Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition (Wii)
Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition helps to bring the rather expensive idea of a photo safari to your home for much cheaper, observing the African wildlife not involving a trip across the planet or the blind luck required to spot all of the animals you’d hope to find. However, the fantasy made reality does get a little stranger when you learn the creatures of the savanna are actually on an island and your guide for this tour is a little robot, but while the setup is a little strange and the world around you doesn’t look the best due to stretched out textures, the stars of your photo safari are still rendered in good enough detail for a Nintendo Wii game.
Your particular wildlife expedition starts after you pick whether you want to play as a boy or girl. This photographer heads out to a special island under orders from their editor to snag amazing photos of the wildlife on a stretch of land that feels more like part of Africa was transplanted out onto the ocean rather than making use of the island setting in any way. The player is joined by a little robot companion named Stupendo who does most of the talking and teaches you the basics of the game, but your playable character does have some amusing reactions to both their new robot companion and the over the top editor’s increasingly brazen requests for what he wants to see you take a photo of. Each time you complete one of the missions given to you by the editor he’ll send you a new one, the game concluding once you’ve done most of them but there are still a few extra missions for the postgame that let you see some animals that don’t fit into the African aesthetic.
A usual trip out into the wild involves you hopping into a jeep Stupendo is driving, the player having no control of its path and the vehicle mostly following one route the whole game until you unlock a few branches later on. The island is mostly savanna, but there are some waterside areas later, and even though there’s a lush waterfall section to drive through, that space still throws you into the savanna whenever you hop out of your vehicle to take some pictures. Similarly, the jungle section later down the line is essentially a huge waste of space, the only animal that even appears here being the gorilla who you find hiding in bushes and sits so close you can’t help but get a good shot. Even when the postgame adds two extra jungle creatures, they’re in a segment after the jungle, meaning one chunk of the map is wasted on an area that you have little reason to visit outside of the one gorilla mission you get.
Taking photos of animals isn’t as straightforward as leaning out of the jeep and snapping pictures sadly. As you travel around the circuit that covers most of the island, you might see a tree shake or some dust kick up off to the side. Click on this with your Wii remote cursor and you can hop out of your vehicle to see if any animals are there. There is no visual cue what these areas might contain beyond their region of the map, there is no way to tell if there will be new animals or the mission objective there, and you might not even find an animal at all after going through the trouble of loading this separate area. Still, more often than not something will be occupying the cordoned off area that you suddenly find yourself in, and while the game only ever requires you to take photos of specified targets, you’re free to snap shots of whatever you fancy and turn them in for a grade from your editor.
However, there’s not much reason to do so with the regular animals. The first time you spot a new creature it’s good to get a photo so it enters the catalog, but even if you do get an impressive shot, getting a gold medal for it doesn’t do much. Even when you turn in the photo for a so-called Picture Perfect mission it can still earn a silver rating and do its job, and since the editor never really gives much feedback on what he likes or dislikes about a photo, it’s hard to be invested in taking a particularly good one to impress him or aim to improve on a previous picture. The grading system also feels rather pointless because at best it might tie into the rather lean reward system. Medals earned from photos or clicking the right spot while driving around can help you unlock new paint jobs for your jeep and other simple rewards, but at least adding an animal to your journal will let you read some details about them. The profiles of the creatures are rather basic though and the details scroll by slowly in a ticker, so unfortunately the desire to learn more about the animals you find isn’t cultivated very well.
Continuing with the obvious negatives a little longer, there’s a very rarely seen minigame where you protect your camp from hyenas which just involves waving a torch around the screen and clicking on hyenas that approach. As part of normal play, you can only submit three photos to the editor per day no matter how many animals you might want to turn in or silly photos you might want to see his reaction to. The last major issue definitely has to do with how certain animals spawn, the final photo you need for the postgame only available in one spot that requires you to speed through the island, see if they’re present, and try again the next in-game day if they aren’t. The game does at least try to spawn relevant animals and situations when they’re the main focus of your mission, but it felt like a lot of the time I was just about to give up on looking around for the day when the final spot I checked happened to contain today’s target.
Looking at the animals though, there are some decent ideas at play and many of the creatures look rather nice. The rough skin of the elephant and rhino are easy to spot and zooming in doesn’t reveal any issue with the textures, the game making sure the horns of creatures are well modeled and the fur and feathers look fine for things like a lion’s mane or ostrich’s feathers. They’re not going to match anything you would find on a high definition console, but the intended subjects of your photos were given special attention when it came to making them look good.
