Having competition can be a good thing. It generally spurs you to achieve more because you know where the bar is for quality and you are determined to exceed it, to "beat the other guy." The problem with competition is that if you don't meet that bar, we all know. Calling Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals a poor-man's Zoo Hospital (hereafter known as "The Competition") is like calling the Honda Civic a poor-man's Ferrari... Does not compute, right? Not only are the graphics poor compared to The Competition, they're poor in any frame of reference. Unlike the relatively smooth 3D animations of animals cavorting in their enclosures or writhing on the treatment table, Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals presents blocky animal models and (no kidding) flat environments that even include some transition scenes that look hand-drawn or modeled in some CAD program. You'll think I'm joking, but at least two of the people you work with in the zoo look exactly like zombies, complete with pasty skin, glazed-over eyes, and shambling posture. It would be laughable if it wasn't intended to be serious.

The only extras found here that dress up the action a bit include some unlocked, still images of the animals you treat. A set of animal games can also be accessed, but they have the same rough look that Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals sports in its other areas. If you've played The Competition, you'll know that it included a nice set of audio and visual cues during procedures. Zoo Vet has some close-up pictures of the animals you treat that aren't terrible and occasionally will have the animal make a sound. These sounds, and the noises that pop up as you go through a treatment, are infrequent enough to make them surprising... and not in a good way. Instead it feels like a random emanation from your DS, more like a haunting than a feature.

If only it were as simple as saying that the developers sacrificed graphics and sound in favor of great gameplay. Instead, it appears they sacrificed... everything. At every corner of Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals, you'll find what was on its way to being good gameplay before stalling out. There may have been an attempt to distinguish Zoo Vet from The Competition by focusing more on realism during procedures, and featuring more exotic animals. Shooting for realistic surgery on the DS makes about as much sense as actually performing surgery with the DS. No spurting arteries and oozy stuff when the rating is E10+. As a nod toward realism, the procedures rarely break away into mini-games as was the case with The Competition. Wipe down an animal's wound and you'll see the blood and gore promptly disappear to reveal clean skin. Things like shaving work the same way, so instead of the loud-buzzing-hair-flying version in The Competition, you get this magical hair-does-a-disappearing-act business. Missing in action are any real games during treatment. Doing realistic treatments probably sounded like fun to the seven consulting veterinarians; how do you end up with seven Veterinary Consultants and only three Quality Assurance people, anyway? It's like a bad joke: How many consultants does it take to suck all the fun out of a videogame?

As if to appease the people that might come expecting to actually play a game, Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals includes a set of six mini-games that are completely separate from the treatment section. These include a memory/matching game with animal cards and a jigsaw puzzle. For the readers - or for Mom and Dad to read to the non-readers - a sort of trivia mode is also included as a mini-game, heavy on reading questions. Finally, you'll play through a set of games that take advantage of the DS touch-screen technology and microphone. The implementation of these is poor, with shoddy controls and the same blocky 3D graphics seen during treatments. Throwing fish at penguins, brushing animals' teeth, and hunting for fleas by blowing on an animal's fur and then tapping with the stylus... it all sounds good in concept, but fails in execution.

Some thought was put into smoothing out the learning curve for players new to this style of game. A "tutorial level" is included to give you a better handle on the controls and the flow of treatment. Once you get into the later levels, you will either be given hints during each phase of treatment or you'll have to nudge the system for a hint by pressing the (X) button. Following direction during a procedure and getting hints depends on reading, where it was possible to play through The Competition by just following visual cues and reading basic numbers to diagnose what was troubling an animal. After just a few treatments, Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals has almost no variety. You can anticipate the steps for each procedure based on what is ailing the animal, such as cleaning a wound before surgery, then following up with antibiotics and a bandage. There just aren't enough visual clues about each animal's condition to make an accurate diagnosis, which leads back to following along with your helpers. In almost every case, you'll get big hints from them ("Better clean up that wound") or just press (X) to see exactly what procedure is required ("Use the sponge to clean the wound") and perform the procedure as prompted. The game is largely inaccessible to younger players because of the reading requirements, and older kids will lose interest quickly because of repetition during treatments or the bland segments where you feed an animal by putting a specified number of objects in its bowl...

Reading about all the ways in which Zoo Vet uses the DS's features makes it sound like a nice package, until you actually get into the fray. The "Flea Finding" mini-game is a perfect example of missed opportunity. You are presented in this game with the furry hide of an animal. You'll need to search for fleas by moving a target around with the stylus, and then blowing into the microphone to ruffle the fur. If you expose a flea, you have just a second to tap the little sucker before it jets off to a neighboring hair patch. It's a great concept, but the microphone is barely responsive, so you'll be blowing until you're red in the face before any of the animal hair actually parts. Then, your face is so close to the DS that you'll imagine the exposed flea is going to jump into your hair. Pulling back your noggin and positioning your stylus is all the time that durn flea needs to uproot and bounce somewhere else. Totally frustrating. Other games like the Fish Toss might have been fun, if not for twitchy controls that cause the fish you toss to miss 100% of the time unless you nudge them slowly, as if the stylus were actually made of nitroglycerin. The controls during your treatments aren't poorly implemented, but are terribly simple. The most challenging game is attached to the stethoscope, where you'll have to tap a box at the right moment while a simulated heartbeat traces its high and low points.

It would be nice to find something redeeming in Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals, something that gave it that, "Buy this if..." angle. Surely there are plenty of kids that purchased, and loved, and long ago beat The Competition. These kids will be attracted by this game's cover art and screen shots, but there's nothing to recommend Zoo Vet as a purchase or rental. It comes across as a stew of poorly executed ideas, which is all the more sad once you realize that the ideas weren't poor to begin with.