Animal Genius (DS)

Before the world of video games captivated me with its boundless possibilities and its open embrace of imagination, my first fascination fell with the natural world’s own unique and diverse creations: animals. I spent hours poring over the same books to learn about the strange shapes they had taken on, the behaviors they engaged with, and how they adapted to fit into a food chain either as predator or prey. I wouldn’t say I ever stopped loving animals for that reason either, I still enjoy a nature documentary from time to time or read up on unusual creatures that pique my interest. If I was a kid when the Nintendo DS came out though, a game like Animal Genius might have caught my eye, but this title finds itself in a very odd spot where its attempts to be child-friendly lead to it constructing fairly easy animal trivia questions that a kid with a large interest in animals would likely already know while providing very little for players who don’t have much love for Earth’s creatures.

Animal Genius might be aiming for a particularly low spot on the age ladder though, the entire game making sure important information is spoken aloud as well as displayed in text and constructing many of its challenges to be simple visual tests rather than a set of quizzes. The quality of the questions will vary based on the mode you pick though, but you’re much more likely to find simple questions like if a specific creature is a mammal, herbivore, or exceptionally large than plumbing some unique fact about a creature. There are times when you might need to identify which creatures are nocturnal which at least isn’t too straightforward since it doesn’t just include owls and bats amidst the answers every time, and I do actually walk away from the game with one fact I didn’t know in advance: seahorses can change their color. Other than that, most of what the game asks you about are things even a very young kid with a mild interest in animals would probably know and many of the questions manifest as ones you can solve just by looking at the creature such as whether or not it walks on two legs.

Animal Genius does avoid the tedium of a quiz format by sorting its challenges into various minigame types, all of them themed around helping populate a set of five environments. When you start a new profile, you are tasked with filling the Grasslands, Woodlands, Arctic, Ocean, and Rainforest with five animals each, and while sometimes you might be pulled away from the task to search around and tell an animal to go back to its proper environment, you’re mostly devoted to accruing enough points to unlock the only direct quiz portion where you need to answer 10 very easy questions about the current subject. This final quiz about the animal is definitely where the difficulty is at its lowest, especially since your subjects are fairly well known animals. You can expect pretty plain questions about a wolf, dolphin, polar bear, lion, and eagle, but even when the game whips out something like a clownfish or specifically a snowy owl it’s not trying to get more out of you by being more specific. Expect questions about things like whether they live in water, fly, have flippers, and so on, some of these made even easier by the constant presence of real life imagery of the creatures during this quiz. However, beating the quiz does at least show you a mildly impressive animation where real images of the animal moves around in the game’s artificial environmental spaces.

The quiz to actually acquire the animals is probably the weakest point of the game though, and the four minigames you need to clear first vary in quality and complexity. Maze Munch is perhaps the strangest because it outright does not contain any animal facts or questions. Instead, it’s a little maze game where you can pick from a set of four different creatures who need to run around mazes to collect their appropriate food sources. The clownfish needs to avoid groupers by hiding in anemones when they’re close and grab food when it’s safe, which at least might teach you a little about its place in the food chain and how it handles predators, but the lion running around mazes to pounce on zebras doesn’t feel like particularly special knowledge. The skunk maze has it using its spray to repel predators, and the chameleon’s version is completely different in that it needs to navigate the maze while the flies are outside its boundaries, the player needing to time their tongue strikes right to grab them. Each maze has three rounds where the maze gets more difficult, the last maze for most of them even a little bit challenging in that you need to time things right to beat the level before the clock runs out. This may be the least educational minigame but it can provide some mild entertainment, although it’s also probably the longest minigame to play while also providing the least points towards getting to the animal unlocking quiz.

If you are concerned with grabbing the most points for a victory, you’ll gravitate towards Creature Collector. Here, you’ll be provided one criteria such as choosing all the mammals, two-legged animals, birds, and so on. Some of these can actually require a bit of thought like whether an animal weighs more than an arctic fox or is faster than an elephant, but the way you play is you watch the creatures that appear on the touch screen and tap them if they match the criteria. Once all nine spots on the bottom screen have been filled with an appropriate animal, you get a bonus question about that set of nine creatures. If you pick the correct answer you’ll get extra points for however much time you had left on the clock, but these bonus questions come from a fairly small pool. This was where I learned about seahorses changing color, but figuring out which one is the biggest or smallest isn’t very hard and since this mode can get you over 15 points whereas others are usually closer to 10, it’s likely you’ll start running into repeat questions fairly early on.

Scratch and See is perhaps the most difficult mode despite its simplicity, but its low point value makes it often not worth the effort. Essentially you’re given a scratch card on your lower screen where you’re allowed to scratch away a certain amount of the screen to reveal an animal underneath. This three round game starts simple but the final round especially has you scratch away very little, and since it uses real pictures of the animals like the rest of the game, you might only scratch away background plants or a chunk of fur that won’t help you much when it’s time to submit your guess on what is shown. This also seems to be the only point in the game certain creatures like cardinals are featured to further make guessing hard if you didn’t get lucky with your scratching. If Animal Genius had you do preset minigames instead of letting you pick which ones you want to play for each unlock this could have been a good quick break between longer games, but the motivation to pick it is low when it’s both the most likely not to grant you points and still provides very little comparatively when you win.

