Zoo Tycoon 2

When our grandchildren discover that we used to go to places where animals were held captive for our amusement, they'll flee from us, possibly tripping, breaking a wrist or gashing a knee. Possibly much worse. It won't do them any good to know that we grew up believing zoos were essentially benign. To our grandchildren – may they one day rest in peace – 'zoo' is just another word for 'torture prison', and we are all monsters.

That's what time does. It makes things obsolete. Take Zoo Tycoon 2. While we're not ready to put pennies on the eyes of the whole management genre, this is a video game in severe danger of obsolescence.

You know the premise. You take control of a zoo with the aim of making it profitable. To accomplish this, you need to build enclosures, put animals in them, create pavements, employ keepers, and so on.

If you do a good enough job, customers start to trickle through the gates, and to maximise the opportunity presented by their presence you can build shops, donation boxes, and fast food kiosks. To keep them comfortable while they amble about and spend all their money, you can build public toilets, benches, and an assortment of other amenities. To keep them entertained, there are animal performances, culminating in the grandiose Dolphin Show.

Of course, this summary doesn't come close to conveying the sheer number of considerations you have to balance. There are employees to pay, animals to feed, enclosures to maintain, patrons to gratify, new items to research, and an ever-changing budget to manage by making the right investments in staff and infrastructure.

That said, Zoo Tycoon 2 isn't the most involved management sim, and belongs in the hands of younger or less able gamers. Once you come to deal with the fact that you can abruptly fail missions with little warning, you should zoom through the Campaign mode fairly quickly.

There are 36 animals available in total, many of which need to be unlocked. These range in glamour from the frumpy camel to the exotic unicorn, and for those of us with a strange obsession with large reptiles, dinosaurs also make an appearance. In addition, you can choose what sex of animal you want to put in the cage, with certain pairings resulting in offspring that you can either rear yourself or reintroduce to the wild.

To situate your animals correctly, you need to first tap them with the stylus as they lumber blockily about in their enclosures, and then tap the question mark icon in the menu that appears to find out what they like. You can also interact directly with each of these animals in Zoo Keeper mode, which resembles the interface of a virtual pet game, complete with separate needs – eating, being cleaned, staying healthy, and so on – that need to be satisfied in a variety of ways involving the DS stylus.

Meeting each of its needs entails a different mini-game, with cleaning being a simple rubbing exercise and feeding requiring you to drag a sequence of flashing icons towards the animal's face.

None of these mini-games is much fun, and the bittily rendered animals are devoid of character, making Zoo Keeper mode a nice but fairly redundant feature. Employing a small pixellated man to do the caring in your place quickly emerges as a more attractive option.

There are 15 missions in Campaign mode, spread evenly across five different scenarios, and as you progress you'll make some breath-taking discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that a camel likes to live in a sandy environment, or that animals drink water? The fact that the game refuses to trust you to apply your own knowledge or work things out for yourself suggests, as does the game's relative ease, that this one's for the children.

There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing innately wrong with anything in Zoo Tycoon 2, except that it looks and plays like a game from several years ago. The grid-based isometric map is ugly and awkward to navigate, and the crude, four-sided enclosures seem too primitive for a console at the cutting edge of innovation.

As well as the Campaign mode there's a Freeform option, in which you can choose where to start from six maps, and also determine the amount of cash you have to spend, the rating your zoo begins with, and whether or not your research is already done. It's a nice feature if you don't like the rigidity of goals, but since some of the maps and animals need to be unlocked in the Campaign mode you'll need to play through that at least once anyway.

And while playing through Zoo Tycoon 2 isn't exactly a chore, it's difficult to get excited about, because it doesn't seem to try. The presentation is flat, the challenges unimaginative, and the interface uncooperative. Worse than that, the animals that provide its selling point don't have any character. Even the cheetah on the game box's front cover looks bored.

Ultimately, then, this is a game pitched sluggishly at a core audience bound by habit to catch it. If that's you, knock yourself out.