Jambo! Safari Animal Rescue (Nintendo DS) - Review by Chris

Introduction

Exploration games centred around the premise of educating a younger audience on various creatures and environments aren't new on the DS. While the genre may not be positively overflowing with titles, there are certainly a small selection of them which aim to facilitate this premise leading to hours of endless enjoyment as you seek out a wide range of animals but unfortunately none of the attempts have quite managed to make something truly worth of a gamer's time. Now Sega have decided to throw their hat into the ring and attempt to tread some new ground with Jambo! Safari: Ranger Adventure giving you the opportunity to take a young upstart ranger all the way from his fledgling feet right up to being head of an entire safari park.

Gameplay

Jambo! Safari: Ranger Adventure puts you in the boots of one of 4 potential new head rangers for an expansive safari park, each of whom are trained in different disciplines. The safari park over which you'll be keeping a watch is split into several areas, within which there are multiple large expanses for you to explore. But before you can become the new head ranger for the park, you'll have to complete vast amounts of missions and assignments, proving you have what it takes to run the whole park.

With a very brief introduction to the hub area of the game, stripped down to represent nothing more than a menu here in comparison to a fully explorable area in the Wii version, you'll almost immediately head out into the park to begin proving your worth to your colleagues. Another brief tutorial takes you through the basics of how to capture the parks animals for sending to the animal centre in the hub area after which you're virtually left to your own desires as you can head out and take on any available mission or assignment that is marked on your radar map. This lack of overall direction, outside of receiving some missions through radio calls, is both a blessing and a curse for the game because while it allows you to take your time with the game, it also leaves you scratching your head often at what and where you should be going to progress the game forward.

The mission structure for the game isn't exactly on the deep side, falling heavily on stereotypical types such as fetch quests, time trials and gathering information on animals through photographs or by catching them. These types are spread out over the entirety of the game and while there are certainly plenty of them to play through, providing a length run time for the game, you'll quickly grow tired of the lack of innovation or the lack of anything new to excite the gameplay.

Perhaps the biggest and most unique mission types included in the game are the capturing quests which task you with heading out into the park and finding a specific animal and capturing it so it can be either studied or brought into the animal centre, where you can care for it through a mini-game. The capturing aspect is what made the Wii version so enjoyable but here, due to the constraints of the hardware, it fails to live up to the credence that that version gave it and falls flat due to cumbersome controls. It's therefore a disappointment that perhaps the most interesting and important part of the gameplay fails to live up to anything other than the mess that it is.

Even with the issues, the game will take a considerable amount of time to complete but it is because of these issues that the time spent on the game will either be largely exacerbated or very short depending on whether you can push through them. Unfortunately, the game lacks any form of multiplayer options so you'll have to head into the park alone to tackle the issues.

Controls

Controlling the game requires a mixture of both touch input and button based input but as a result of this combination, the game is a lot more confusing and difficult to control. Through all menus and dialogue windows, you'll make use of the touch screen to progress and these touch screen controls pass over into the mini-games as well where they work very well. When you head out onto the plains to take on missions and capture animals, the game changes the control setup to a button based one where you steer your jeep with the d-pad and accelerate and brake with the B and A buttons respectively, changing a common setup used in other games where acceleration is A and braking is B. Even at this level, things feel difficult to control and getting your head around the change to the power buttons can also be an issue. However, these are only the beginnings for control issues as the capturing mechanic has been mapped to the shoulder buttons and using these to lasso and then net an animal make what is a simple idea overly complex and hard to control, especially with there being no real tutorial to using them.

Graphics

The game's visual are of a decent standard, presenting everything in full 3D. This includes all of the park areas which remain the large open expanses filled with animals and other objects. Of course the draw distance isn't particularly great, as objects fade into and out of view depending on how you are driving, but what you will see is well designed and of a decent quality and looks exactly like the Wii version albeit in a lower resolution.

All of the models, from the human characters to the animals to the jeeps, are again well designed and all look the part, and due to the smaller size of the models on the screen, blemishes that existed with the Wii version, such as blocky or muddy textures, aren't nearly as apparent here as they were there. Rangers continue that exaggerated, cartoony look and provide a nice contrast to the realism of the rest of the game while the vehicles look respectable and look like the real things. The animals similarly look great and are animated extremely well. Even with many of these things on the screen at once, the frame rate remains steady throughout, with only some minor dips but nothing to bring the game to a crawl.

Sound

The audio seems to be a bit more withdrawn in this version of the game, the jeep's engine having taken a noticeable step down in volume. It now means that your riding around the savannah is accompanied by a much softer sounding engine, which still manages to sound realistic for the vehicle, and you'll be able to hear the background music more often, although the volume for this seems to have been turned down in certain areas and you'll rarely here it. It's presented as nothing more than some simple ambience music to further the feeling of being on safari but it would have been nice to actually hear it more prominently. Sound effects for the animals seem to have been kept to a minimum, presumably as a result of cart size restrictions, so once again, you'll rarely hear the animals making any noise as you chase them around the locations or when you're treating them in the animal centre.

Dual screen

All of the in game action takes place on the top screen and the touch screen shows a radar for finding animals and missions, as well as being used for the caring mini-games. It's nothing particularly special as the screens have been used together in a similar in other titles before now but the overall quality of the usage feels lower than those other titles, mainly due to the touch screen use being rather poor outside of the mini-games.

Final comments

Even though the Wii version had its issues, it was at least a smoother and more enjoyable experience than what is available here. Everything from the Wii version has just about made it into the game, giving plenty of content to play through, but this DS version feels too clunky and cumbersome for playing on the go, making what were some enjoyable tasks on the Wii, such as the caring for the animals and the capturing of them, downright tiring and creates further tedium about having to redo the same kind of assignments over and over again. While it's far from being a terrible game, Jambo! Safari is something which is not suited to the DS and for someone looking for this kind of safari edutainment title, the Wii version is definitely the one to pick up.

Pro: Visuals are pretty good, plenty of things to see and do
Con: Controls are too clunky, gameplay is awkward in comparison to the Wii effort, strictly a single player affair
Final score: 5.4

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