A Bemusing Downgrade on the Original Merge-Puzzler, Zoo Orbs
I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for Zoo Orbs Safari. The original, Zoo Orbs, was a fine but derivative merge-puzzle game – something we get an avalanche of on the Xbox (to the degree that I’d like them to merge as they hit each other). Zoo Orbs Safari is a sequel releasing less than a month after the original, and the only real differentiator is that the backgrounds are more safari-themed than zoo-themed. Yeah, Zoo Orbs Safari was never going to turn heads away from 007 First Light.
What surprised me most is that Zoo Orbs Safari looked at those low expectations and fell short of them anyway. It’s one of the lazier sequels in Afil Games’ roster, and it’s vastly inferior to the game it’s following on from. You have to wonder what happened.
On a Mission to Make Things Worse
One of the things I liked most about Zoo Orbs was its missions. You’re not just dumping animals into a bucket and hoping they merge to create an elephant or two. Missions would encourage you to create specific animals, perhaps even to your detriment. You would keep two hyenas apart rather than merge them, simply because the missions demanded two hyenas.
Don’t get us wrong, Zoo Orbs Safari does include missions, but they have been reduced to the point of becoming banal. You don’t get multiple missions at the same time anymore: you get one, single mission. A whole heap of strategy now goes out of the window, since you’re not choosing which objective to focus on (which once created neat pitfalls like half-satisfying two missions and then losing because you didn’t commit to a single one).
The missions in Zoo Orbs Safari don’t need any thought. They will naturally complete by playing the game. If you ever have a monkey in play, the monkey will tick off. You don’t need to protect that monkey from merging. And the number of missions is incredibly small. You only need to complete a few for the level to be considered ‘done’, and even if you stick around beyond the level-completion, you will only have a few more after that to complete. The missions will evaporate and you’re left to play simply for the joy of the merge.
Stacking and Merging Bizarre Design Decisions
I’m racking my brains for reasons why Zoo Orbs Safari would take its one differentiating factor – its missions – and reduce them, make them easier, and never offer more than one at a time. I can only assume that it was to make Zoo Orbs Safari more accessible. Three objectives at once might have seemed like a lot. But it’s made Zoo Orbs Safari a mindless old romp. I don’t think more than three brain cells fired at any point while playing.
But missions aren’t the only instance of the original game shrivelling up into something less. There are only five levels in Zoo Orbs Safari, and they each take about five minutes to complete. If you’re only after achievements, that drops to something like fifteen minutes total. But Zoo Orbs had dozens of levels – mostly because it was happy to repeat the shapes of the bowls that the animals were being dropped in. It got its difficulty and variety from its missions which, of course, Zoo Orbs Safari does not. Without a host of missions, Zoo Orbs Safari seems to have thrown up its arms in defeat and said ‘well, you’ll only have five levels, then’.
The motivation shifts. You need to care about merging animals without missions, achievements, progressing levels, new creatures or things to unlock. The only possible motivations are your score – when there aren’t highscore tables, global or local – or the simple joy of merging. You have to be motivated by the natural frenzy that comes from an arena full of big creatures. Which, I should add, is a motivation that I only had for the first couple of sessions. After that, I lost all will to play Zoo Orbs Safari.
Looking for More Than Merging Monkeys
Games like Bun Buns at least stir in some power-ups to make the merge-puzzling varied. Dogpile adds in roguelike structures. But Zoo Orbs Safari has nothing of the sort. The merging is vanilla: you get animals of various sizes, and they merge into other animals of the same size. That is literally all it has. It won’t even give you bigger animals to play with: for some reason, Zoo Orbs Safari limits itself to only handing you the first five tiers of creature (at least that was our experience).
The silver lining is that Zoo Orbs Safari can be played two-player split-screen. Both players are given their own sequence of creatures, and that can lead to griefing or cooperation, depending on the people you pair with. But while it’s a neat addition, it’s also table-stakes. You expect cooperative play in merge games nowadays, and it’s rarer to find one without than with. Which is to say that we are grasping at straws in finding something to compliment.
Ugh, even the theming annoys me. Zoo Orbs Safari needed to do something different to kick on from Zoo Orbs. Mythical creatures, perhaps, or at least pets. But no: it opts for ‘Safari’, which, let’s be honest, is still a zoo. The animals in a zoo and safari are the same, so there’s nothing that makes you feel like you’re playing a different game. It’s just more of the same.
An Uncharacteristic Abandonment of a Working Formula
Afil Games have a habit of taking a successful template and making multiple games from it. You might criticise the lack of innovation, but the foundations are often strong: they are building on games that work. Zoo Orbs Safari feels like a confusion of that formula. It’s a quickfire sequel that ditches almost everything that made the original work, turning stable foundations into unstable. Clearly, some rethinking is needed.
There are dozens of merge-puzzle games on the Xbox, and Zoo Orbs Safari is comfortably in the bottom three. What makes that damning is that the original Zoo Orbs placed so much higher. Heaven knows what happened. It’s fair to say that Zoo Orbs Safari will only be of interest to achievement hunters thanks to its effortless 2000G.
Important Links
Zoo Orbs: Safari Roars Onto Xbox And PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/zoo-orbs-safari-roars-onto-xbox-and-pc/
Buy the game, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-orbs-safari-xbox-series/9PCWRGH4TD1R/0010
There’s an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-orbs-safari-xbox-one/9NFRT06CVZF6/0010
And a Windows PC drop – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-orbs-safari-windows/9N21L3WS0BL8/0010
