We had a chance to preview an early release of Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo before the boxed product hit shelves, and not much has changed. Things look a bit more cleaned up, but the essential pieces of the game haven't changed. The visuals are bright, fun, and perfect for kids that enjoy the show. All the characters from the show appear, with the exception of a few townsfolk that are really incidental characters, anyway. The catchy tunes from the show run in the background, which will please kids, and there are voice prompts as kids slide the mouse over different icons on screen. The voices can get jumbled together, a necessary evil to help kids that aren't ready yet avoid missing any instructions, but an annoyance for listeners. Other oddities in Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo are the Sticker Book mode - fun by itself, but lacking any way to print your child's final masterpiece. Why this wasn't included in the final game is a mystery, since most every DIY online site for kids that allows coloring, stickering, or other crafty fun will then allow printing. Kids love to keep their works and parents love to display them on the 'fridge or in the office.

The game tests kids' skills with recognizing visual patterns, colors, and shapes. There isn't much tied to sound, which is a shame. Audio cues are present throughout the game, as in the distinct sound that you'll hear when selecting a correct object or performing the correct action. The game's narrator will tell you nicely when you've done the wrong thing, in a very constructive and sensitive way. With all the activities included in Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo, it seems like a missed opportunity to have limited the learning focus to visual cues. Including more features related to sound recognition for the purpose of matching, sorting, etc. would have created a much more well-rounded game experience.

There are seven distinct activities in Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo, available in Free Play Mode. The Sticker Book mentioned earlier rounds out the three available modes, including Story Mode that wraps the learning activities around a narrative. When the game begins, it appears that Bob will need to help build a zoo for a large group of animals that have arrived. The idea behind bringing all the animals into town was to put them into the Bobland Bay Zoo, which doesn't exist yet. Bob and his machine friends get busy building the new facility.

The activities that go into building the zoo help kids practice problem-solving, critical thinking, object classification, sequencing, and recognition across a wide array of patterns, sizes, colors, and shapes. The method for this is similar to some of the flash-card games that parents have likely already purchased for their kids, but kids will be more likely to invest time when the Bob the Builder is wrapped around every activities. Basic activities include helping Bob build structures from blueprints. This teaches sequencing and since the plans include basic shapes, it helps kids recognize how those shapes come together to construct a building. Each animal destined for a place in the zoo must have an enclosure that kids will help Bob build, and then it comes time to match animals with their houses. This requires some shape and color-matching skills as Bob's machines truck the animals from house to house, based on signs displaying the outline of the animal in a specific color. Other activities around this project include painting fences, moving materials, and placing signs. These games all test your kid's ability to recognize and predict patterns, either based purely on color or a sequence of objects. The game with placing signs is similar to that of placing the animals in houses.

During the project, you'll have to keep your tools in order, so there are several games that involve finding or sorting tools. Bob will ask you about a specific tool and it will then fall on you to select the correct object according to shape and color. Just finding tools is the subject of one game, where finding and sorting them is the object of another. Each time you work successfully through one of the games in Story Mode, you'll open up more of the game and earn a sticker. Once the Story Mode is complete, you can work through the same activities to earn more stickers, keeping the replay value of Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo relatively high.

The ability to dial up (or down) the difficulty level makes this a game that kids can grow with. The changes in difficulty will modify each game, so there are fewer moving parts. Examples from pattern-matching games are that dialing down difficulty reduces the complexity of patterns or the number of objects that make up a single pattern. Playing on Hard in the fence-painting game will result in patterns that start in the middle or have overlaps, making it difficult to read the sequence. Playing on Easy in the game that has you load stacks of objects onto a train will result in simple sequences of one object, versus a more complex sequence of two or three in the Medium and Hard difficulty. The Easy setting will be accessible to almost any child that can perform matching and sequencing, and move the mouse around the screen.

All game designers should be forced to build at least one game for children, so they have a chance to see how a simple interface works. Nothing in Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo is any more complicated than moving the mouse around. There were some glitchy elements in the Sticker Book around selecting and erasing stickers, but nothing that kids can't fix with a bit of experimentation. The lack of any option to print is an oversight, but kids will still find building scenes that tell stories fun and easy. The main game is all built around audio cues depending on where kids move the mouse, with all instructions spoken. In two languages, even! The ability to play in Spanish or English is a nice feature that kids won't access, but that parents can tweak. Other tweaks include the audio and video settings of the game, but the settings out of the box are going to work for 90% of the players out there. Install couldn't have been easier on my Mac, and the CD-ROM is not required to play Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo once it is on your system.

The final analysis on Bob the Builder: Can Do Zoo is that it will be fun for parents and kids that love the show. How long it stays entertaining for kids will depend somewhat on age, but we'd guess that somewhere in the 4-6 range is the sweet spot. The few areas for improvement are just that: What we would have liked to see included that wasn't... Judging what is here, we'd say this stacks up as a worthwhile purchase that kids will enjoy while they are learning skills that will help them in school and life.