Zoo Town

There’s a fine line between inspiration and imitation.

If developers stay on the right side of it, they can borrow design aspects from popular games, throw a couple of new elements into the mix, and create something which, while not entirely original, still possesses a unique identity.

Step over to the wrong side of that line, however, and you find yourself in 'clone' territory. This is a dangerous place to be, something which the developer of Triple Town clone Yeti Town learned the hard way.

Still, it seems that the possibility of lawsuits and out of court settlements weren’t enough to deter InLogic from producing its own Triple Town homage, imaginatively titled Zoo Town.

However, even though it borrows almost every concept and mechanic wholesale from its addictive precursor, Zoo Town still winds up feels like a stale repurposing of a far superior game.

If you hadn't already guessed, Zoo Town is a match-three puzzler. You have to place animals one-by-one onto a grid-based play area. Align three or more animals and they will combine to create one new animal.

Each level has an animal hierarchy. For example, in the introductory aquatic level you can match three starfish to make a single crab.

Stick three crabs in a line,and you’ll get a clown fish. Conjure up two more fish, and you’ll have yourself a killer whale.

As you might have gathered, Zoo Town’s evolving creature map is a straight riff on Triple Town’s shrub-to-tree-to-house-to-castle system.

Later levels may have you turning frogs into salamanders, or eggs into penguins, but the game’s deviation from Triple Town’s rustic blueprint is almost entirely aesthetic.

Triple Town's infamous furry villain has its own Zoo Town equivalent, too.

The pesky bears that Triple Town players have learned to despise are represented here by 'thieves' - masked bandits who roam the grid and occupy unused squares.

Oddly, these thieves make no attempt to actually steal the animals. They just wander aimlessly. They might as well be wearing bear suits, for all the difference it would make.

Zoo Town does introduce an undo feature that you can use once every ten turns. There's also a zookeeper character who lets you remove one animal from the grid.

While you won’t find these backtracking features are found in Spry Fox’s game, both feel redundant, and neither adds anything of value to the formula.

Obviously, given the similarities between Zoo Town and Triple Town, we’d be lying if we said that Zoo Town had zero entertainment value.

After all, Triple Town is a very good game.

The problem is that Zoo Town’s lacks both the production values and originality of its superior. By failing to bring anything genuinely new to the table, InLogic’s match-three menagerie is doomed to sit in Triple Town’s impressive shadow forever.

There's another problem, however: Triple Town is not currently available on Java devices.

Therefore - though it pains us to say it - if you only a Java device and are looking for a Triple Town-like experience, Zoo Town is probably your best bet.

Until the court documents arrive, that is.