Animal Circus

If you could talk to the animals, what would you do? Would you finally put to bed years of scientific research and ask just what goes on in their heads? Would you fashion a detailed study that answered just why they do the things they do? Or would tell them to stand on top of each other and catch saucers falling from the sky?

Animal Circus is unsurprisingly a game aimed at the latter audience, essentially comprising mini-games with a timing bent, but dressed up in the clothes of a trip to your average (or perhaps not so average) zoo.

Included in the package are five different types of challenges, most of which focus on either dropping or catching zoo animals and stacking them up in a line, the odd plate saucer dropped into the mix for good measure.

If that sounds overtly complicated or just downright daft, then fear not: it all makes sense during play.

The five games are duplicated to form a Campaign mode that consists of 25 levels, each one you pass unlocking the following challenge, the difficulty naturally ramping up a notch with each new stage. But though Animal Circus is simple to comprehend, it's not always immediately easy to conquer.

'Pagoda of Animals', for instance, tasks you with dropping a collection of creatures one by one from a rope swinging at the top of the screen using the '5' key. The idea is to line them up to form a pillar that reaches high up into the sky, your tumbling and tipping tower having to hit a set height before you can move forward.

But when you consider some of the animals in question are cute, cuddly, and most importantly rather small koala bears, managing to time it so hulking great elephants land perfectly on top of them is as entirely difficult as it might sound.

Even trickier is the game's spin on a similar theme. The perfectly named 'Balance' comes with the same aim, but this time you have two towers to contend with. Each one is lined up on one half of a set of scales, and putting too many heavy animals on one side without balancing out the other tips the whole thing over the edge.

Of course, once you have got the measure of one of its games, the whole of Animal Circus begins to fall into line, and it's not long before you either master it in full, or get a touch bored.

Still, while it lasts, Zed's bevy of furry and fluffy mini-games has merit enough to make it the perfect fodder for those looking for a quick-fix of animal magic.