Zoominoes — Review
Numbers Go Up Goes Wild in This Roguelike Deckbuilder .
Zoominoes is another challenger in the roguelike deckbuilder arena. Frankly I'm starting to see a parallel between my relationship with deckbuilders and isekai anime. I like the genre, and the definitely scratch a sweet spot for me, but there are just so many of varying quality that they all start to blend together. To be fair to Zoominoes though, it's not this game's fault that it's getting really hard for me to have strong feelings about roguelike deckbuilders. Or that the general gaming population is as weary as I am. That said, as jaded and tired as I am with the genre, this one stands a head and shoulder above it's competition. This game is worth spending time with — it may not reivent the wheel, but it vastly improves on it.
Zoominoes is a type of deckbuilder known as numbers go up. Numbers go up, to briefly explain, is a game such as Balatro where the idea is keep scoring bigger and bigger numbers, with the amount needed to clear a stage increasing significantly each round. This leads to a deck that, when built correctly, creates outragously huge numbers by the end of the game. The key constraints with this set-up is there are limited resources with building said deck, and doing so correctly requires a lot of skill, and little bit of luck. I am definitely a fan of them, and find them a very engaging and fun gameplay loop that tickles my brain in just the right way.
Zoominoes has a very silly take on the numbers go up genre with having players build a zoo. Each card in the deck is an animal with a point value. The animals fall into three categories — land, sky, and sea and a basic four colors -- red, blue, yellow, green. (There are two additional colors for players to discover, but I'll let readers surprise themselves with those.) There are multiple spaces on the board, with players needing touching titles to match either color or category. Each game is a month, or 28 days long. During each of these days, a point threshold must be reached within a set number of turns. After each day players can pick out a card or consumable item (known as snacks). Once a week or so, there was a visit to the gift shop to buy items that allow players to manipulate the run in various ways (such as giving point increases to animals of one color or reducing the cost of re-rolling the shop). It's a very simple concept that's very easy to pick up, but understanding the underlying mechanics and mastering the system is a much different task entirely. Once I understood what I was doing though, that's where the real fun started.
This is not a game content with letting me simply survive each round. Absolutely not. Rather this is a game about breaking the system over one knee. One of my favorites was when I combined the ability to make all stat increases permanent combined get large point increases whenever I fed an animal a snack with a single creature, the bunny. The bunny is an animal with an ability to create a copy of itself. In a game where critters start at 1-3 points, I had a broken deck full of 1,000 point bunnies. These combinations are so incredibly delightful, and there's so many out there, that a few deckbuilder youtubers have dedicated themselves to showing off these silly runs (I'll link below) because they are just that entertaining.
There's also so much game to enjoy here as well. There are a large number of things to unlock such as additional animals, snacks, zookeepers, difficulty levels etc. Simply playing the game unlocks some but not all, with many things requiring players to get out of their comfort zone and try new strategies. The items that are unlocked add to the toolbox, expanding on the available options to build a deck. Each game is about twenty minutes long, which is the perfect length to unlock things at a pretty steady pace .
That said, Zoominoes feels limited to me in one respect, which is while it has leaderboards, there are no versus modes, either with other human players or against the computer. I'm not sure if this was in the original vision of the game or not, but it seems like a missed opportunity in a sense.
Zoominoes employs bright colors and a cartoon style for it's a game art which grew on me as I played, and in the end, I found quite charming. One of my favorite things was the wide variety and personality in the zoo keepers portraits. On the flip side, I did not care for the music at all, and found it rather annoying and super distracting. I opted to turn it off and just listen to my own tunes.
I mostly played this (as I do most things) on my steam deck. It did require me to use the touch screen, which isn't my favorite way to play, but I made do in this case as most of it isn't playable with any of the buttons. It did feel super weird that I couldn't even press the "A" button to progress through text menus. I do hope being able to use the buttons rather then the touchpad is something devs will implement in the future. Of note on my steam deck, if I played too long, the screen got hot, which wasn't great for something that required the touch screen. To be fair to Zoominoes though, it does not have the Steam verified checkmark, and is just listed as playable on the deck. Given this, I felt the performance was adequate.
All in all, I think this is an amazing additional to the roguelike deckbuilder space. Basing it on a zoo is a fun theme, and help differentiate it from a crowded genre and the actual game is very well made with lots of depth. The 20 minutes games make this very easy to pick up, and squeeze into a crowded day. Though I will admit, when I did pick it up, even if I meant to play one game, I stayed occupied for a hour or two. If you're a roguelike deck builder fan, this is, in my opinion, a must-play.
Zoominoes
This roguelike deckbuilder with an unique theme is quite addictive and a must play for fans of the genre.
