Zoo Keeper DX Touch Edition

It wasn't all that long ago when us reviewer types had to weigh in on whether it was worth paying up to $30 to play the world's most addictive riff on Bejeweled. We'd write from our shoebox in the middle of the motorway, munch on coal and be bloody grateful.

Several hundred hours of hollow-eyed, match-three animal swapping later, we'd decamp from our central reservation and wash up at Zoo Keeper's Anonymous, muttering high scores to one another like whey-faced children from the early 1980s.

Zoo Keeper's journey to iOS can mean only one thing: it's time to fall off the wagon and surrender our free time and tenuous grip on sanity in the name of rapid animal matching.

But don't have a heart attack just yet. Saucy little tease that it is, Kiteretsu Inc. has elected to only dangle the carrot of Normal and Tokoton modes in the initial release, meaning that you'll have to wait for the likes of Time Attack and Quest mode to make it into the package.

In the meantime, though, what you get more than justifies the piddling $1.99 that it's currently being sold at, with online leaderboards and Game Center integration likely to have you frantically adding friends like nothing before it (krudsteruk, before you ask).

In terms of how it performs on an Apple touchscreen, the answer is flawlessly. There's an obvious advantage to playing it on the iPad, though, because it's likely that your porky old man-digits will obscure just enough of the iPhone or iPod touch screen to prove an irritation when the going gets tough. Ladies' mileage may vary.

Some of you might wearily point out that Piyo Blocks 2 already does everything that Zoo Keeper DX Touch Edition does and more, so why get excited? If you try to rationalise it, it all sounds a bit flimsy. The music's brilliant. The cute icons are brilliant. The perennially disappointed boss: brilliant. How much brilliance do you need in one game? A lot? Good. Then you'll be a credit to this zoo.

Used under license from Eurogamer.

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.1 or later.

Download Zoo Keeper DX Touch Edition