was just
plain lazy" or, in fact, "I was dragging a stylus randomly over a
touch-sensitive screen for six hours."
That's the problem with Zoo Keeper, though, in that dragging the
stylus around is basically all you do. As with all puzzle games (the exception
being Tetris, which doesn't seem to
need it), there's a loose 'plot' based around animals getting free, and you
capturing them, but we know what's really involved; you align blocks and they
vanish. Voilá, another puzzle game.
The main difference, however,
between Zoo Keeper and other games of
its ilk (see: Tetris Attack, Pokémon Puzzle League, et al.) is that there isn't really any
skill involved at all. You are faced with different coloured blocks, and you
swap them using the stylus, but unless a line of three or more is completed,
the blocks swap themselves back, making the initial move pointless to a large
degree. There's no room for forming clever combos by cunningly aligning things
to fall easily into place, so you remain almost entirely at the mercy of Zoo Keeper's play screen, which will
more often than not give you combos merely because the randomised blocks fall
that way.
So... align three or more
blocks (sorry, I mean "dangerous animals on the loose") and they
disappear. More appear to fill up the play screen and if there are no more
available moves, "NO MORE MOVE!" will appear on the screen (yes,
really) and the blocks will mix up and reappear with stupidly obvious
alignments waiting to be done. If you really can't think of anything, you hit a
binoculars icon and the available alignments are revealed to you. And that's
it. That's all there is to play. There are different modes, just like in the
various versions of Tetris, but they
are all essentially the same thing. Oh, and when you die because you can't
think of anything else to do and you've run out of binoculars (so you leave
your DS on, go downstairs to make a cup of tea, come back and hope that the
time's run out), one of the characters throws out a random insult at you for no
particular reason.
It sounds a bit cheesy, and
it is. It's no Dr. Mario, that's for
sure. It's not meant to have the addictive charm of Tetris Attack or the frantic urgency of Daedalian Opus, because it's entirely based on luck and you get very little
reward other than blocky pictures of animals which don't bear much relevance to
what you're doing. Even the music's quite poor: a hypnotic two-note melody which
continues on and on and on until your ears start to wonder whether they've died
and gone to hell prematurely.
But for all its flaws, Zoo Keeper is perhaps the most addictive DS game on the
market. Why? I have no idea. It's not even very fun; it's just tapping the
screen with your stylus and wondering why you're not playing something else.
But then you have another go. And another go. And
another, and another, and another… until eventually, it doesn't matter what
you're playing because your brain has shut down. Your ears are playing the two
notes without you having to listen to them and your body's
only function is to align three blocks of the same colour together. It becomes
more than a dependency; it's actually your
purpose in life. After the six hours that the universe had fluctuated out
of existence, I started looking at bits of my wallpaper that could align and
disappear.
The thing is, after playing Zoo Keeper - I'm procrastinating from
finishing the review here because there isn't any more of the game to discuss -
you'll want to play something else, but you won't. You just won't. You'll go
onto the internet for a few hours, do some work or something, and then go back
to Zoo Keeper because it's already in
your DS and you won't see a reason to change cartridges.
I suppose the message I'm
trying to get across to you here is: save yourself, don't play Zoo Keeper (or its GBA equivalent, Zooo), because
then you'll find yourself living a game with no actual purpose and no actual
gameplay value either.
It must be the two notes.
They're like opium for the gamer’s soul.
Text & Site © Benjamin Charles Maydon
2011