No launch of a new gaming device would be complete without the RPG, the driving game, the beat 'em up, or in the case of Zoo Keeper for the Nintendo DS, the good old fashioned puzzler. Long have we awaited a game that dashes your brains against the rocks in the same way Tetris did all those years ago. There have been so many close calls; Super Puzzle Fighter, Columns, even good old ZooCube. Now we have a brand new bit of mobile media with (gasp) a touch screen. Perhaps the hardened puzzlers out there are about to get their wish?

If their wish includes a decent story to go with it, they might as well forget it. This title has a very basic premise. The arrogant head keeper has mistreated the animals in his zoo and they've all escaped. Knowing they won't get back in their cages for him, he enlists the charge of capturing the animals to an underling zookeeper, who you play. All you have to do is put the animals into a bit of order and they'll walk back to their cages themselves.

What follows is a devilish bit of puzzling, although the premise is very simple. In the main game you have seven animals, each represented by a head on the touch screen. The screen shows an eight by eight square filled by these heads and your job is to line up three or more heads to make them disappear back to their cages. You can only move a head up, down, left or right one square and they'll only move if the head lines up with two or more heads of a similar type, vertically or horizontally.

This is done by quick use of the stylus that comes with the DS. Once lined up, they disappear and the heads above drop down to fill in the space they vacated. You've got limited time per level, represented by a bar running down the left hand side, which drops steadily. Although this bar drops quickly, it is replenished by each lot of animals captured, so getting them into line quickly is the name of the game. Collect a certain amount of each animal head and you move onto the next level. Sound familiar? If you've played Bejewelled you'd be right - it's practically the same game but with animal heads.

For those not familiar with Bejewelled, this title probably sounds a little too simple for it's own good. Well trust me, it's a lot more taxing than it sounds! When presented with a screen of sixty-four different colour and shaped animal heads, your brain initially does a bit of a double take. You suddenly have to adapt your brain to look for likely combinations, animal heads of the same ilk, the potential for getting more than three in a row, whilst also ensuring clearing a row doesn't mess up tiles you had your eye on earlier. The unrelenting timer adds an air of tension to this looking around and as it nears the end, all of the animal heads start vibrating to remind you to get a move on. These are hideous distractions, as once the heads start shaking you may well panic. This means you won't spot the tile you need to move to make that vital last line of heads and the game is lost. It took me a whole day to realise that I really need to keep my cool if I am to have any chance of saving the game at the last minute and it took me a further day to get my name on the scoreboard!

There is a little help, in the shape of three pairs of binoculars on the right of the animal squares. Tapping one of these means the squares you need are highlighted very briefly - blink and you'll miss it! Also, you only get three chances to use the binoculars, so it's always best to save them until much harder levels and only then when the situation is desperate. Very often, when it highlights the squares you need you mentally go 'D'oh!' as more often than not you've cast your eyes over them once already. Similarly, if you lose a game it shows you where you could have moved, which quite often makes you look really stupid as, once shown, the move is obvious.

There are other game modes, which add a lot to the game, but are ultimately limited to different forms of the same thing. These are Tokoton, Quest, Time Trial and Two Player Battle. Tokoton plays like the main game, except you've got much longer on the timer and need to collect 100 animal heads to level up. Quest plays you through ten levels, each with a different task. This could be only collecting animals of a certain type, avoiding collecting any more than three at a time, or collecting animals in a particular order. This adds another element to the game, which again involves switching your brain into a different gear. This particular game is so taxing I haven't completed more than three of the ten tasks yet, though I've played them all over and over again. Time trial is basically your chance to get the highest score possible in six minutes. Regardless of the green timer bar on the left hand side, after six minutes the game is up and your scores counted. It's a great version, which places much more emphasis on getting on the scoreboard and is great when you want to challenge your mate but only have one DS between you. If you have two DS's then you're in luck, as the Two Player Battle only needs one game between you. The object is to collect animal squares to reduce your opponent's timer as quickly as possible. The first to zero wins and along the way you can play tricks on your opponent by sticking in the Head Zookeeper's face over certain animals to obstruct him, change the colour of the animals to confuse him and so on.

Thankfully, any confusion is really going to be down to you, as the presentation of the game could not be any clearer. When it comes to the animal heads, the producers haven't gone for a realistic look but instead have opted for a blocky type of caricature for each animal. The monkeys have big square jaws and googly eyes, the pandas have big white faces and prominent black ears and the lions have a fabulous chunky mane. They're instantly recognisable amongst the other animals in the square and that each type has its own colour only clarifies things further. This is great for the touch screen, where you'll be doing most of your work but I had hoped they'd have done something special on the graphics on the screen above.

What you get is a depiction, in the same blocky cartoon style, of the lucky animal - the one that'll give you the best bonuses if you collect them and your score. I'm not saying they aren't well presented and they are very funny when they suddenly animate as you capture their counterparts on the touch screen but it just lacks the details, or the pizzazz of the 3D depiction we know the DS is well capable of. It hardly pushes the graphical power of the DS at all, which is a shame.

Similarly, the sound is not brought to the fore and neither is it particularly remarkable. While you do have a choice of about ten different tunes to listen to and some great voiceovers at crucial moments, the tunes can irritate you. They are reminiscent of the kind of pre-programmed tunes on keyboards of old and nothing groundbreaking or particularly fresh sounding. I've cycled through them all now and ultimately I've had to turn the sound off altogether. This is no great loss on the whole, as the other sound effects consisted of pings, pops, screeches and roars as you capture the beasts. Also, when the heads shake as the timer runs out there's a nasty buzzing sound played, which is very off-putting. I found my attention and my scores increased dramatically without the audio input, so it's a bit of a thumbs down in the aural department overall.

It's a shame both the sounds and graphics are limited, as on the whole the gameplay itself is a hell of a lot of fun; incredibly tense, simplistic enough to be picked up quickly but, like all the best puzzlers, incredibly difficult to master. Though the gameplay really does save Zoo Keeper, you also have to ask yourself if it's worth paying top dollar for a game you can probably download to your PC (albeit under a different name) for much less, if not nothing. Overall then, I'd say proceed with caution before handing over your hard earned dosh; if you're not a hardcore puzzler fan and not prepared to put up with dismal sound then I'd probably look at the other releases for the DS. However, if puzzles are your thing and you're looking for some tense on-the-move brain bending action, then this is the one for you.

Reviewed by Dave Wynn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).