Gaming to Go: Zoo Keeper (p2)
As the screenshots suggest, gameplay in Zoo Keeper is what we've come to grow to love from classic titles like Bejeweled and Planet Puzzle League. You'll see a random assortment of icons
on the screen, more falling down every time you successfully switch the blocks around and line up three or more of the same type. Zoo Keeper puts its colorful stamp on things by taking the formula and throwing animals into the mix, turning plain blocks into charming animal faces.
It also introduces a welcome twist into the scoring mechanic. You can slide animal blocks around until your stylus finger bleeds and try to rack up the highest score possible, but the only way to 'level up' is to clear a certain number of each animal, the required amount increasing with every new level. Later levels also up the difficulty a bit by introducing new animals and speeding up the timer, which steadily decreases as you play but is refilled a small amount every time you make a match.
These aren't revolutionary changes by any stretch of the means, but they're still pleasant deviations from the norm, propelling Zoo Keeper out of clone status and into its place as a welcome addition to the DS's library of puzzle games. The gameplay is solid and the animals are pretty cheerful, so it's easy to have a good time with Zoo Keeper's normal mode, though one can argue that some of the more interesting features of the game lay outside of it.
Time Attack mode, for example, challenges you to rack up the highest score possible in six minutes. Needing to capture a certain amount of each animal in order to advance in level -- which bumps up your score considerably every time -- makes things much more interesting and challenging than just trying to line up one match after another. It can be a little annoying when the blocks for the last animal you need are nowhere near each other on the screen, admittedly, but you'll still earn points for every match you make trying to get that last creature, so getting your name on the high-score list is doable even if you don't advance too much in level.
Quest mode is where things get pretty quirky. Your boss, the soul-crusher of a man mentioned on the first page, tasks you with a completely random set of challenges, grading you after each one and changing your score to reflect it. The challenges themselves run the gamut from capturing a certain animal 20 times, capturing each animal only once, moving a special flashing tile to the bottom of the screen, and so on. Most take an equal
amount of skill and luck to complete the challenge as quickly as possible, as the boss man is quite possibly one of the most temperamental jerks I've seen on the DS's bottom screen. When you perform a task to his satisfaction, he might be so generous as to double or triple your score, but dawdling too long on a difficult challenge can invoke his ire and cut your score by seventy percent, which is just as painful as it sounds.
Getting the highest score in Quest mode can be pretty difficult, as you can imagine, especially when you encounter one of the more difficult challenges right before you've completed the required ten. And then you lose seventy-percent of your score. The tears shall flow. You'll likely than scamper back to Time Attack mode, which provides the best of what Zoo Keeper has to offer in a fairly small and speedy portion. Ignoring the allure of getting the highest score in each mode, I'd argue that Time Attack is probably the most fun experience the title offers for a gamer on the go, especially if enjoy the challenge of conquering on an old high score in such a relatively small amount of time.
But earning the highest score in each of the game's four central modes isn't completely necessary unless you intend to unlock the Super Hard difficulty, which isn't so much more difficult than regular Hard mode as it is more profitable. Playing on Super Hard is the best way to rack up super high scores, so keep that in mind if you're interested in the beating the game as thoroughly as possible. I'd argue that sticking with the original three choices -- Easy, Normal, and Hard -- can still provide ample entertainment for most gamers, though the option to achieve some fairly astronomical scores is there for anyone who wants it.
