Zoominoes

I really wanted to like this game, its FX and general aesthetic are interesting and seeing the gameplay looks interesting. Unfortunately, the gameplay makes for a questionable roguelike. Despite short runs, viewing the game from an early-mid-late game perspective reveals its flaws. Early game is pointless and unengaging. Except for lyrebird, alligator, or shark, animals aren’t worth taking. If you pick an animal that depends on specific interactions, not drawing it for 1-3 days hurts. Which is rather likely due to deck size and the lack of discards. At that point better options are likely to appear soon and you'll wish you never picked them. The most valuable early-game strategy is to focus on thinning your deck and buying souvenirs or gems to ease the first week. Anything that isn't deck fixing is useless later; +1 or +5 upgrades are meaningless when you need hundreds. A third of the game’s content is filler because of this. Mid game is marginally more fun. It shines when you develop interesting synergies, but only if your deck is well-built and you draw consistently. You can scale animals and use more interesting souvenirs to create a unique deck, and can get rare animals that complement your strategy. This is the core of a roguelike to me. Late game introduces "mythical" animals that overpower everything. They come with powerful effects and turn the game into a minigame of collecting mythicals, feeding them cheese and burgers, and winning through brazen synergies between them. Your souvenir box quickly devolves to a stack of random junk at this point and drawing mythicals is usually all it takes to secure victory. Overall, early content becomes obsolete too quickly, mid game offers slight intrigue, but late game replaces it with overpowered mechanics to reach its insane score scaling. Other major problem I want to shout is that the game uses tile colors and animal types, but these lack identity; land/sea/sky animals have counterparts that perform similar functions across the board. Playing a blue deck is no different than playing a yellow deck. Deck-building is solely about buying whatever souvenirs your deck can fulfill than strategic differentiation. Mythicals unfortunately hoard all interesting mechanics that could have added depth to a full run or deck archetypes. I wanted this game to be great because its visuals and theme are appealing. I joined this discord, followed updates and gave balance patches a chance but wasn't convinced enough. It feels like the game needs all the animals and souvenirs to be revised, perhaps a discard mechanic, a smoother scoring curve, and more player control. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Still, kudos to the developers for engaging with the community.

[h2] Cute deckbuilder with a fun core that loses strategic variety in the late game [/h2] ✅ Charming visual design and clear visual communication The art style is incredibly charming. The animals and zookeepers all have a lot of personality, and the clean, colorful presentation establishes a consistent visual language that makes the game very intuitive to play. ✅ Lots of replayability early on There's a healthy variety of starting decks, characters, relics, and cards, which keeps the early and midgame feeling fresh. Experimenting with different combinations is consistently enjoyable. ✅ Satisfying deckbuilding mechanics The deckbuilding is the game's biggest strength. Cards and relics interact in interesting ways, and putting together synergies feels rewarding. There's a good amount of meaningful decision-making throughout a standard run. ⛔ Endless mode loses strategic variety Unfortunately, endless mode is where the cracks begin to show. Target scores scale so aggressively that many otherwise fun animal cards quickly become nonviable, but my bigger issue is that there's very little incentive to invest in slower-scaling animals. It rarely feels worthwhile to commit to an early-game scaling strategy because those animals don't have enough time to become competitive before stronger mid-game options appear. Those later scaling animals not only start stronger, but often continue scaling even faster, leaving little reason to take on the risk of developing an early-game engine. Personally, I enjoy deckbuilders where investing in a weaker early-game option is rewarded with a powerful late-game payoff if you can survive long enough. Here, that risk-versus-reward dynamic rarely materialized, and successful endless runs instead converged on the same handful of efficient builds and/or strategies. ⛔ The gameplay loop could use more variety Outside of combat, the game largely alternates between playing a few rounds and shopping for relics and items. I found myself missing random events or other encounters that could occasionally break up the routine. Even simple events would go a long way toward making runs feel less repetitive. ⛔ Late-game turns become painfully slow Once you accumulate lots of relics and start duplicating food with numerous on-feed effects, turns can take an extremely long time to resolve. Even with the 300% animation speed option enabled, late-game turns often drag on because you're waiting not only for animations to finish, but also for the game to process the sheer number of effects being triggered. The resulting lag becomes increasingly noticeable as builds grow more complicated, turning endless runs into multi-hour commitments where a significant amount of time is spent simply waiting for turns to resolve. [h2] Grade: B+ [/h2] Overall, [i]Zoominoes[/i] is a polished and enjoyable deckbuilder with an excellent core gameplay loop. The deckbuilding is satisfying, the presentation is charming, and the amount of unlockable content provides plenty of replayability. My biggest criticism is that the game's strategic variety peaks too early. Endless mode gradually funnels players toward the same handful of strategies, while the repetitive between-battle structure and lengthy turn resolution make long runs feel more tedious than exciting. If you're primarily interested in standard runs, I'd definitely recommend it. If your goal is pushing endless mode as far as possible, expect the experience to become much more repetitive over time.

