Ziro – PC Review

Reviewed by Steve Rosenthal on March 3, 2010

Ziro - PC Review  | read this item

Global warming – possibly one of the greatest long-term threats to modern civilisation. Is the solution greater awareness of waste, and more global cooperation? Is the solution improved technology giving us renewable energy and fusion power? Or is it… sliding dice around a puzzle board? Here’s a tip from the team behind Ziro: get ready to roll them bones.

Developed by Eipix Entertainment and published by Kokakiki (say that ten times fast) Ziro takes players on a journey around the world to solve die-matching puzzles. Aimed at a family and child market, the game promises to “warm up your brain [and] cool down the earth”. Pick your continent, pick your city, and prepare to slide and mix dice in your quest to save the earth. We think.

See this is where the first problem arises. Ziro clearly has a back story, actually about a mutant snowman earth-guardian, yet there’s nothing of this in the game. Our first hint that something was afoot was the mysterious snow falling from the sky, even in Australia. The second hint was after completing a level, a badly-dressed midget wearing a bed pan on his head popped up to tell us we should consider taking the bus instead of driving. W. T. F.

It was only after consulting the game’s website that we came to understand the back-story and purpose behind the game. While a puzzle game may or may not have a story—either choice is fine for the genre—failing to even mention it in-game is a serious problem. Perhaps we can forgive certain Japanese games for this, but for a game aimed at kids it’s going to create a lot of confusion.

That confusion is only going to be compounded by the incredibly high difficulty of the puzzles. The basic idea is to remove all dice from the board, and this is done by touching two dice of the same value together. If you touch two different dice together, say a four and a three, they’ll add together to form a seven die. If the combination goes above nine however they’ll subtract, such as touching an eight and a three, giving five. It’s pretty clever stuff and a good idea so far.

Unfortunately the difficulty level is poorly matched for the target audience. Children, who may have something to learn from Mr Ziro’s environmentally-friendly tips, are going to have no chance getting past even some of the early levels. Only adults with a lot of spare thinking time on their hands are going to be able to tackle this one. It feels condescending at best to complete a particularly difficult puzzle only to be rewarded with a handy tip telling us to save petrol by walk or ride a bike more often.

This problem is compounded by the inconsistency of puzzle difficulty; incredibly simple levels are mixed together with brain-achingly difficult ones, and there’s no way to skip a level at all. A lack of save features means you must solve puzzles in sets of threes otherwise next time you load the game you’ll be back to the first of the group again.

The graphics and music in Ziro are adequate, but it needs to be stressed that for a puzzle game the bar generally isn’t set terribly high. The cartoon-style graphics look good and clearly set Ziro as a game pitched at younger people, but the MIDI-style music seems to have travelled through time from its native 1980s. Happy funky tunes don’t inspire terribly much either as you restart a seemingly impossible puzzle for the umpteenth time.

I won’t deny for a moment that the team at Eipix know how to make some seriously challenging puzzles. If you’re the type that enjoys really wracking their brain for hours trying to solve fiendish puzzles, this is a title you may want to take a look at. Repackaged as a straight puzzler for fanatics, Ziro might work. Sadly as it stands, this is one uncool global-warming game that’s likely to burn any kids who try to compete with it.

Tags: 3D, Children, difficult, Eipix Entertainment, environment, Family, Kokakiki, PC Review, Puzzle, Ziro