The last Animal Genius minigame you can pick to play during the unlocking phase is probably right around the middle in terms of points gained and concept quality. Matchomatic has a small set of animals appear on the touch screen that you flick up towards images on the top screen, the player needing to match the animal with their appropriate images. This can be something like a close up of their eye, foot, or body or something a bit tougher like trying to figure out which animal a set of footprints belongs to. These close ups can make it hard to make out a butterfly’s wing or parrot’s feathers, the game even putting something like a fish that would have a similarly scaly look to the wing or a toucan during the parrot question to obfuscate what might be the right answer. It’s still not too hard and it’s quick to complete, the bonus question for this round actually changing to an audio challenge where you match an animal to its sound. The fact they include the uncharacteristically monstrous bellow of a koala as one of the audio questions shows that Animal Genius did want this mode to be a little tough at times, but again the game never reaches such a degree of difficulty that it will put off kids or potentially keep the interest of the kind of animal fan who would be drawn to this title and could figure out the little tricks it pulls.

Now, I’ve mentioned the points you earn from the minigames and that they go towards unlocking the area-specific animals, but this simple minigame collection with an animal-focused edutainment angle strains its design with the amount of points it demands of the player to unlock the later animals. The first creature requires an easy 25 points, meaning after two or three minigames you can already get to the quiz portion. However, this begins to balloon to 50, 75, 100 and finally 200, meaning to clear an area you need a total of 450 points playing the same set of barely changing minigames, and with five areas total, that’s a grand total of 2,250 points needed to complete your little virtual menagerie.

Now, quite clearly kids aren’t expected to clear the whole game in one sitting, so I won’t act like this tall order is extreme, but the question that arises from it is why there is such a limited amount of material if you potentially have to play even the highest scoring minigame around 150 times to get every animal. Having some distance between play sessions will not make children struggle to figure out if a racoon lives underwater nor will it make the same repeated questions about which animals are carnivores more difficult, and if there is a concrete amount of points to be earned, it really feels like the game should have ensured it had the content spread to cover it. Even playing the minigames in a decent spread means by the time you finish one area’s creature set you’ve started seeing a decent amount of repeated questions and set-ups, and some like Maze Munch are the same presets every time you play. Using real photos of animals could have been a restriction, but we also see ones not utilized elsewhere in Scratch and See who could have helped fill out the ranks in other minigames some more.

THE VERDICT: Animal Genius’s value as an edutainment game seems minimal because of the plethora of common sense questions mixed together with ones that won’t challenge a kid who is actually interested in animals much. However, it does do a good job obfuscating that low difficulty level with its minigame construction. The actual quiz game is hilariously easy, but modes like Scratch and See and Matchomatic feel like fine challenges, Creature Collector has its moments, and Maze Munch is just a somewhat decent maze game with no big ties to the quiz angle. The problems really begin to arise with the incredibly thin amount of unique content for each mode and a points system that demands repetition, challenge beginning to erode as the same questions are thrown your way again and again or the minigame structure fails to evolve as you are forced to replay them to continue unlocking new animals.

And so, I give Animal Genius for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Animal Genius feels like the kind of game you’d buy for a kid you know has an interest in animals but it doesn’t have the strength of content to keep that particular kid interested. As it stands, the most difficult questions in Animal Genius tend to be things like whether an animal is faster than a giraffe rather than tapping into aspects of the natural world that could be interesting to learn or show us what is unique about an animal. Asking the player if an orca can fly or if a jaguar has horns shows that the team had very low expectations for the level of intelligence even the youngest players will bring to the table, but there was a very easy way for Animal Genius to escape its problems with constant streams of easy repetitive questions. Each area has animals that require few points to unlock and some that require a lot more, so a simple degree of difficulty scaling would reward players who are diving in to see more of the animal info. It doesn’t have to be a huge jump in challenge, but ideas like matching animals to footprints, determining if they’re nocturnal, and other less straightforward questions could be packed into the back end with some new information like how seahorses change color sprinkled in as well. More animals across all modes, some variation in Maze Munch, and other little adjustments so it doesn’t grow rote and familiar within the first area’s animal set could have made this a fine game for both players with a passing interesting in animals or a deep love for them, but instead its a weak set of basic questions and setups recycled again and again in a game Scholastic probably expected few kids to play beyond a few small samples of the minigames on offer.

Going in with a life spent learning about animals as one of my main interests did mean I knew I had to be a bit more forgiving to this title, and like I said above I can see how this would work if Animal Genius didn’t take the cheap and lazy route and hope it can flash the same questions in front of children and hope they don’t realize what’s going on. The big animal books I read as a kid I reread because they were full of unique facts that I couldn’t hope to retain in one sit through. They were arranged in manners where I could open to a page and quickly find out about an interesting animal by reading a small bite-sized segment of info. The books wouldn’t spend undue amounts of time nailing in that a creature was a carnivore, it would touch on what made it unique as a carnivore or some other aspect of its life. The Animal Atlas by Barbara Taylor will provide any animal loving kids with so much more than this cheap DS game that mixes fine minigame concepts with lacking material, and the price range on both the book and the game seem to be around the same amount. While there’s a conversation to be had between the values of books and video games and whether some children will sit down and do one or the other, in this case at least The Animal Atlas values a kid’s time, intelligence, and interest better without being too complex for a very young mind to interpret. Animal Genius on the other hand hopes your kids won’t want anything more out of their experience then being asked the same set of easy questions that do little to teach them about this aspect of nature that likely made this game seem appealing on its surface.