GameSpot editors' review
-
CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 05/23/2008
- Released on: 05/19/2008
- Originally published on GameSpot: Critter Round-Up (Wii) Review
Critter Round-Up is a cute, colorful puzzle game with a slightly misleading title. The eponymous critters have already been rounded up and fenced in by someone who thinks nothing of penning wolves in with sheep and goats. As a concerned citizen and prolific fence builder, your job is to separate the different species of animals into even smaller fenced-in areas. This simple task is complicated by your character's fragility and the presence of some feisty predators, but it never proves to be a very difficult challenge. This light, albeit limited, puzzle action, combined with a handful of simple and absurdly entertaining multiplayer minigames makes Critter Round-Up another reasonably fun item in the WiiWare catalog.
Each of the 50 levels in the Adventure mode presents you with a field full of animals. The cartoony beasts wander around aimlessly, waiting to be fenced in to smaller and smaller spaces. Once partitioned off by themselves or with other members of their species, they celebrate their confinement with a wacky dance. There are five different environments (farm, forest, savannah, outback, arctic), and each environment hosts a number of ecologically appropriate animals.
2 alligators + 2 koala bears + 1 manic builder = 1 dangerous construction project.
You play as man who firmly believes in bestial segregation and implements his new regime with fence-building skills that make John Henry seem lazy. Complicating things a bit is the fact that coming in contact with any animal--even chickens and meerkats--will cost you one of your few lives. Holding the remote sideways, you maneuver around with the D pad and press the 1 button to begin building. Once begun, you can only stop your mad building by connecting to another fence or by perishing. If you win by fencing all the animals off from each other, you'll see your score for that round, which you can maximize by completing the level quickly, using fences economically and penning all the animals of one type together in one enclosure.
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