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Baku Baku Animal review

Game: Baku Baku Animal
Platform: Sega Master System
Genre: Casual (Puzzle)
Developer: SEGA

Reader review by goldenvortex

August 18, 2005

The majority of puzzle games are low quality rip-offs of some the genre’s finest titles. Most of them are mere imitators that don’t even come close to the sheer quality of the original title such as Oh My God ( Atlus’s Puyo Puyo clone) shows us that. Others try hard to push different a method of stacking blocks forward but fails rather miserably. Baku Baku Animal is one example of this as it produces a rather different approach to the puzzle game but proves to be dull, awkward and repetitive.

The premise here is simple; in order to apply for a job as a zookeeper you must enter and win an animal feeding contest. This consists of a rather generic puzzle game where you have to stack certain blocks on top of one another. There are four different coloured boxes and in order to gain points you have to match the blocks up. Red blocks will have either a rabbit or a carrot on them and if you match the two then you’ll get a few points and these will disappear. The animal will eat its way through the food and will cannibalise any animal of its type one is next to it. The other three blocks are blue for dog/bone, yellow for monkey/banana and green for panda/bamboo. To emerge as the victor of the contest you must keep on getting matches until your opponent fills up his area with bad pairs. Then you can watch with pride as your opponent cries after his crushing defeat and get furiously bored at the same time.

Every time you create a chain of blocks, you will receive a handful of points. You’ll get more points if you set off a chain reaction that demolishes a whole row of blocks from the field. Collecting points enables you to, unfairly, drop a pile of plain boxes into the opposition’s playing field. Doing this is probably the most satisfying task in BBA because you can watch your opponent wriggle in pain before you CRUSH him. Of course, if you opponent is doing well, he can unleash this bastard on you, which usually completely screws your game over. If it does happen to you, the only way to counter it is to perform chains near the blank boxes, which is a slow and repetitive process.

And that’s it.

Apart from the different opponents in the various difficulty settings (who all fight the same as each other) and the small cut scenes that introduce each new opponent, there’s nothing much left to say about Baku Baku Animal. There’s no variety in the levels or any real challenge throughout the entire game. BBA’s simple style is flawed because it is too simple for it’s own good. I’ll give it some credit though, it does try hard not to imitate Tetris or Puyo Puyo but it gives us an easy and rather repetitive experience that isn’t really worth bothering about.

Rating: 4/10

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