ZooCube (GameCube)
ZooCube is a puzzle game I’ve been interested in trying for a long time, but there was one of the strangest barriers to getting around to it. I have often made lists of games I am interested in playing for each video game system even before I committed to the grander goal of playing every video game ever released. Since Zoocube is the last game for the Nintendo GameCube when they’re arranged alphabetically and since these lists were often lost or forgotten before completion of the listed games was even close, poor ZooCube never got its day… at least until now.
ZooCube’s premise is that a mad scientist named Dr. Buc Ooze has been traveling around Earth and changing the wildlife into strange shapes, seemingly because it makes it possible for him to more easily abduct them at a later time. However, a group of young people aboard their own space ark head out to counteract the transformations and prevent Dr. Ooze from stealing away all the animals, deploying something called the ZooCube that can revert them back to their normal forms. The game really does a bad job at communicating any of this in its wordless cutscenes and we only ever see Dr. Ooze’s ship instead of the man himself, so the box, manual, and advertising are where you’ll need to get what little context exists for this puzzle game’s kooky concept.
The main game consists of traveling to different major bodies of water around the world to assist the animals nearby. Some of these are obvious stops like the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and others like the China Sea, Arctic Ocean, and unlockable Gulf of Mexico feel like a more focused region of Earth. This doesn’t really influence the animals that appear save new additions to the lineup like the Polar Bear joining in the Arctic, but they do influence the backdrops, the bodies of water less emphasized than making places like the Pacific Ocean actually represented visually by the Pacific Northwest regions of North America. Progressing through the main game involves clearing enough animal matches to move onto the next region of Earth, but if you end up losing, you can start from the furthest along level you’ve unlocked. There’s barely an ending, but the progression focused style makes this the most interesting mode all the same.
During regular play, you control the ZooCube. Animal pieces will fly in from set directions, the player needing to rotate the cube to have the face they want the animal piece to land on in the right lane. When the pieces are matched, they’ll combine back into the floating head of the creature, the game featuring all kinds of critters like coyotes, giraffes, peacocks, and far too many more to list once you start getting to the later stages. Matching animal pieces is surprisingly simple, as you only need to make sure that two of the same kind stack together on the same cube face, but the pieces come in a manner that usually requires you to start piling pieces that don’t match onto the cube faces. You can cycle through their positions in a stack after they’ve been placed so you can have the right piece on top when the match comes up, but as the speed gradually increases, more piece types enter the fray. The stacks get higher and higher, and it becomes much more important to rotate the cube quickly and efficiently to catch the strangely shaped animal pieces approaching from the six available lanes. The appropriate piece in a stack will dance a little if an incoming piece matches it, a surprisingly helpful feature as the game gets harder and the variety of pieces get so broad that a few begin to look similar to each other.
ZooCube’s play is all about that rapid recognition and lining things up appropriately, the player definitely needing to make frequent use of the option to drop pieces onto the cube faces faster to keep up with the rate they start entering the picture. Developing a rhythm and keen eye for matches is key as you reach the later levels, but if the game isn’t challenging enough for you, you can tinker with the speed settings to make it even harder. The main game definitely packs in enough challenge even on its slowest setting though due to the need to be reactive and quick to rotate. While it’s easy to pick up on the idea of play, ZooCube definitely requires a good degree of skill to clear most levels outside of the starting ones that ease you in.
If five non-matching pieces end up on the same side of the cube, that whole stack will grey out and lead to a game over if a single additional piece is added to it, but if you’re lucky and can recognize the shapes without their distinct coloration, you can match an incoming animal with something in that stack to make it safe again. Items will also appear in the play area, spawning in based on which particular animals are falling onto the cube, but the incredible variety found in the animal shapes means you basically can’t memorize their associated items to take full advantage of this feature. Some items only provide a point bonus, but if you can pick up certain tools with a piece as it drops in, you can get special help from things like explosive rockets to clear some animal pieces away or a spike that will break the next piece to fall into a lane. This is usually a great help for clearing up accidentally stacked sides of your ZooCube, but since the game delivers animals deliberately, it can mean you don’t end up clearing them all since you eliminated part of an upcoming match. If you can clear every animal on the cube before the next round in a level starts, sometimes you’ll be transported to a Bonus Round where the goal is to completely clear the cube with a limited amount of animal pieces, the points going towards the high score system also tied to your puzzling play.
The modes outside of the main game are a bit weak in concept unfortunately. While playing ZooCube in its normal state can be tense and rely on quick recognition, Blind mode turns every piece grey after it hits the cube, making it hard to suss out if you have an available match with incoming pieces. The shape technically could help, but many of them are very similar when they lack their coloration. Knockout mode is a bit of a better idea, basically taking the idea of the Bonus Game and making its own adventure across Earth’s oceans out of it. Knockout is all about clearing all the pieces with a limited amount of incoming ones, but Knockout Blind mixes the two modes and doesn’t really benefit from this extra layer of difficulty. Simply rotating the cube accurately and spotting the reactions in time is already sufficient challenge for a fun, addictive puzzle game, and the complications don’t really match the game pace too well. That speed may also be why other aspects like item use don’t get to shine as well as they could otherwise, but simply building a satisfying matching game was done very well here all the same.
THE VERDICT: High speed reactive rotation makes ZooCube constantly engaging even though it’s working with a very simple concept. Lining up the animal piece columns continues to grow more challenging and complex as more types enter the fray and more lanes start delivering them to your cube, and while the item system is too detailed to learn and the extra modes fail to shake things up well, the design of regular matching provides plenty of very satisfying play. Keeping track of all the piles and rotating and rearranging them accordingly is definitely fun for a puzzle game fan looking for something quick and twitchy, so while the approachable animal theme may invite the attention of players who can’t keep up with the difficulty, it’s still got a strong appeal for those willing to dig in and try to conquer the ZooCube.
And so, I give ZooCube for GameCube…
A GOOD rating. While I often see the Game Boy Advance version recommended over it despite being stripped of a lot of its personality and even most of its animal theming, the GameCube version of ZooCube nails its core gameplay for those looking for a strange twist on a matching game. Juggling your six-sided puzzle-solving machine is a thrill even if it can get overwhelming easily if you fail to keep up, but the shapes and coloration mean you can get on a hot tear if you’re attentive. The challenge of keeping up and arranging things perfectly is what makes the basic play so compelling, but some of the systems in place could have been better refined. The items being tied to each animal type really make it hard to plan out their use intelligently, the player instead just lucking into the better tools at times because the game speed is far too high to try and even invoke the few you might pick up naturally. Greying out a lane in regular play is a sufficient punishment for losing track of a stack, but a whole mode based around removing important cues seems ill-conceived. The idea the Game Boy Advance version could be superior with far less screen to see incoming pieces or the exact shapes of them makes it hard to believe it’s really better, but ZooCube at least does enough that only a few pieces in regular play look alike and thus you can continue to indulge in the fast-paced twitchy action of trying to line up everything perfectly so you can keep playing and either hit a new high score or make progress in the animal-saving main mission.
Perhaps the biggest reason the Game Boy Advance version is often recommended above the GameCube version of ZooCube is that puzzle games do so well on handheld. I could definitely see the appeal of whipping this game out when there’s time to kill, but the home consoles are a bit less likely to be there for that downtime. That doesn’t make the GameCube release any worse though, and for fans of matching puzzle games, once you’ve gotten the hang of the rotation and identifying pieces, ZooCube will provide some thrilling play and shouldn’t be put at the bottom of your to-play list.