Zoo Hospital Review

A game like Zoo Hospital is not made for a broad audience. Even with the game’s honest flaws, it maintains itself as a decent bargain brimming with educational content and youth-targeted mini-games. The niche that will enjoy Zoo Hospital is the “younger child obsessed with animals” group, one I actually fell into for quite a while as a kid. Young girls and boys will like reading about the game’s dozens of animals and treating their ailments.

Zoo Hospital isn’t loaded with features by any means. The single-player mode lets you operate on countless animals until you earn Competent, Proficient, and Expert medals in several broad animal categories like African Animals, Carnivores, and Fish. It’s unfortunate that the zoo you work in isn’t organized to cater to these groups or even a realistic zoo layout; the only sensible pairs were a few big cats and similar snakes. Players who enjoy the simple mini-games enough can engage in cooperative play through Nintendo Wireless Connection, but friends have to have their own copy as well—a stiff requirement that has become unforgivable as of late, with Nintendo’s repeated use of Single-Card Wireless play in their own first-party titles.

The mini-games themselves are pretty redundant after a while for an older player, but younger kids might enjoy observing the animal motions and facts more than I did. I plowed through every operation with the speed and stylus agility of the Trauma Center fan that I am, and after a while realized that I was essentially doing the same things over and over in a different order or pattern. There are a few incredibly common practices, and a few rarer ones. In every operation you will have to read up on the animal’s normal vitals and then check its pulse, weight, respiratory rate, and temperature. You can perform x-rays; then magnify areas of the body, and check blood, skin, and hair tests.

Using all of these different tests you’ll play different mini games. For example, when a blood or skin test comes up negative you’ll often have to inject the animal with a syringe, then play a mini-game where red virus balls attack from the left while you protect green healthy balls on the right with your virus-killing stylus. A common problem when magnifying the mouth of an animal when it has a lacking appetite is that its teeth are incredibly dirty or sore and need pulled. These different ailments are generally reflected in the animal’s behavior on-screen.

The problem is that Zoo Hospital’s variety dies in about 20 minutes or so, and after that you’ll repeat the same processes with different diagnoses over and over until you’re tired of it. I sat down on the job on a slow day and plowed through almost the entire single-player game, earning at least Proficient and almost entirely Expert medals on all the animal categories. I performed the same treatments on the same animals multiple times, especially the sickly king cobra snake.

If anything is to be complimented widely it is the animal models, which look very good on the screen. The head shots that are scattered on the bright map are a very low quality, and I had a hard time distinguishing the snakes from the crocodiles at times. Again, I found it strange that the zoo layout wasn’t more realistic. Also, when magnifying parts of the body, applying ointment, and shaving hair off of animals I wasn’t impressed at all with the effects. The DS is capable of much more than what this game had to offer visually, spare the models.

I didn’t expect a Trauma Center experience from Zoo Hospital, and as such I feel that this game shouldn’t be compared to that game. In Zoo Hospital the selling point is performing check-ups and light treatments that don’t involve dramatic life-or-death situations. After all, as a children’s game, failing to save the lives of kangaroos, lion cubs, and panda bears could be incredibly disturbing. Trauma Center focuses on surgeries and deep story lines as well as bloody processes and procedures. Parents, if your kids really like animals, Zoo Hospital would make a good Christmas gift.