I've played this game for over 80 hours since I got it, so take this with a grain of salt I guess, but overall I think I'm basically done and regret buying it. I've given it a few more chances since the balance patch that came out yesterday but it's still very clear there are fundamental issues with the way the level of challenge is calibrated that make it feel very shallow and overly centralized. Basically the issue is that 90% of the content and mechanics and animals and interactions in this game are essentially irrelevant. The devs put the daily challenge on the hardest difficulty where the goal will jump from like 300 to 700 in the middle of a run as if the single new animal you draft and might not even get a chance to draw into with your 7 plays is going to somehow enable a new crazy 400 point play. The reality is that your entire deck will be rainbow by week two and you will have stacked the same exact 17 multiplier items that you have to get every time to win a run or you may as well give up and reset because the majority of the game's content is just mathematically irrelevant. Even if you make "good" choices early game that help you get through the mid game, those choices ultimately will end up punishing you because you are wasting money and clogging up the deck with dead weight. I guess I got a lot of "enjoyment" out of playing through all the modes and challenges, but that enjoyment was predicated on exploring and learning about a game that I thought had a lot of potential to enable a large depth of cool strategies and different types of decks, but that's literally just not true. Every "good run" you get will be exactly the same and every time you don't get to build the one deck that can actually compete you will feel frustrated and like every choice you made is pointless.

What seems at first like a fun, cute casual game ends up not only delivering on that promise, but also having the depth to keep me interested. New zookeepers, animals, and unlocks keep the game fresh, and a surprising amount of depth has gone into how the animals work together. Also, honestly, it tickles the little part of the brain that loves when big number gets bigger. I'm a simple guy at heart.

[h1]First impressions[/h1] So far the best tiles animal game in last 2 years. I also tryed Coin Tavern recently, but it has much less creatures and artifacts, making runs feel the same. Zoominoes has quite a lot of content for you and many ways to break game with high scores. Just 20 heroes alone will keep you occupied for a while + quite tricky achievements that unlock new stuff. I also liked that there are several ways to play: you can use small decks, big decks, consistent decks with creatures that summon specific partners, one-shotter decks, field tiles decks and have 10 consumable slots (shame on you Balatro). If you take a look at current Slay The Spire 2 - it forces you to go big decks only to counter specific opponents, which is very annoying, just let us play as we want to play! Zoominoes delivers. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] I would say it is quite unique. There were some games like this in the past, of course, where cards interact with eachother and need specific placements (like Islanders), but not at the extent of Zoominoes. Each creature has ability that may be gamebreaking if utilized properly, as well as specific color and biom they live in. Abilities feel fresh and interesting to build around, there is almost no boring "+1 this or -10 that" - they influence field, themself, other creatures and till the last round you actually involved into creating interesting build like no other. Gameplay is quite simple - you jump in fast without long tutorials and don't need to be expert in puzzles to figure it out, or 20+ hours of experience to feel comfortable (shame on you Balatro). UI is good, everything is described and easy to understand, card interactions are clear. Artifacts are quite useful and also have a good influence on overall rules. Heck, i think this is first game since Against The Storm that makes every run so much different that you cannot stop playing it. And you won't really ruin build by doing some mistakes - each next round let's you do adjustments and correct deck. You can change creatures color, biom or even morph them into something else pretty much anytime. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] Definitely buy this masterpiece, who knows when such a huge game with cheap price and no annoying Early Access will pop up next. There is no bugs, no lags, no screen tearing. It is bright and colorful instead of green-grey palette which i am sick of seeing. It does not overwhelms you and does not takes hours for a single run. The closest similar game is "Cat God Ranch", but even that one is not as big as Zoominoes.

Absolute banger of a roguey dominoes game. Build a game breaking, high scoring engine of madness with some decks. Has lots of "One more turn..." energy. Cute animals/creatures as well. Lots to unlock so far.

It's alright, but it suffers really bad from having an aggressive ramping curve, which if you miss you'll just starve really quick and not have a good time. The initial days are incredibly repetitive and stale. It seems like there is virtually no chance to get higher quality picks until lategame, which makes the game too predictable early on. There's also some high variance and the different keepers feel completely all over the place balance wise. Some very clearly have no scaling at all (e.g. extra starting cash). It also has some odd quirks, such as when beating difficulty "five" you don't unlock keepers for difficulties below it, which just doesn't make sense. Either you should stop me from being able to skip difficulites or unlock lower difficulty rewards. Some sounds are also _incredibly_ annoying and seemingly can't be turned off without turning off all sfx. All in all, it's tough to recommend even at the decently fair price, which is a shame as the game really has potential. If the game had better balance and more focus on fun and less focus on managing to stay ahead of the curve it would get a thumbs up.

From the demo alone I knew this was gonna be my GOTY. It is quite simply the most instantly fun, accessible, easy to load up and addicting run game I've played in years. In a genre that is very over saturated Zoominoes still manages to shine and give a whole new experience to absolute bonker crazy and wacky combos. At the higher difficulties Zoominoes has tonnes of skill expression, feeling rediculously challenging yet still surmountable as you learn the intricacies and deeper machinations of the game. Quite simply the perfect enginebuilder and a must buy!