World of Zoo

Gonna keep some surprises here...

I’m preparing the list of games for my next set of Quick Reviews. Yes, I do plan these things in advance. And most titles on those lists tend to be fairly short, requiring less than 5 hours to finish… at least, according to HowLongToBeat, not a perfectly accurate tool to properly judge the length of a game, but still one of the better tools we have. In this field, it’s impossible to have hard data anyway, as several factors can influence the amount of time it takes any player to finish a game. Not every game has that data; the site has many games without any recorded length, either from lack of submissions or being multiplayer-driven. I still tend to jumble a few of those in the lists for Quick Reviews, just in case I only need a short article to cover them. Well – today’s game is on that list, and was supposed to be a Quick Review, but I’m expanding it to a full article today.

I’ve covered simulators and tycoons before on this blog, and have quite a few in my Steam collection. A Venn diagram of these two genres would have some overlap, but wouldn’t form a perfect circle; far from it, actually. I believe I purchased today’s game thinking it would be a tycoon title. Instead, what I got was a simulator. ….Hey, why not. It’s going to change the tone of the review, but that may be for the better. Instead of talking about managerial decisions, I’m gonna talk about how funny it is to scare lions.

Is it a big zoo? I have no clue, we never see
anything beyond the enclosures.

Welcome to World of Zoo, made by THQ and released on October 30th, 2009. It’s not a world; it’s not a place you can visit at your leisure to complete tasks and help. All we really get to see is the animal exhibits: One regular and one nursery for each. However, I’m also not sure we can call it a zoo. Wouldn’t the word “zoo” imply that the animals are on display for the public? Not to get into a debate on semantics, but if you, the player, are the only audience… And in fact, you’re not even an audience, you’re technically the caretaker.

So is this closer to a wildlife preservation center, then? Man, I can’t think of a title with those words that would sound anywhere as  marketable as World of Zoo, so let’s keep that. Besides, I feel like this is a game more geared towards children, with its focus being less on taking care of an entire park, and more on taking care of the animals… which we can do in pretty fun ways. It feels closer to a virtual pet game.

Bringing back the prehistoric classics.

When you open your, um, “zoo”, you select one enclosure in which to begin the game. You will be able to buy the other exhibits later with the Star Tokens earned from taking care of the ones you own. And how do you earn these? Not by greeting guests in or fixing ticket prices; you get the game’s “currency” (or at least the closest this game has to one) by completing achievements/missions with the animal(s) in each enclosure. Sometimes, you'll also get some from just tending to their needs well.

I first picked the big cats, the felines from around the world. Lions, panthers, leopards, even fancy options like sabertooth tigers. …what? I really like lions. Other enclosures exist are for giraffes, small monkeys, equines (think horses, zebras, etc.), pandas and koalas. Each one also comes with a Nursery for babies/cubs, some of which welcome less animals than the main exhibit.

My heart, they're adorable!

The gameplay is the same in each section: You select a first animal, then take care of it in the exhibit. You can watch them play around, pet them, make them find stuff for you, customize the exhibit, let them explore and interact with whatever is available. As you care for your new animal, you gain hearts and get progress on multiple missions. Use toys to keep them entertained, food to feed them, and tools to give them proper care.

Hey, what's that in your mouth?
No eating candy wrappers!

You gain hearts for anything good you do for your animals. After getting enough hearts, you go up a rank, unlocking more food, toys and tools to use, as well as sometimes an extra spot for a new animal. Exhibits can contain 3 to 4 animals, whereas nurseries can contain 2 to 4. The ranks officially are Junior [animal] keeper, then Senior, Head and Master, finishing with [animal] Whisperer. The official title changes based on the type of creature: For the felines, it says "Junior Bigcat Keeper", and so on. After you hit Whisperer in an exhibit, you can keep on gaining hearts and Star Tokens (as not every mission will be finished and the animals can also give some if they like you), but there’s nothing left to unlock there.

Every once in a while, you might see a spot sparkling in the enclosure; you can direct your animals to look over there, and they will come back with the thing they found – be it a wallet, a diamond ring, a pencil, or ordinary junk like a boot or a candy wrapper. My gripe with these is that they appear very briefly, which means that by the time you tell a lion or a giraffe or a zebra or a monkey to go check it out, the sparkles will be gone, and so will the item.

A gift? For me? Aw, you're so sweet!

I guess I need to go in greater depth about the food, the tools and the toys – just to give an example of things you can do in the game. As a reminder, you start with almost nothing, and unlock new items in each category at every rank you reach in every enclosure – from only two items of each type when you start out, to twelve once you’ve become a Whisperer for the kind of animal you’re taking for at the moment.

Here, buddy; have some bamboo.

The food: The first item that you have access to is the most common type of food for the kind of animal you're interacting with at the moment: Bananas for monkeys, bamboo for koalas, meat for the big cats, and so on. For all types, you also have access to cookies that give the animals an energy boost, and cookies that calm them down, put them to sleep even. Every type of animal also gets a spicy food that causes them to be inconvenienced/scared (which can be hilarious to watch), and an item that will spawn multiple smaller food items (such as full turkey that will drop two turkey legs, or a large bamboo that splits into many).

So, balls, and that's about it? Meh.

