A Refreshing new Level-Based Direction for Merge-Puzzlers
I’ve played a fair few merge puzzle games, but I don’t think I’ve encountered one that takes a level-based approach. In Zoo Orbs, you’re not just mushing together dogs, foxes and hippos, you’re trying to achieve level objectives so that you can move from one stage to the next. When it’s hard to stand out among other merge games, it’s a strong strategy.
The merging side of Zoo Orbs isn’t anything unusual. You’re given a bowl-shaped arena and some animals to fill it with. You start with – and I am guessing here, as they are not named – hamsters which merge into guinea pigs, which in turn merge into rabbits. All you have to do is drop the animals into identical other animals and they will ‘merge up’, turning into the bigger, arena-blocking beasties.
Zoo Orbs does this stuff relatively well. I would have liked a bit more pomp and pyrotechnics around the animals merging, I suppose: they transform so quickly that you don’t get the satisfaction of watching a chain reaction pop off. Plus – and this is something we’ll get to in a moment – it’s hard to distinguish between animals that merge, and animals that are yoinked away for the missions.
I’ve got some other minor gripes about collision, particularly as animals can seem to touch but Zoo Orbs waggles its finger and says ‘nah’. But generally everything behaves well with the physics that you would expect. There’s a lovely satisfaction of tucking a hamster into a tiny gap and watching it begin a hamstersplosion.
A New Kind of Puzzler E-merges
But it’s the levels and their missions that are the headline grabbers. There are 25 levels here, and each of them has a sequence of missions to complete. A mission might ask you to make three foxes and three red pandas, for example. So you might have to deviate from the usual ‘merge everything up!’ strategy. We found ourselves deliberately separating red pandas so that they didn’t mate and create something larger. That’s an unusual approach, and a good one.
When a mission is complete, all of the associated animals disappear in a puff of smoke, which creates a new kind of chain reaction. Suddenly, the bigger animals are gone and all the smaller animals tumble together to form their own mating pairs. The missions have a doubling sense of satisfaction.
The levels and missions do have their downsides, however. Merge games often thrive on their highscore chasing, and that sense of escalation you get of having an arena full of giant animals. Zoo Orbs has to give up on this dream. Levels are discrete and completeable, meaning that once you have satisfied their mission objectives then you are shuffled on to the next level. You can’t keep playing, working towards an elephant, perhaps. You have to keep moving on the conveyor belt.
It is a bit of a loss. It’s entirely possible to be in the zone, getting into the flow of merging animals, when the level interrupts and moves you on. Particularly in the early levels, you can be playing for mere seconds before you get tugged out of the game. We weren’t really allowed to make the top three tiers of animals in Zoo Orbs – not until the final few levels.
There’s also no meta reason to be completing these levels, or completing them at speed. There’s no highscore table, since score is often what acts as a goal for a level. There are no star rankings for completing the levels quick-smart. You earn coins in the levels, but those coins can’t be spent on accessories for your animals, for example. Having come from Bun Buns, another merge-puzzle game that was released in the past two weeks, it’s a shame that Zoo Orbs can’t borrow its accessory system.
A Little out of the Orb-inary
But as an adaptation to the formula, Zoo Orbs is worth playing. I got the sense that it was onto something: the mission structure does its job of making the player play differently. Strategies and thoughts shift as the player tries to satisfy a shopping list of animals. I can’t help thinking that the missions would be better as optional, rather than mandatory goals. If I got a better score or ranking for abiding by their terms, but could still play on and push for the bigger animals, then I think Zoo Orbs would achieve some kind of sweet spot.
Regardless, I think Zoo Orbs will appeal to merge-puzzle fans because it is so different. If you love the genre but are feeling signs of fatigue from the same rules, over and over, then Zoo Orbs is crafted just for you. Its merge physics might be a little off, and the mission structure does undermine the merging on occasion, but Zoo Orbs is unusual and new.
For players who are new to the genre, though, I’m less convinced that Zoo Orbs is a wise choice. It doesn’t offer one of the core joys of this type of game: the panic from bigger animals pushing you to the top of the arena. It’s a fundamental element of merging games that’s lost by constantly moving from level to level.
Important Links
Zoo Orbs Is All About Smart Drops – https://www.thexboxhub.com/zoo-orbs-is-all-about-smart-drops/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Zoo-Orbs-Xbox-Series/9PDSNC73VZS3
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/zoo-orbs-xbox-one/9nds73797d47
