Handheld
(DS) Zoo Tycoon 2 DS
By George Damidas
Mar 18, 2008, 7 :59 am

After managing the world’s most famous zoo, all I have to show for my efforts are some mean hand cramps. Zoo Tycoon 2 DS tries to shoehorn a tycoon title onto the DS, which would seem to be a natural fit, but it stumbles when trying to get around the system’s limitations.

The DS seems as though it would be perfect for tycoon and management games like Sim City, Settlers, and Zoo Tycoon. So far, a developer has yet to really deliver on that potential. I am beginning to think that – well, in this case – it isn’t necessarily the developer’s fault. Sure, there are some design problems, but a lot of the problems involve the DS’ screens and system design. The team did an admirable job trying to fit all of the information and items necessary for a tycoon game – buildings, workers, customers, structures, financial reports, wage reports, research information, etc. – onto the two screens, but the screens just aren’t enough. With the camera zoomed out as far as possible the structures are so-so but the people and animals turn into little pixel blobs, instead of the fascinating miniatures found elsewhere, and there is still too little screen real estate. The top screen will show a general layout of the zoo and any detailed information while the bottom has the action panel, showing the zoo itself and allowing access to the building and managerial functions. There will be plenty of tap tap tapping as you try to scroll across your sprawling zoo to track down information and do one of the handful of repetitive tasks. Still, in trying to fit everything in, unfortunately, some basics got left out.

The heart of the game is the campaign mode. Throughout a series of multi-objective events, would-be zoo managers need to accomplish a set of tasks within a given time limit. The problem that arises is that there is no countdown feature or function on the main screen, so you have to remember when ’50 Months from now’ exactly is. I often found myself running out of time simply because I wasn’t aware of just how much I had left. 

The pixilated buildings and extended view often made planning difficult as well. There was one instance when I had to set and demolish a restaurant four times before getting it right because I kept setting it down backwards. What should have been easy turned out to be a chore because of your inability to rotate the camera while placing a building which resulted in me accidentally rotating a building right before setting it down; and because it can be difficult to quickly distinguish what’s what on a building, I was left with some expensive mishaps.

The extensive tutorial maps do a decent job of tackling the game’s many facets, mainly due to each facet being fairly limited, but tackling the camera angle will consistently be a problem. Another problem is that the game is repetitious.  Despite all of the campaign challenges, from building a dream zoo to making right another’s past grievances, and the ability to freeplay with custom settings and trade zoos with friends, nothing changes the fact that the game consists of only a handful of things to do. From the outset, it seems like there are all kinds of activities manage: planning and building, setting prices, advertising, staffing, what items to sell and how much to sell them for, and research. The fact is, all of those options are extremely limited. Advertising, for instance, involves three options that are chosen and that’s that. The truth is, advertising is actually unnecessary because the game is very easy. The only reason the campaign is of any length is because of the time it takes to simply wait around to store revenue.

The most time consuming function is setting cages up. Once a fence is laid out, an animal must be placed inside, then the animal’s preferred ground text tile must be places, as well as water tiles, a shelter, a toy, some foliage, and then an employee to watch after them. You go through this process over and over and over. The public isn’t really uninterested in any of this, so the only real difficulty is how the campaign’s objectives are structured, which favors a really easy task following by others that take a while to complete due to the nature of research and waiting for guests to arrive. The only respite from the monotony is the ability to feed, clean, pet, and take care of the animals through a handful of mini games that range from moving the proper food icon to the animal’s mouth to rubbing the screen to clean them. This is novel for a few minutes, but an employee will soon be a welcome replacement from the constant babysitting.

There are some solid design choices though. Instead of having to guess at just what an animal wants, a screen indicates what’s wrong with it – if it’s hungry, lonely, sick, etc. – and another saying just what kind of foliage and surroundings is needed for it to be happy. On the other hand, that means the game is simply about selecting an animal, plopping down its favorite ground texture and toys, and watching the cash roll in; and that really is it. Instead of allowing you to skip the middleman and just have those objects an animal desires as the only ones available or allow for saving display layouts, the game forces you to go through these gestures that, essentially, comprise the entire game.

The actual management and administration portion won’t tax you too much either. Most functions work like the advertising feature, which means that you raise and lower ticket prices, food prices, and so on. Advancements through research will garner more prestige for the zoo, allowing for better structures and more exotic animals, so once a zoo hits three stars the option to set a per-day allocation is opened up for research. Again, it’s simple, but I think that in the end it was decided to have a little of a lot because the accommodations really aren’t right for anything too intensive – I can’t imagine reading detailed financial reports on that thing.

The problem is that Zoo Tycoon 2 DS ended up being too simple for adults while being too complex for kids; with the result being that the game isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. Day and night cycles, a large amount of information on each animal through collectable cards, and other goodies are there, but they can’t help the package when the core game is so average.

Overall: 5/10