Zoo Olympic Review

This game is great for the kids.  Zoo Olympic is a series of 6 mini games whose central character is a cute 2D lion these games include:

Sea Escape, Lion Ball, Enjoy Flying, Memory Cards, Jumping High, Eat Meat

Each use the device in different way, Sea Escape involves using an onscreen thumb pad to move your lion headed submarine around the screen to avoid a series of balls.  Scores are gained by the length of time you can stay alive for.  There is a power up which clears the screen of balls giving you additional time and additional points.  Enjoy Flying has your little super lion flying through the air avoid planks of wood.  This is done by pressing and holding the screen to go up and releasing it to go down. Lion Ball is a game of ‘keepy ups’ where you tap the falling balls up in the air and then attempt to bounce them into a lions mouth, each tap increases the balls score value and you have 3 lives to get the highest score possible.  Memory cards is the classic game of pairing up two cards and clearing the screen as fast as possible.  Jumping High sees the lion jumping up on moving platforms to see how high you can get, additional boosts can be gained and some platforms have springs on to allow for higher jumps.  Eat meat has our Lion armed with a basket to catch various falling meat objects and avoiding falling bombs.  This is achieved by pressing the left or right of the screen to move the lion in that direction.

The graphics are cute and well presented with great 2D artwork and pencil crayon style backdrops, the character animation work well, if a little simplistic.  The sound is a mixture of happy go luck tunes and sfx and strange random sounds (like the helicopter sound whilst flying) which are a little weird.

The gameplay is simple and easy to follow and should appeal to the younger audience as it does use the different types of controls available on the iphone.  From a developer point of view its like they wanted to try out all of the different types of controls to see how they worked and it just so happened that they tied all of them together with a similar character.  Each score is shown in their own individual table and the aim is just to better your previous.

My aim problem with this game is that there is no sense of achievement; you get a score and you can either play again or try another mini game.  It would have been nice to link the games in some sort of narrative or have different levels on the mini games to feel like you get somewhere.  But that being said, i’m not the target market but I appreciate that this is a great introduction to the iphone fore children.  Recently I found myself trying to entertain a 5 year old with my iphone and most apps I have were either to complicated or not short enough so if I had this I would think this would be right up there alley which is why it will stay on my iphone for a while just in case.

Overall its an adorable little game with a great central character and will entertain young children and their families and as it is only 0.99 at the moment its worth it for just a hours worth of peace.  My only gripe is some kind of narrative glue holding the whole package together

Looks:        Great character and colorful visuals if a little limited
Sound:       Bubbly tunes and cute sfx but still not sure about helicopter sound
Gameplay: Simplistic and uses different styles; great as an introduction to iphone games
Overall:      Will entertain the kids but adults will find it limited

Buy it here >>