Zoo Tycoon – NDS – Review

By now I can honestly say that the
DS has taken a commanding lead in the next Generation handheld video-game
race. Most games released for the DS have been pretty quality runs and even
more surprisingly, there have been several top-tier titles (Castlevania,
Nintendogs, Advance Wars). Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later to
this reviewer, I got DS title for review that really kind of fell apart on me.
By that, I mean it really doesn’t have much going on for it.

To say that the Tycoon series
hasn’t been successful would be an out-right lie. The PC was originally
blessed by this series and using the same formula there has been all sorts of
tycoon games; Roller Coaster Tycoon, Deep Sea Tycoon, Hell Tycoon, etc,
etc. The interface is fairly simple, create a theme-park style location and
build it using the appropriate items provided. Try and draw in people to make
money and eventually build up to creating extravagant exhibits. Now of course
this is very generalized, some of the different titles involve all sorts of
unique problems and solutions, thus making the title different as compared to
the others. But in this title, the player is challenged with selecting animals
for a zoo, building and maintaining habitats for them that will keep them
happy and healthy.

 
It’s either a zoo or a golf course.

However, the problems pop up quite
quickly with this one. The game screen is incredibly pixilated to the point
where it actually becomes a hindrance to play. The little sprites are blurred
together and there is a little "happy" icon that pops up whenever you do
something to an animal’s pen that makes it happy. I just don’t see how it’s a
"happy" icon, my wife says it is, but to me it looks like a little green
balloon. But whatever it is, it doesn’t look good. Plus, the graphics of all
of the different terrain and items that you must fill your exhibits with just
don’t do a title like this justice. Which, by the way, is done by navigating
through the screen using the stylus and then tapping the area you want
effected. Of course to do all of this and see the entire 3/4 view angled
screen, you must use the trigger buttons to spin around the entire exhibit. If
you don’t you won’t be able to remove the rock that’s behind the little
building that is really upsetting the cheetah. Cause cheetahs don’t care for
phosphorus rock, they like dessert rock. Hmmpff, either way, the little game
clock goes by and you must complete certain exhibits, get the animals into
them and then assign a zoo keeper to take care of the animal all while
maintaining a strict budget and time table.

It would be fun if the game didn’t
make such a challenge out of building the actual exhibits when clearly the fun
should be figuring out the problems each animal has and designing cages that
suit them, but instead building them becomes more of a hassle. For example,
the fences that are used to enclose the animals must be placed and sized in a
specific area, but the clunky controls that are within this game make it more
painful then anything, I just can’t get over how much of a failure the
controls on this title are. Now, I realize that half the fun of the DS is
finding new and creative ways to utilize the touch screen, but this is a port
from a PC title, and it maintained a certain amount of success without any
sort of touch screen. I think that a "less is more" kind of approach was
needed here in order to pull this title out of the depths.

Do you see the elusive jaguar? Me
neither.

It would also help if the game did
look better. The shading is sub-par and the different textures don’t seem all
that different. Sure there are different colors used for the different terrain
but look as the demo screenshots above. The game contains too many different
items for such a small screen, it becomes overly cluttered and runs together.
Plus, once you finally get your animals in the cages, if you aren’t the one
building the zoo, you won’t know what the heck kind of animal is in there. My
wife was playing the game and I came up behind her and asked if she had placed
an animal in the pen yet. She looked at me as if I was crazy, stating that
this was her best exhibit and was the first animal placed. I walked away still
trying to figure out what creature was in there, I simply could not see
anything.

The sound the game features is
absolutely a non-factor. It’s as if the game would be fine completely silent.

Gameplay: 5.2
It’s a clunky, uninteresting mess.
The challenges that the game provides pale in comparison to the plodding
through of the unfriendly clutter that this DS title features.

Graphics: 5.0
Wow, it’s grainy, it’s run
together, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of hard sharp edges to the various
objects.  It’s a real disappointment.

Sound: 5.6
Huh, I said it best above, but you
can take it or leave it, the sound of this game does absolutely nothing for
me.

Difficulty: Easy/Medium
The real challenge will be if you
can fight your way through the technical failures, rather then the designing
of a quality zoo.

Concept: 6.0
It was a novel concept five years
ago. And while it could be said that placing a title on the DS would be a
natural fit, the whole thing just feels too dated.

Overall: 5.3
It’s a real shame when you take
something like a popular franchise and put it on a system that screams "novel
gameplay," but the forced or rushed feeling of this title just weighs too
heavy on me. And with the lacking graphics and clunky gameplay, this title
just fails on all levels. I do not recommend this one to anybody.