Zoo Keeper

"RockmanCXDEZ's Zoo Keeper Review"

I would have never bought this game, had it not been for my sister wanting it. But I'm glad I did, Zoo Keeper turned out to be a surprisingly fun game. Zoo Keeper is basically a version of the puzzle game Bejeweled, only with animal heads instead of jewels.

Story:

The story is probably not the reason you're going to buy a game like Zoo Keeper, but I'll put it down here anyway for people who might be interested. This is taken straight from the instruction booklet.

In the historic zoo on the outskirts of town, the animals were fed up with the arrogant zookeeper and so they started a riot. As a zookeeper yourself you must bring order back to this chaos.

Game Play:

The most important part of Zookeeper is the game play. Like I said at the beginning, Zoo Keeper is basically an animal version of the puzzle game Bejeweled. When you start a game, your screen will fill up with all the different kind of animal heads. The goal of the game is to switch the animal heads around and get three or more lined up either horizontally or vertically. Once you get three or more lined up, they will break apart and more will fall down on to the screen. The trick is to try and find moves that will cause a combo, by switching an animal head that will cause more then one line, or will cause more animal heads to fall in line. The higher the combo the better you score. Also at the beginning of the game you will get a number you must try to capture of each animal. Once you capture the number of animals you level up. Leveling up starts the board over and depending on how well you did that level gives you a boost in points. You must also watch your timer; the longer it takes for you to find a move the more the timer will go down. As you make moves, you will re fill up your timer. (The better the move the more time you will gain)

Zoo Keeper has 5 different modes of play, each using the same game play I described.

In Normal mode the whole goal is to try and capture the set amount of animals needed to level to the next level.

In Tokoton mode you're trying to capture as many animals as you can. Capturing 100 of the same animal levels you up, each level increases the difficulty but also increases the amount of points you earn.

In Time attack you have a six minute time limit to try and get as high a score as possible.

In Quest mode you have 10 challenges you must complete. Some of the challenges have you only capturing 1 or 2 different animals, or only letting you score with combos, things like that.

And of course verses mode. In this mode, you hook up with a friend and face off. This time instead of scoring combos the raise your timer, you'll be lower your friends. The first player to run out of time loses.

Sound/Music

The music in Zoo Keeper really isn't anything to special, but it's not bad. It's really goes well with the cutesy feel of the game. Other then that's there really nothing much to say here.

Graphics:

You're not going to be blow away by the games graphics, but you more then likely won't be disappoint with them either.

Zoo Keepers graphics are very cutesy and fit the feel of the game very well. The animals are very colorful and unique. The human characters look like little lego men. The backgrounds are also very colorful and detailed.

Overall:

If you're a fan of puzzle games you'll love Zoo Keeper, and like me you may enjoy it if your not. It's a fun little game to kill some time with, and with the somewhat disappointing DS library I would at least suggest giving it a rent to see if you'll like it.

Final Score 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/05