DS Review: Sea Park Tycoon

Ever since Maxis released the first of the Sim City games, I'm sure they had no idea just how much of a genre that they'd be cornerstoning by doing so. There've been tons of city simulation games, home simulation games, and of course, the whole gamut of Tycoon simulation games. One of these, the one which I'll be focusing on here, is Sea Park Tycoon.

The premise itself seems simple: Build a sea park, keep your animals and visitors happy, and turn a profit. Seems simple, right? Not so much. Not only are there numerous goals that you have to reach (well okay, in scenario mode anyway), but keeping your assets afloat doesn't prove to be as simple as it seems at the start. This is good training for real life money management skills, I suppose, but at the same time, it does get really frustrating, going bankrupt so easily so often.

There's two types of gamers in the world; the experts at these type of games, and the rest of us. The experts can cruise right through like they're nothing, and the rest of us are practically reduced to tears of frustration. It's like Zoo Tycoon all over again, except with clearer controls and better graphics. The one main difference is that when your animals get sick, you have to play minigames to heal them, and there's other mini-games for whenever you want to hold a park animal show with, say, the dolphins or sea otters.

The 3-D graphics aren't the typically horrible quality that we're so accustomed to expecting from Nintendo DS games, but it's nothing spectacular on the other hand, either. Definitely a little on the better side of the line, if anything. This helps bring up the points a tiny bit on my scoring for the game, as does all the detail put into most aspects of the game.

Overall though, this is an easily forgettable game. Chances are, at most, you'll spend a few weeks playing this, put it down, and never think about it again. Rating this a 6 out of 10 zookeepers.