Parents' Guide to Wildscapes

While it doesn't add anything to either of the genres it covers, this still manages to be fun, especially if you like cute animals. In Wildscapes, you run a new zoo that needs a lot of work. It needs animals, a place people can buy coffee, and lots and lots of trees. To earn the money you need to pay for all of these improvements, you have to solve a series of match-3 puzzles. Like similar games, this presents you with a board full of colored pieces. In this game, the pieces take the form of food. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to move these pieces one square so they're next to three or more of the same kind, which removes them from the board. Sometimes this is the objective and sometimes you're supposed to clear the board by removing pieces that will take out blocks of wood or flowers. But you always have a limited number of turns in which to achieve this goal.

As match-3 puzzle games go, this one is fairly similar to other ones, and follows all of the genre's established rules. Combining four green pears, for instance, creates a green can of soda that will take out an entire row or column when matched to more green pears. The same also goes for the parts where you're building the zoo, although it's slightly restricted since you don't get to decide where things like the coffee shop go. But it's nice that your customers offer helpful suggestions, and reward you when you listen to their good ideas. While this otherwise offers nothing new in either genre, it still manages to be fun by mixing things up rather nicely in the puzzle parts. It's also damn cute -- the mascot is a red panda, fer crying out loud -- which might annoy those who are dead inside, but they probably wouldn't want to play a puzzle/planning game that has elephants with really long eyelashes anyway. Which is why Wildscapes may not be the most original game of its kind, but it's still a fun place to spend a couple hours on the weekend.