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The current line of games available on the DS is admittedly pretty low on variety right now, and puzzle gamers have pretty much been left in the dust since the systems launch. This is no longer true, thankfully, due to the release of Zoo Keeper, a game that boasts some kooky art design, but feels very, very familiar.

The reason I say Zoo Keeper feels familiar is because of this: it is. The game, while fun, is little more than Bejeweled with a face lift. Instead of different colored jewels to swap around on the screen, you have stylized little animal heads. The differences between the 2 games pretty much end there. I’m not saying the game is bad because of this, as Bejeweled is a fun game, but when you can play said game for free on the internet, or for a couple measly dollars on a cell phone, paying the $40 price tag for an animalized version of the game seems a bit of an odd choice to make.

For those of you that haven’t been introduced to either game, let me give you the main idea behind it: You have a screen filled randomly with animal heads (hippos, alligators, monkeys, etc.) and you have to try to move them into lines of 3 or higher in order to clear them off the screen. You do this by switching the heads left, right, up or down with the other heads on the screen. You can’t move them around though, so unless you can string 3 or more together in 1 move, you’re out of luck. It’s a simple premise, but one that’s actually rather addicting.

The game feels a bit random at times, though, especially when it comes to chaining together combos of heads. When you clear out more than 1 type of animal head in a move, it’s considered a combo, but most of the time, you have no control over it. This is caused by the random blocks that fall onto the screen to replace the blocks you’ve erased. The blocks fall in a random fashion, and often end up landing into combos that will take out 2, 3, sometimes even 4 lines at a time. You have no real control over it, it’s just blind luck. Of course, it’s those times where you’re running low on time and looking for those bonuses that they don’t show up at times, but hey, it’s the luck of the draw.

The game offers up a few different play modes, though none of them really change the gameplay much at all. There’s normal, which plays the default style of gameplay. There’s a quest mode that has you challenged with certain objectives to reach during 10 missions. There’s timed challenges, challenges that let you move up a level only after catching 100 of a specific animal, etc. The game types all sound different, but the objective is always the same. There’s a high score board too, so you can keep track of your best games.

Zoo Keeper even adds multiplayer support with the need for only 1 cart, a welcome addition. The multiplayer mode is basically a competitive version of the single player game, where getting combos takes away time from the other player. Focusing on combos, though, the multiplayer component suffers from the same randomness that the single player does. You often win more out of luck than skill for the game. It can be fun to challenge a friend once in a while, but it’s not something you’re both going to miss if you don’t get a chance to play in a while.

Overall, Zoo Keeper is the definition of pick-up-and-play gaming. You can play long enough to hop a bus to work/school, you can play during lunch break, or you can play for hours at a time, which you likely will. The game is pretty clear and sounds pretty good, though neither element is really overly important in a puzzle game. Thankfully though, the game offers some truly addictive play while it’s in your system, but it’s hard to recommend you pay $40 for this version when you can play it on your phone for a significantly smaller chunk of cash.