by Christian Costa - November 29, 2005 When I was a kid I wanted a pet mongoose. You know like Ricky Ticky Tabby so just incase a cobra was trying to kill me it would fight it and I could make a music video to it and make millions on the black market! But alas I got a dog instead, a cowardly dog. But with Marine Park Empire by Enlight Inc., I can get almost any cool animal I want. But no mongoose or snakes� so no black market music video for me. But I digress that Marine Park Empire is an ok game if you like such Sims wannabe games. All around I would suggest this game to those types of people and kids who are tired of reading Zoology books. Except keep the stickers, those Zoology stickers rocked!

What happened to good ol� killing stuff

Ok, this game lacks the excitement part. I found myself hours upon hours of falling asleep in my chair only to try to get excited by two elephants having maritals (kids ask your parents and say you learned the word from Harry Potter). I mean it�s cool and all trying to build the �ultimate theme-park� but nothing really exciting happened. The only part about this game that made it fun was trying to beat the scenarios. They would give you a set about of money and tell you to do something with it like buy 3 rhino�s and make sure they are the main attraction and make sure all of your people stay happy. It was rather difficult in fact. You have to practice a lot with this game so I suppose it takes some skill.

The best part of the game play was the free play. It allowed you to give yourself as much money and animals as possible so you could go nuts. I made the Taj Mahal of parks. Disney himself rose from the grave and threw some graffiti on my park. Free play is also the best way to learning all the game functions and �ins and outs� such as how to keep your people happy, and customer complaints, and how to improve, etc., etc. It was also very cool to add buildings such as arcades, and restaurant, and more arcades. My park itself had over 5 arcades because I know for a fact shooting something is a lot more fun than watching animals eat and go to the bathroom.

The career mode was also pretty interesting. You can be a zookeeper or a zarine biologist and you do your job and try to move up in the ranks. Interesting yet boring because that is what I do in my everyday life, well um try to be better than the next guy, not feeding and taming animals as fun as that sounds� (Sarcasm).

And what would a game be without stuff to unlock? A bad game! Fortunately for me I got to unlock different scenarios in the game. And as exciting it sounds it wasn�t. It was pretty much the same thing as taking pictures of animals just it was �unlockable.� The saving grace of this game is� drum roll please� unleashing the animals upon unsuspecting tourists. That�s right. I unleash everything from elephants to tigers upon my customers and it was hilarious. They constantly ran around yelling for help and as my reviews went down my grim widened. Well until I realized that the animals wouldn�t kill the guests. What? It�s a kids game come-on psycho don�t wish such harsh thing upon kids, frickin sicko�
 

A message to Enlight: STOP

Ok so The Sims never was very good at graphics right? Well Marine Park Empire beats it out for having worse graphics. But many animals loving hippies will look to me and say �what about all the information they had to use for this game, of course the graphics aren�t going to be good�dude� and to those hippies I say �Nay, if any other game can do it so can the king of all �tycoon� type of games.� And then of course the debate will be over because the hippies would have forgotten what we have talked about.

The graphics really suck in this game. I just bought a new video card for my comp and I turned all the graphics way up for this game and it still disgusted me. The Terrain-editor left dirt jagged when labeled �smooth.� Instead of making a water hole it looked like I made a squarish water circle. My workers looked bigger than my animals. My buildings looked small. I mean there is no excuse for such things. I would think someone just out of Devry would even be able to make a better looking game out of this. Marine Park Empire I hate to tell you but you definitely need a surprise makeover by someone like Ryan Seacrest.
 

It's about time

Ok here is my favorite part of the game. I think that sound is sometimes the most important quality of a game besides it being able to work. The sound puts the player in the mood to play. Scary music makes the player scared, loud music makes the players want to run really fast and shoot stuff, and happy music makes the player want to frolic in the sunshine with his monkey friends. The sound was the saving great of this game. It was very happy and �bouncy� so it made me bob my head and decided to make me add a counterpart to all of my already existing animals. It may come off as a little cheesy but it is pretty impressive they actually added unique animal sounds. Even my arcades and restaurants have their own sounds. The sound really helped and made me feel happy inside.
 

*USRB Censored Message*

Yeah, not much to talk about here. If you like animals this will be fun. If you like learning it will be fun. If you like The Sims at 50% it will be fun. The game can only go so far before you get bored, plain and simple. I actually loved playing Sim City and The Sims but this was a let down. Not as many customizable options besides what your fences look like. The game is pretty slow moving and the objectives are amazingly too hard for kids and myself. Once again the saving grace for fun is watching those little people run for their lives when an elephant comes charging. Ahhh playing God of Eden at half of it�s finest.
 

HA!

Uhhh hmm not sure how to phrase this but �it�s been done before.� Nothing really new to this game than any other game. Zoo Tycoon and Marine Tycoon did the same game except Marine Park Empire just combines those two games with less of a fun factor. This just happened to have more information and a more miniscule amount of functions than its competing games. It�s made for animal lovers and kids, absolutely no one else.
 

Lions, and Tigers, and Bears� Oh! You know what screw it

As Martin Luther Kings Jr. once said, �Free at last. Free at last. Thank God I�m free at last.� And that is exactly how I feel as I write the ending of this game. And I may have been a little too critical of this game but it is because hippies smell like animals, I don�t like hippies, and there are animals in this game. Yes that correlation does work if you think hard enough. Buy this game only if you are very avid of animals or Sims type of games.