Jambo! Safari Review

While I never had any experience of it myself, I’ve been told a few times by friends they hammered the 50 pences into the Jambo! Safari arcade machines as little ‘uns. SEGA has seen fit to deliver a new iteration of the game to Wii owners. Is it as good as you might remember though, or is it simply nostalgia?

To begin with, the game now has a story mode – instead of the pure arcade mode of the machine – where you have to capture animals and do other assorted things of the kind. You begin by selecting a character from two males and two females, who you can dress up and make look how you want. After that, you’ll be lassoing animals with your shiny rope in no time.

The story mode sees you taking your ranger, tasked with finding quests from NPC’s, gaining experience and trying to become a fully-fledged ranger. You’ll spend your time driving around in a Range Rover, which you’ll use to chase down your prey... sorry, this game isn’t about hunting, it’s about ‘rescuing’ the animals; by chasing them in a large jeep and lassoing them like some kind of modern day cowboy.  The game has three regions, which each contain three levels – bringing the amount of playable areas to nine overall.

There’s an assortment of tasks to perform, such as lassoing the animals, catching sick animals, then lassoing them, taking photographs of animals (which haven’t been lassoed), but you’ll never leave your Land Rover unless you want to change clothes or hairstyle. While the game is fun, I can understand its arcade appeal, but it doesn’t fit well on a home console. If you enjoy lassoing animals however, and do so unprompted, the game will put you into an ‘arcade mode’ which is more like the arcade game, funnily enough. Here you have to lasso eight different species of animal in a set time limit – while this sounds easy enough, it’s sometimes difficult to make out which animal is which, leaving you wasting precious time trying to figure out which animal you’re currently looking at.

The animal treatment is the main aim here though, as you are to ‘rescue’ the animals and take them back to the enclosure to be treated; you can only have three animals there at any given time. You treat said animals by participating in a mini-game (would you expect any less on the Wii?). These can become tedious after you’ve treated your fifth animal, which doesn’t bode well when it’s going to be done a lot more in the future. You’ll get Ranger Points for treating the animals, and with these you can (surprise surprise) buy new hairstyles and clothing for your character. You can also upgrade your Land Rover (or the other three unlockable Land Rovers) with the points. Strangely enough, in a game that is clearly geared towards kids, some of the female avatars’ clothing you can purchase may be more revealing than you’d expect.

The graphics and sound of the game can only be described as ‘there’. There’s nothing special about any of it; animals make animal sounds, the whole place is covered in grass – and by that I mean a flat green surface – and you get the typical African drum music you would likely expect. That’s about all there is to say, which is unfortunate.

There’s a multi-player mode added in, which is pretty fun. You have one player controlling the jeep, while the other lassos the animals in. Good fun with a friend when things get hectic in arcade mode, but again, not as thrilling as it likely was back in the arcades. As well as the multi-player side, there are a host of party games, but none of these are very fun; with the possible exception of the Land Rover Football, – that’s right, Football – in your Land Rover. This is mildly entertaining for about ten minutes, but after that it’s just as stale as the other mini-games, such as Ostrich racing and a game where you’ll control a Meerkat running about collecting fruit, possibly saying “simples” to yourself every few minutes.

Unfortunately, Jambo! Safari crashed on me a few times, where-by the power button on the Wii or the reset button would do nothing. It was a case of unplugging the machine and restarting, so make sure you save your game often, or else risk losing everything you’ve done.

When all is said and done – Jambo! Safari isn’t inherently a bad game; if it had stuck truer to its arcade game roots it may have been a solid title. As it stands though, it’s a glitch game with pretty unresponsive controls (control the jeep via the nunchuck, and the lasso with the Wii-remote). The multi-player can be fun, and if you’re one of the gamers who hammered the arcade machine, you’ll find something to like about this, somewhere. But for someone entirely new to the experience, the ridiculous premise and the rather bland design of the game, it’s one best avoided.