Ziro (PC) review "To be honest, I tend to dislike puzzle games. Playing Ziro did nothing to change this since I really hated playing this game."

Warm Up the Brain?
Ziro is an indie puzzle game that has the player move dice around to find matching pairs and then combine them to eliminate each other. You can also combine unlike dice together to add / subtract them (depending on their values) making a new die. The game adds a lot of different gimmicks (like vanishing blocks, teleport areas, etc.) to maze-like maps to really complicate things. Yet, Ziro really misses out on the core element of any good game...being fun. This game is beyond boring, being just plain painful to play.

Meh-be Not
Are you ready for sluggish controls? No? Well, too bad! Ziro features controls that would make a turtle look fast. The only way to move the dice around is through clicking and dragging your mouse. However, the pointer in the game moves at a snail’s rate. Even worse, there is no option to turn up the sensitivity or scroll speed. So, you are stuck with controls that make you feel like you are wading through mud the whole game. Better than that, there are 300+ painful puzzles to plow through with those muckish controls! So, you can enjoy hours of “fun” with a frustratingly slow-moving mouse. It’s almost a mystery why less than 5% of players (according to Steam achievements) finish the game.

One other thing that deserves to be mentioned is the game’s titular mascot, Ziro. The storyline says that he’s “the youngest member of the ancient order of Snowmen Earth guardians.” What he really ends up being is an overgrown ice cube with a tin pot on his head that gives you lame “earth-saving” advice...like car pool, something I’m sure you’ve NEVER heard. This “advice” is given after every few levels, and some of it is so obvious and simple as to be actually kind of insulting...or at the very least annoying.



The Real Puzzle is Why Play This?
To be honest, I tend to dislike puzzle games. Playing Ziro did nothing to change this since I really hated playing this game. It was tedious and boring, and you could tell that the designers knew that their core gameplay was pretty stale as they kept adding in gimmicky stuff to keep the game fresh. The most fun I had was trying to get some of the top slots on the global leaderboards on Steam...surprisingly easy since not many people (understandably enough) play this game. However, I quickly found out that the Steam scoring system was buggy. My Steam score never really matched my locally stored score for some odd reason, and if you ended the game in 13 moves, exactly, the Steam score added on several hundred points. I wasn’t really sure if this was a bug or some sort of hidden bonus...either way it seemed kinda stupid. Overall, I gave Ziro a 2/10. If you are really a hardcore puzzle fan and find this on sale you might get some enjoyment out of this...but everyone else should stay far, far away.

Community review by Never3ndr (July 02, 2014) Retro-Gaming Enthusiast!