Disco Zoo Review

This is a brilliant game, unfortunately tainted by microtransactions. I could ignore it, if parts of the game weren't rigged. Alas, "balance" is not a strong feature in this game.

Look at rescue missions. You only get 10 attempts, yet some rescues require up to 12 (4x3), meaning even if you play perfectly, you will still need to gain extra attempts via discobux.

There's an option to watch an ad, but it seems deliberately shut off ("There are no offers"), save for a random 2 hour window in the day.

This is, quite frankly, bullshit, as at a certain point in the game, whether it's triggered by unlocking the city habitat, or via a recent update, it starts shoving static ads in your face after leaving rescue missions, even if not five seconds ago, there were "no offers" to gain those 5 free attempts for the rescue mission you were just doing. In fact, the sheer dishonesty of this infuriated me to such a degree that my previous rating of 4/5 stars has now dropped to 3/5.

As for Discobux, it is an "extra" currency in the game, that is extremely rare, and relatively difficult to come by. You are encouraged to use it for disco parties, but you also need discobux for extra attempts, should you run out, and no ads are available at the time (which is nothing more than a ploy to get you to buy discobux).

[It is around here where I ran out of characters. Thanks for the unnecessary restriction, Google.]

There are four ways to obtain discobux. Here they are, in descending order of difficulty:

  1. Sometimes, a discobuck will be in the 5x5 animal rescue grid. Meaning you have a 10/25 = 40% chance of finding it. As the placement is completely random, your chances of finding the discobuck are even less than that, thanks to human psychology.

  2. Periodically, your rabbits will lose their minds, and decide to hang out with your crocodiles. Find them and you might be rewarded with disco bux. Might.

  3. Wait around the zoo, eventually a patron will drop a discobuck as a tip. Statistically guaranteed.

  4. Pay real money for a metric ton of them. Yup, just spend $30 of your hard-earned cash for 2,000 of them. This is the textbook definition of pay-to-win.

Isn't it lovely when a game's balance is tipped in favor of microtransactions, AND you get annoying, non-optional ads plastered in your face?

That said, the game can still be played without having to spend a dime. The difficulty is much, much higher, to separate the weak-willed from the strong-willed, but that just makes victory so much sweeter. The ones who lose in the end are those who cave and drop 20 big ones for 5 million coins.

This game is almost perfect, but the presence of microtransactions and ever-increasing ads takes away from the experience. It's only a matter of time before Nimblebit introduces paid DLC with extra habitats. I hope they don't do that, but I suspect they will.