Snapping the best photo of them might not be too important in the grand scheme, but since some missions want you to get very close to a crocodile, catch a cheetah during a hunt, or snap a photo of a giraffe feasting on some leaves, angles and distance are important and you have some tools for ensuring you get the desired composition for the shot. One of the most important systems involved is familiarity, animals initially flighty around you until you help them acclimate to your presence by snapping a shot where their body completely encompasses the lens’s center. This familiarity spreads to all animals of that type and makes it easier to approach them, but spooking them can often help with certain animals as you can get them moving more quickly and potentially place yourself in the path of one for a nice close-up. You’re only in danger if you get incredibly close to a predator and even then sometimes a lion might be practically rubbing against you without the game forcing a retreat, but there’s still enough to getting a good shot that trying to set it up legitimately or with unconventional tactics is a decent enough challenge.
As you drive around you can break open boxes with your cursor to get special items, and these can help with the animal photos as well. A zebra mask can help herbivores ignore you more while the lion mask does the same for carnivores, and a little tent lets you hunker down and wait to see if animals might approach the unassuming camouflaged photographer. There is a rain machine that adds some puddles to the photo areas but doesn’t seem to draw out many unique behaviors or animals. The missions do at least mean sometimes you will have to try and wait for something unique like an elephant spraying water over itself or have to search for something atypical like a hyena den, so if getting to the animals wasn’t so cumbersome, the degree of thought that can go into trying to get the best framing and shot timing would have allowed this to be a fairly simple but enjoyable photo taking setup.
There is an unfortunate fact about your photo safari though, and that is that there’s only 20 unique animals total. Some the game refers to generically like calling a vulture simply “Vulture” while they give specific breeds for the gazelle and zebra, but the bigger issue is definitely that it deemphasizes searching for anything beyond your mission goals. You’re likely to find new creatures while hunting down the main targets anyway, and since the number is so small in general it’s not too much of a challenge to fill out your photo journal. The game does withhold certain creatures for a while so you can still have that nice moment where you run into something new and eagerly go to get the best shot of it you can, but it’s just another way the game limits the wonder of a photo safari by trying to keep it a bit too on rails with the story.
The strange thing is that, besides the fact the game draws things out a fair bit and doesn’t have too much content to fill that space with, the actual photo taking and finding your targets can be mildly entertaining. It requires a bit of patience sure, but so would finding real animals to take photos of out in the savanna. The flaws don’t make it a grueling game to go through and a bit of patience can help pave over the stretches of doing nothing, but it’s the kind of experience that has plenty of apparent problems but none so egregious they’re absolute deal breakers. If you like the concept it can still provide some simple delights, but it definitely feels like you’re settling for what you’ve been given rather than getting a photo safari game that tried to do justice to the idea.
THE VERDICT: When you’re actually out of your vehicle and snapping photos of the African wildlife found on the game’s simple island setting, Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition can be quite decent. Coaxing critters into the best poses, using items to sneak in for a better shot, or stumbling across a new animal or special event give you enough to do and look forward to, but almost everything related to the photo taking is done poorly. Actually finding animals is a strange and tedious process involving luck, the animal variety is rather low, the editor doesn’t tell you his criteria for judging photos, and it can sometimes feel like there’s little to do besides zip off to complete the day’s mission since anything else barely provides any reward.
And so, I give Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition for Wii…
A BAD rating. If you love animals a lot, are very patient, or a kid who isn’t too hard to please, Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition can provide a few hours of simple photo taking fun that at least keeps things moving when it comes to new species and scenarios. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to fully look past all the small missteps that make up most of your playtime, pivotal moments like finding animals and getting photos judged confusing or hollow experiences. It has some good ideas for how to make getting good shots challenging but doesn’t always nail the follow through. The way animals just run around wildly when spooked rather than outright fleeing the source of the sound undermines some of the craft in setting up a good photo, but missions do at least try to prevent such exploitation from easily winning the day to prevent the player from easily earning win after win. While it’s easy to say it should have taken Pokémon Snap’s approach of clearly communicating its photo judging standards or even allowing you to try and take better photos for a report, it also could learn from Endless Ocean’s approach to interacting with wildlife where doing so provides plenty of interesting trivia bits in a digestible format.
Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition feels like the starting point for a good photo safari game project, but the kinks haven’t been ironed out of it and the ideas are mostly in a shallow state rather than being refined enough to really motivate the player to be the best animal photographer they can be. A lot of the issues stem from limited content or underdeveloped systems though, so it could have been on the path to actually making this an exciting journey to photograph exotic creatures. However, it lacks the polish to realize this route, the game stuck on a path to tedious play and exploitable gameplay systems. While you can squeak out moments of photo safari fun, the dullness does sink in thanks to some poor design decisions, the animal kingdom feeling a fair bit less fascinating when it is presented in such a flawed and simplistic manner.