The toys: They always include a basic ball to toss at your pet, as well as multiple types of balls and inflatables. The scare ball will jump around, mimicking the sound of a predator of the type of animal in this exhibit (example: A ball that emits crocodile noises in the big cats’ den). By the way, I don’t know if it’s a bastard thing for me to say, but seeing these animals get scared, jumping in the air in fear, is freaking hilarious. Anyway, other toys include the keeper bopper, available in every enclosure, is a balloon looking like an animal keeper, that the pets… er… animals will play with, thinking it’s you. Stuff like a sponge ball that cleans the animals, a mud ball that gets them dirty, a music ball, etc.

Where... where did he even get that??

The tools: The most interesting aspect of caring for the animals, in my opinion. This is the crux of the game. The first items you have are a brush, which will slowly remove dirt from your pets (they get dirty over time). Brushing is fun, but the hose obtained later does the same thing, faster. The poop-vac is required to take away the poops left behind by the animals; none of them like this thing, and it’s hilarious to see them flee from it. The medical scanner opens a mini-game in which you check your pets for ailments and cure them. The playset builder will create new play areas for them: Each one costs 15 Star Tokens, but they add decoration and toys to the enclosure. A bubble blower… meh. A treasure finder… meh. An air horn… Okay, scaring the pets is REALLY funny. The last ones you get are a hypnotism pendant to put your friends to sleep, and a caller to bring all of them to you at once.

Brushie brushie!

Note that, for all three categories, most items aren't available in an exhibit's respective Nursery, only keeping items to take care of the babies.

By the way, you can take part in challenges where you can groom your animals with the brush, cure them with the medical scanner, or find treasures around the exhibit. These mini-games involve things you already do with these tools, so they feel rather superfluous.

To top it all off, every animal is fully customizable, to incredible degrees. Color, shape, fur patterns and the size of various body parts, especially in the face area – if you love to play around on character editors, you will love this. The game definitely encourages trying out various combinations of shapes and colors, as every enclosure has empty slots for almost 30 animals. Make the perfect pet you want to own!

Aw buddy, your mane is all dirty!

Another very cool feature of the game is that your animals will sometimes come towards you to be petted. In similar fashion to when they find treasure, the screen format will change and give an impression of the pet breaking out of the game to come towards you. And then you can pet them to your heart’s content and see their happy reactions! The breaking of the fourth wall here is surprisingly effective. That is to say, if your buddies do love you, it’ll be great! However, although it’s rare to see, if you scare the animals too often, they might actually attack you, the player, using the same effect. Only happened to me once, let’s say it genuinely took me off-guard.

What the Heck? This isn't a horror game, that
jump scare was unwarranted!

And, well, that’s about it, really. There’s not much else to discuss. It’s a perfectly serviceable and fine game, although I assume I may be older than its intended audience. It’s not great, but I did enjoy the time I spent playing it. Alas, in spite of the attempts to encourage it, I don’t see much replayability here.

The game has options to create your pets from scratch and even change every single detail about them, from color to physiognomy and even size, and then you can literally play with them and see how they interact with other animals you’ve created – or perhaps use the pre-existing animals. Allegedly, every animal will have a personality of its own, which can shine through depending on what you do to it… however, since the options are so limited, unless you genuinely spend a long while watching the pets play about, you might not even notice these differences.

Aww, he likes it!

You might have seen that I started referring to the animals as pets after a bit. A point came where the entire game felt closer to a basic pet simulator. The load of items in every enclosure doesn’t really change: Some items are cosmetically different but serve the same purpose. You can give your lion a turkey leg and your monkey a banana, sure; but does it change anything, gameplay-wise? Nope. As a result, by the point you've unlocked them all, the exhibits will likely start to feel samey. There is at least a decent enough number of options that you’ll be tempted to try them all out, at least in the first enclosure, and maybe to see if other types of animals react differently to them.

Where do they keep finding wallets?
We don't even have visitors at this zoo!

Earning Star Tokens is fairly easy to do, as you get some for every achievement that you unlock. Therefore, it’s pretty easy to gain enough Tokens to get every exhibit and extra pre-created animal, even if it leads to the same gameplay. It’s not even that long into the game till all that’s left to do is to get through the achievements. To be fair, the game does feature a lot of those, so you can be kept pretty busy.

I almost forgot to display the koalas too! I got
too caught up with the big cats and the pandas.

Six enclosures that all feel the same.
At least they provide very different
flavors of cute.

Speaking of, some of those achievements can be a slog to get through, since they will eventually ask you to reach the highest keeper rank everywhere, which requires earning 3,000 hearts with your pets in every exhibit, becoming a Whisperer times six. It’s a time commitment that I wouldn’t see myself make, as it would mean spending two or more hours caring for the species in each enclosure, and the gameplay eventually got repetitive enough that I didn’t really want to see the other enclosures in greater detail. I did like that we could also customize exhibits with the playset builder, but the novelty of those also tends to wear out.

In my research, I also learned that other versions of World of Zoo were released for gaming consoles, the Wii and Nintendo DS in particular. That last one had extra exhibits, one of which housed penguins. Man, I would have loved to care for penguins in the PC version...

At best, I could recommend it for children. I think they’d enjoy the whole pet simulator aspect, not to mention the constant gratification of seeing achievements being earned over time. The game's very cute style and concept also help make it a family-friendly choice. Not sure I could see much interest in it from other demographics.

On this I’m back to the board to write the next big article. Hopefully I won’t take too long to bring it out. See you later!