Zoo Frenzy

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Zoo Frenzy is a Management Simulation with Minigames and some light RPG elements originally released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS was released. This game’s premise is that an amazing island has been discovered where animals can talk to people (though not all people, for some reason). This led to the creation of a zoo on the island, but the zoo has fallen on hard times because it suffered through illness and was then attacked by monsters who kidnapped the animals. You take the role of a young man aspiring to be the new zookeeper responsible for the island, aiming to rebuild it to its former glory and rescue the kidnapped animals.

It’s a pretty bizarre plot, and it’s made even more bizarre by a pretty shoddy localization here, with characters speaking in an extremely awkward and unnatural manner, and with some really odd quirks (for one thing, this game’s currency is apparently “pies”, and one early character suggests that you collect 20,000 pies… which definitely evokes quite a mental image). However, rather than harming this game, the bizarre behaviors and localization actually lend it a strange sort of charm.

The rest of the presentation is somewhat less successful, however. At the very least, this game features a nice colorful world with some appealing cartoony 2D character designs. Unfortunately, choppy animations and screen shuddering make the game look amateurish, and the game’s plunky soundtrack is extremely annoying.

It’s not just the presentation here that’s unorthodox. Zoo Frenzy starts with pretty rudimentary Management Simulation gameplay, but seems to have grafted onto that numerous other gameplay elements. Players manage their zoo’s buildings and try to meet the needs of guests and animals alike while remaining in budget, but actions taken within the buildings like preparing food often involve minigames, with some better than others.

Bringing new animals into the zoo involves rescuing those animals from cartoony monsters, and this is done by sending your current pet out on a mission to fight ten of those monsters and then make a beeline when the game reveals the location of the next animal to rescue. These fights tend to just be a back-and-forth trading of blows with zero strategy, and if you’re struggling with this part of the game it just means you need to go back and spend more time in your zoo’s animal training facility to improve their stats.

While it is certainly interesting to see these various elements tossed in together into one game, I can’t help but feel like in trying to include various types of gameplay here, the game’s creators weren’t able to spend the time with any one of those gameplay elements to ensure they’re deep, well-crafted and fun. Of the minigames, only roughly half of them were entertaining, and these only because they basically copied the formula of Puzzle games like Bejeweled. The rest are just tedious and frustrating, like one where you need to run out of the way of countless hockey pucks with slippery controls, and one where you just need to repeatedly time a button press when a ball is tossed in front of you.

The very fact that players may feel like they have to not only participate in these tedious tasks, just so they can level up their animal to not get slaughtered in the equally tedious and boring RPG portion of the game, just to add an extra animal to the zoo… it’s hard not to feel like this would have been so much less of a hassle if the game just skipped all that pointless busywork. Of course, then the unfortunate reality would be that all there is left is an underbaked Management Simulation without enough depth or variety to hold your interest for long.

If Zoo Frenzy focused on just being a good Management Simulation, that gameplay may have gotten the attention it needed to be an enjoyable entry in the genre. If the minigames had gotten more attention, this could have been a fun minigame collection. And the RPG stuff… well, okay, I don’t really see how there would have been any saving that. In any case, if this game just picked one of its better elements to work on and invest quality into, this could have been a really enjoyable game, but instead it just feels like a mix of compromised game elements that just do not mesh well together.

tl;dr – Zoo Frenzy is a Management Sim where players work to manage a zoo filled with talking animals, all within a game that has an amusingly shoddy localization. These gameplay elements are joined by a slew of minigames and some light RPG elements, and the issue is that with all these gameplay elements, none of them seems to have gotten enough time and attention to make it truly worthwhile in its own right, or a greater part of a cohesive whole. There is fun to be found here, but it’s so scattered and under-developed that it’s hard to recommend this game.

Grade: C

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