Puz: Chomp! Chomp! Safari [by Astromaniac]

Chomp! Chomp! Safari is a joyful flash puzzle game that presents as much atmosphere as you could possibly expect out of a puzzle game.  In this game you star as a zoo-keeper who needs to feed the different animals.  Astromaniac is well versed in making web games fun and they have a large resume of past products that have been done, including a couple featuring the croc hunter. 

They've taken their obvious experience, and made Chomp! Chomp! Safari a very involved game.  What stands out most to players playing the game, isn't as much the puzzle itself as the creatures involved in the game and the overall game theme.  Nowhere in the game is the theme as prevalent as it is in the "Adventure" mode.  In this mode, you move across a map, feeding more and more animals on each level as you move along. 

In addition to Adventure mode, which mixes puzzle with speed in terms of game play, there are also an Attack and a Puzzle mode.  These different modes mirror what more and more puzzle games have done recently in offering game play for those who enjoy playing at a fast and furious pace in addition to offering game play for those who like to slowly think through what they are doing. 

The game itself has something in common with the game collapse.  In collapse, you click on the different colored squares to make them disappear.  Chomp! Chomp! Safari also focuses on you as a player trying to make specific squares disappear, but the way you go about it is a bit different.  In this case, the different squares are different because they have different animals on them.  Each of the animals requires a specific type of food.  In order to get an animal to disappear, you must place the right kind of food next to the animal.  However, you do not need to place a piece of food next to ever animal.  Anywhere on the board where like animals are touching, you can feed them all by placing the food in a place that touches any one of the the animals in the chain.  As you can probably guess, feeding a chain of animals scores you more points than feeding a single animal, and in puzzle mode, setting up the correct chains is paramount to solving the puzzle.

In addition to feeding chains, another good way to score points is to set-up a chain reaction.  By placing the food down on the board and then feeding an animal, it causes all the other animals to shift.  Doing so will drop or slide the animals into new slots.  As this happens, if you have put down food in expectation of the next animal to move adjacent to your food square, you will score extra points.

Chomp! Chomp! Safari also features a lot of items that can be bought at the shop to further game play, in addition to variations on the game play, such as trying to feed the animals when you cannot see them, or trying to feed them within a brief period as they appear on the screen.

Chomp! Chomp! Safari offers a lot of game play in a little package, and I truly commend the developers for making each of the 3 game play varieties available.  Doing so certainly helps the game become more accessible to the general public.  The graphics in the game are quite bright, and have a very nice style to them.  The music has a great safari beat to it, but I personally found it to get rather repetitive quickly.

Those looking for a new puzzle challenge should definitely give this one a look.  The mixture of collapse with some original game play, and especially the theme design of the game are sure to please many puzzle gamers.

Added: February 23rd 2004
Reviewer: Russell Carroll
Score:
Hits: 3593
Language: english   

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