Animal Kororo is a quirky new puzzle game published by Rising Star Games on the DS. The background story to the game is based in the kingdom of Kororo and the residents have gone missing. From pandas to puppies to pigs, these cute, chibi, critters must be rounded up and returned home. This is achieved by pairing like with like. Sounds simple enough after all the game is rated for age 3+ and what could be difficult about coupling these delightful creatures?
On opening the game you must opt to play as a piggy koro or bunny koro and then the mode menu will open. Here you will have a selection of six menu options – the three main playing modes, Koro house, a tutorial and exit.
The first option is the challenge mode and you can select at which difficulty level to play (easy, normal or hard). The Kororo can be rolled horizontally or vertically by the simple touch of the DS interface and will only stop at the the edge of the screen or when they hit an obstacle or kororo. Ok so the premise of Animal Kororo is still sounding essentially really simple but there are three mechanics which can make this quite a challenging puzzler.
Firstly the direction in which you can roll a kororo is dictated by a movement directional arrow in the side panel meaning you have to have a look on screen to assess which would be the best move however, your time allowance is limited (although this can be expanded and temporarily frozen by matching and selecting kororo with egg timer) and doesn’t seem to increase with difficulty. It really is a race against time. Lastly there are the obstacles consisting of bricks, cannon balls and thorny pink obstacles. The bricks are static, the cannon balls move on impact but if you land your Kororo animal on the thorny pink
obstacle the kororo dies and its level over! The thorns appear about halfway through the normal mode levels and stretch across the entire screen with only two gaps where you must squeeze the animals through to match. Everything goes great until you’re left with the last pair of kororo and no other kororo or obstacles to bounce them off to get them through the gaps. Not so easy now!
In my favourite Attack mode your objective is to fill a quota of each Kororo. It’s a much more forgiving type of play where all obstacles are removed although the timer and directional instruction still remain. On the top screen is a line of 10 Kororos with a number under each type. Once you match a pair it will then be crossed off the list at the top cross them all off to move on to the next level.
Battle Mode allows you to engage in DS Download Play with a friend to see who can match Kororos the quickest.
Koro house allows for a bit of personalisation. By earning currency in the challenge and attack modes you can buy houses, furniture and accessories. But Kororo is not a cheap place to live so expect to put in plenty of playing time to fund your lifestyle.
The overall package is a bit of a contradiction as the graphics are clearly designed to appeal to a younger audience yet the puzzles
themselves do get very challenging as you progress. On the upper screen your Kororo chats and pulls funny facial expressions.This screen can be decorated with goods from the Koro shop. The music is what you would expect from this sort of game and can become a bit repetitive however, you can disable it if you so wish.
Animal Kororo is cute, frantic and works on one of the simplest premises.However when we take into account the obstacles, preset
directional moves and limited time the game becomes quite a challenge even to the seasoned puzzle fan. Even when you’re struggling to get past a level because the grid style layout is pretty basic it’s easy to conjure up the problem in your own mind to continue mulling over it when away from the DS. It is addictive mainly because you don’t want to admit defeat at the hands of a game designed with cutesy characters to appeal to a much younger audience and for all intents and purposes should be easy. ??? Not !!
Marks out of 10
Gameplay: 8 Simple and easy to follow with just the right enough of difficulty in the puzzles
Presentation : 7 lovely little animal characterisations
Storyline : N/A
Longevity: 7 once youve overcome each level its easy to adopt the same tactics next time. The only reason to revisit would be to personalise the Kororo’s space
