DynaZoo is DynaCool!

DynaZoo is an interesting app. It’s supposedly for kids, but as an adult I found it pretty difficult… then again, my girlfriend does say I’m pretty childish sometimes, so take that with a grain of salt!

DynaZoo, by Apps4U, is a matching game on methamphetamine and it’s unapologetic about it – their sub-title is “Animal Matching Frenzy” and the game is just that: a frenetic frenzy. I dove right in to this app without reading the instructions and did OK, but I went back and read them and realized there were some things important in there that helped me out later, so I would recommend giving them at least a once over. For example, if there’s a particularly crowded region you can double-tap it and a “thunder” will sound and everything will shake and redistribute – pretty handy. Aside from a few intricacies the controls are simple: tap on an animal and find it’s pair. There are four levels of increasing difficulty. On Easy the animals are on a grid and shake themselves into a jumble of outlines; Medium is the same, but the animals redistribute faster; on Hard they redistribute rapidly, change size and flip horizontally; on Pro they redistribute, change size, flip and fade in and out! Despite the complications, I didn’t find that the game didn’t get too much harder with the higher levels, which is a good thing, because it’s pretty hard to begin with. After a few games I settled down and was able to drastically improve my time – oh yeah, it’s timed and your first score will make you feel terrible!

Animal overload!

The graphics are really cool. They remind me of various sand art videos you can find on YouTube – check one out here – only they’re way cooler. There’s a high-score section and a “Cool Stuff” section, the latter being an advertisement of sorts, but whatever, it’s unobtrusive.

I only have two suggestions, or issues with this app. First, once you’re in the game you have to exit the app to go back to the main screen, or lock the screen to pause the game – there’s no pause option. Second, if you make an incorrect match thunder strikes and everything is shaken up. but the two incorrect selections remain selected. You have to go back and deselect one or both in order to make a correct match. I found this extremely frustrating and time consuming. With so many animals in such a small area you’re bound to accidentally match two animals (I know I did) and feature that automatically resets your selection would be very helpful.

Despite these drawbacks I would recommend this for anyone over the age of 5 or 6 (female) and 25 (male).