Zoominoes might be my favourite new roguelike of this year.
The mechanics are simple yet satisfying, the combos rack up to insane degrees, and both music and artstyle are appealing.
You place animal tiles on the board, adjacent to other tiles you've already placed, and each animal must match every neighbour in either colour or type - of which there are 3 base types, and 3 base colours, plus black, and rainbow, which counts as all of the colours. That's all there is to the basics. Possibly one of the simplest concepts for a roguelike deckbuilder I've seen in years, and yet, it works so damn well.
You have animals that score additional points for every neighbour, or for every tile of a certain colour, or based on the bonus tiles in the levels, and so on. Combine that with souvenirs - your permanent powerups for a run - and you can score truly ludicrous amounts of points. It's worth noting that Zoominoes' souvenirs do not work like Balatro's jokers, i.e. there is no limit to how many of them you can have at a single time, so things can quickly scale out of controls.
And yet, I wouldn't say the difficulty is too easy. I've lost plenty of runs, whether it's to a boss level being too strong to overcome, or just to random RNG card/tile draw. I haven't found it to be too frustrating to lose to RNG, because runs are very quick to start and get going, so it doesn't feel like I've wasted too much time when something unfortunate does happen, but this is definitely a game in which you can get screwed over by the luck of the draw.
There's quite a bit of content in the game, with 20 Zookeepers, who all have somewhat different starting decks and effects, ~120 souvenirs, and hundreds of animals. However, I will say that some of these numbers feel a bit fake. Some of the Zookeepers are more unique than others, though I don't think it's a problem to have the very basic ones, since they encourage you to play around with some different animals or playstyles. The souvenirs and animals fall into a similar category though, whereby you can kind of split them up into early game, mid game, and late game 'pots', and especially for the early game souvenirs and animals, they're not always noticeably different.
A Hyena getting +2 permanently for every neighbour isn't all that different in gameplay from a Meerkat (I think it was the Meerkat) getting +4 for every neighbour (but only for that round). It sounds like the Hyena would be a straight upgrade after a few rounds, and that's kind of true, but between the score goal scaling and the luck required to draw the Hyena consistently, I've found that these kinds of animals perform basically the same when it comes down to it. You need a few to get you through the early game - as I've lost plenty of levels to just running out of animals to score decent points with - but it's not like you'll be a running a 'Hyena deck'. They're just not powerful enough to turn into your centrepiece.
That's not a problem, but I would say that there's a lot more variety in early game animals than there are in late game animals, especially when it comes to Mythical animals, who are often the ones which become your centrepieces. To the point where I've encountered and played with nearly all of the Mythical animals, even though I haven't had the opportunity to try out so many common or uncommon ones. And this is exacerbated by some Mythical animals just feeling so much weaker than others. A T-Rex just has 100 base points and no special ability, but by the time you're likely to get a Mythical creature, that's already not nearly enough to be viable. There are actually some animals and souvenirs that synergise with creatures who have no abilities, so it's not a horrible design or anything, but it's much more difficult to make work than other creatures.
So in the late game, you kind of fall back on a bunch of the same strategies I'd say. Which isn't a problem, I like the strategies the game provides, but it does mean that the 200+ animals can get reduced down rather quickly. I don't think it means the game doesn't have enough content, there's still plenty, but it is decidedly less than it might seem at first.
This is compounded by the speed at which you unlock things, which I feel like is a bit too quick. I would have liked a bit more 'exploration' to it, by spacing out the unlocks more. The way it is now, so many animals are already available to you from the start, and you're likely to unlock so many more on each run, that they don't get the time to shine individually. It's better than the alternative, but it means that the game lacks a little bit of aspirational content.
I like to play roguelikes until I've discovered every unlockable. I don't need to have played with all of them, I'm not someone who goes for the full 100% completion, but I do want to know everything that the game is offering. And with Zoominoes, I've kind of gotten to that point after 8 hours of gameplay (2,5 hours in the demo, and 5,5 in the full release). I'll play more of it, the game's fun enough to do that, but I think the way I would have done it is by making a bunch of playstyle unlocks, AKA, if you beat the game with the first Zookeeper, who's slightly focused on Land types, you unlock a Sea playstyle, then you beat it with the Sea Zookeeper, and you unlock a Sky-focused playstyle. The game does do that a [i]little[/i] bit, but not to the degree I'd want it. For example, before I unlocked the Zookeeper who specialises in the Black colour, I had already done a full build based around Black, so I was kind of repeating myself. If the game had done it in the way I desired, I think I could easily have 15 hours in it already.
Still, I do not want to overblow the issue, I'm having a lot of fun with Zoominoes, and I think this is one of the best designed roguelike deckbuilders since Monster Train 2. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes the genre, and I think the base price of €15,49 is a fair deal. If you can get it for cheaper - I got it for €13,16 with the launch sale - then it quickly starts to become a bargain. Anything below €12 is where I'd say this game is a steal.
