Reviews// Jambo! Safari

Other missions on the playing field include catching certain beasts, racing through markers to a finish line, and photographing animals doing certain things. Badges, Trophies and Certificates are handed to you when you reach certain goals, but if you don’t fancy going for specific missions you can also engage the classic Arcade mode, which stays true to the 1999 original.

There are nine of these fields, spread across three areas of the game world, and while each one is different enough to entertain the young’uns, essentially you’re looking at the same old open space with the odd tree here, hill there and river over in some inconvenient place.

The collision detection is quite irritating, particularly with water, as the game automatically picks you up and resets your position if you go too far into the drink. Which is fair enough, but sometimes this happens when you’re driving over two inches of water whilst trying to capture an animal. It makes for some frustration if you’re after the Arcade challenge.

Trying to capture animals can also be a chore at times, due to the finicky targeting accuracy required. You can be right up next to a running creature and lob the net, only to have the animal immediately run 90 degrees to the right, which not only makes you miss but overturns your jeep. It doesn’t make you look like a graceful Safari Ranger, particularly.

Problems are compounded when you take into account the occasional unresponsive nature of the motion controls - you can’t be quick and efficient here, as if you try to throw the net just after you’ve lassoed an animal it won’t register - and graphical imperfections that bug the game.

The game crashed on me a couple of times (but luckily auto-saves frequently, meaning I didn’t lose anything), and during several capture sequences I noticed the odd lioness or giraffe frozen in animation, yet still slowly moving across the background whilst levitated in midair. That ain’t right, Jack.

The strange thing about Jambo! Safari is that, despite these irritations, you can fight to play a little bit of it every now and then. Clearly the game is designed for kids (difficulty modes are made for 3-9 year olds and 10+), but as an adult there’s something deeply therapeutic about driving around catching animals and rescuing them.

You just can’t play it for too long before getting tired or frustrated with it all. And for the kids, it could be a much more polished experience to boot.

SPOnG Score: 74%
Jambo! Safari is a good way of giving your kid something different for Christmas, and its theme makes it a very accessible game. It’s also adequate for the animal lover, but more care and attention should have gone into the code to ensure it was a less buggy experience. Anyone else will unfortunately tire of the repeated challenges and clunky gameplay, and will only find excitement in its bare bones Arcade mode.