The launch of the DS saw a handful of simple yet addictive titles, one of which was Zoo Keeper. This colorful little puzzler had you switching cute animal faces in and out with the stylus, ala Bejeweled. Zoo Keeper amassed a small following and is one of the DS’s more popular puzzle games to date, surpassed only by Meteos. Recently, Ignition Entertainment ported the bubbly little game to the GBA. So, how does it fare?
You’ll spend all of the game, every mode, swapping rows of zoo animal heads back and forth, trying to line up three identical faces to make them disappear. These heads appear in an 8 by 8 square that is constantly replenished. It sounds easy, but you’ll quickly discover that it takes a keen eye to single out the areas where you can make rows match up. All the while a timer is ticking, so you can’t simply rove over the square lazily looking for matches. It gets pretty hectic when the time is almost up, and usually the only way to save yourself is by executing combos. This means lining up one set so that several others will follow. Flashing heads will eliminate all of one kind of animal on the board, usually setting off a chain of combos.
This idea is broken up into five game modes, which offer a surprising amount of variety. Normal has you meeting a designated score within the time limit, and then moving on to a harder stage. By stage four or five I was sweating, a lot, but then again puzzlers aren’t my favorite genre. Tokoton is a little different; capturing 100 animals always bumps you up a level and difficulty. Score and Time Attack are self explanatory, but the Quest mode is more interesting. It gives you 8 different tasks to complete, such as collecting a certain number of combos of one animal type, or completing a number of combos in a set time.
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
I've been gaming off and on since I was about three, starting with Star Raiders on the Atari 800 computer. As a kid I played mostly on PC--Doom, Duke Nukem, Dark Forces--but enjoyed the 16-bit console wars vicariously during sleepovers and hangouts with my school friends. In 1997 GoldenEye 007 and the N64 brought me back into the console scene and I've played and owned a wide variety of platforms since, although I still have an affection for Nintendo and Sega.
I started writing for Gaming Nexus back in mid-2005, right before the 7th console generation hit. Since then I've focused mostly on the PC and Nintendo scenes but I also play regularly on Sony and Microsoft consoles. My favorite series include Metroid, Deus Ex, Zelda, Metal Gear and Far Cry. I'm also something of an amateur retro collector. I currently live in Westerville, Ohio with my wife and our cat, who sits so close to the TV I'd swear she loves Zelda more than we do. We are expecting our first child, who will receive a thorough education in the classics.
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