Imagine taking a peasant from 15th century England and sitting him down in front of an episode of
Animal Hospital. Aside from the ungodly spectacle of electric light, moulded plastic, and miniature people conducting their affairs in the incredible confinement of the television set, the thing that would surprise him most is how well we treat our animals.
After watching men pay to have a dog's teeth cleaned, or women shedding tears over the loss of an elderly rat, he'd no doubt turn to you and ask, "Why do they not simply eat the beasts?"
Because, you'd tell him, life's not that simple. For instance, when the entire population of a zoo escapes, you can't just kill and eat the liberated animals. You have to go to the trouble of recapturing them.
Capturing animals is the challenge at the heart of Namco's puzzler
Zoo Keeper, and the only means you have of doing so is to line three or more up at once, so that – pop – off they go, leaving three or more others to slide into the vacated space.
Yep, it's another one of those.
There are three game modes – Normal, Endless, and Time Attack – and you can play each of these in either Classic or Ultimate. The difference between these last two is that in the latter you can continue to make moves while chain reactions are going off elsewhere on the screen.
To bring blocks (animals) together, you select the one you want to move with '5' and then move to an immediately adjacent block with '2', '4', '6', or '8' to swap them. The difficulty is that if this procedure doesn't bring three blocks into linear conjunction, the two you've tried to swap revert to their original positions.
The upshot of this is that it's difficult to plan several moves ahead. You can't set up huge cascading combos or manoeuvre long lines by getting everything in place. In fact, all you can do is choose the most appropriate match from a typical range of three of four at various points around the screen. You can expose these by pressing '1' to look through your binoculars, although only three times every game.
From time to time, a special block appears, cycling at high speed through the different animals until you press '5', whereupon all of the animals of the selected species disappear. In addition, at the beginning of every level a 'lucky animal' is specified, so that every time you match three of that species you get double points.
All the while, a timer bar shrinks along the bottom of the screen. Whenever you make a three a bit more time is added, but if it shrinks all the way down to nothing the animals start to rattle in excitement and then it's game over: a terse summary of your achievements and an animation of a suited boss terminating your employment.
That's it. Still reading? Good, then let the following incredible simile be your reward.
Genres of game are like enclosures in a zoo, and puzzle is by far the most overcrowded. Block-matching game after block-matching game gets bundled squawking into the cage, and they're so tight-packed that it's difficult to tell them apart. When you put your arm through the bars of your operator portal,
Zoo Keeper might just be the title that comes out. The question is, will you be disappointed?
No, you won't.
Zoo Keeper – already a successful Flash and
DS game – is unoriginal to an almost wilful degree, but it's a solid game nonetheless, with a well-pitched difficulty curve that keeps you playing.
The colourful, quaintly striking Lego block graphics sort of sum the whole thing up, which is to say they're basic but also stylish and solidly rendered, both puerile and polished, like a gleaming Fiat Panda. It's mediocre, sure, but if all you're looking for is a decent puzzler to get you from A to B, you could do a lot worse than
Zoo Keeper. 
