Zoo Tycoon DS

4.5
Mediocre

Gameplay	5.0	"Stick with bug catching, kids."
Graphics	3.0
Sound	3.5
Value	3.0

By Daniel SR

Any kid who has caught a bug in a bottle will understand the appeal of a Zoo Tycoon game. Fence off an enclosure, add a swamp, chuck in a couple of crocodiles and watch your visitors eyes pop. You’re the creator; you’re playing zoo god, and you get to charge 30 bucks a ticket.

This Nintendo DS conversion of the PC series promises this familiar blend of boyhood wonder and management simulation. The concept is easy to grasp - you’re in charge of creating and managing your own zoo. With your limited budget you will need to erect fences, pick your critters and hire staff to take care of them. After this you’ll need to place walking paths, food vendors, restrooms, benches, and statues to keep your guests happy. It’s a balancing act, and if you please both your animals and visitors, you will hear the chi-ching of the cash register as often as the trumpet of your elephants.

In Zoo Tycoon DS you can begin building your zoo under two standard modes - a freeform game or a scenario game. Freeform is your free-reign playground. You will start from scratch slowly building your petting zoo into the king of menageries. Scenario is your challenge mode where you will be set with goals and deadlines, like building 5 new exhibits within 6 months, or attracting a number of patrons in a year.

The whole appeal of visiting a zoo is that you can gawk at lions, tigers and bears from the safe side of the fence. It’s this looking glass mentality that the DS version of Zoo Tycoon fails at painfully; there is just nothing good to look at. From the isometric perspective your animals appear as grainy sprites that bob within their exhibits in choppy tandem. What is the fun of owning a zoo if your lions behave just like your zebras? It doesn’t end there, though - from the plain menus to the 2D graphics, you could be fooled into thinking this was a Game Boy Advance game. The DS may not be a graphic powerhouse but this game is just ugly and it kills what makes a simulation game like this fun.

'Workable but flawed' would also describe the game’s clunky interface. While Zoo Tycoon’s combination of control pad and touch control is manageable, the stylus rarely provides the intuitiveness the game needs. Drawing the fence lines for cages should be simple and efficient; instead it’s fiddly and it will take you several attempts to create your desired enclosure. Other aspects like removing animals from your zoo also prove confusing, not achieved through the otherwise helpful ‘delete’ or ‘undo’ buttons.

It gets worse. To ensure the happiness of your animals every enclosure must be specifically tailored to that species preference. It makes sense at first; penguins need ice just as chimpanzees need rainforest. But addled by the crappy interface, repeating this process for each animal gets monotonous fast, and often requires an inane amount of detail – your tigers will be pissed if they have one more square of desert than grass.

In theory Zoo Tycoon for Nintendo DS should have the depth to provide a fulfilling strategy game. Each month you receive a financial report, detailing everything from patron numbers, concession sales, construction expenditure to donations. You can hire keepers, maintenance workers and tour guides. You can tweak admission prices and the marketing budget, and put money into research for new animals and features like more nutritional food. However, in the end none of these details make a difference. It’s too easy to make a self-sufficient zoo with minimal effort, and consequently the game feels shallow and boring.

Don’t be fooled - where Zoo Tycoon DS is concerned, the phrase ‘as fun as a barrel of monkeys’ couldn’t be further from the truth. Plagued by ugly graphics, a shoddy interface and repetitive gameplay, after a couple of hours few gamers will wish to return to this snoozefest. Zoo Tycoon may not be the most respected PC series, but this port is one of the worst to hit the DS yet. Stick with bug catching, kids.

NZGamer.com - Zoo Tycoon DS Facebook