Tap Zoo
Tap Zoo, Street View Labs (Free), is a simulation game where you build a virtual zoo on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. You start with a blank island and start adding animals, paths, walls, rangers and more. A developed zoo looks great as you can see in the picture with the animals and people moving around the zoo. You choose which animals to buy and breed and can add additional land to expand your zoo as it grows. The problem with Tap Zoo is that you need to either be extremely patient to earn enough money to build up your zoo or have to pay real money for in-app purchases to get the items to really make your zoo look impressive. Whether its the giraffe eating leaves from a tree or a whale shooting water out its blowhole, visually Tap Zoo looks fabulous. It would be great if you could hear the animals in the zoo as well, but it only plays music. Hopefully sounds are added in a future update. Animals and items can be purchased with either coins or stars. You gain additional coins every few hours as people visit your zoo. This occurs whether or not you are playing the app. So a couple of times per day you can open the app collect your coins and then close it. However, stars can only be had with an in-app purchases and some of the best items to purchase can only be bought with stars. Thus, the “free” app could get quite expensive if you really want to build the best zoo out there. You can also earn some coins or stars by downloading other recommended apps. However, most of these are paid apps so you are spending real money either way. Personally, I won’t do it, but I think the game is interesting and fun enough to where a lot of people are going to. Especially if the app creates a way for your zoo to compete with others. Possibly awarding stars for the zoo of the week. There really are tons of items to add to your zoo. Some include restaurants, bathrooms, benches, lamps, trash cans, chairs, fountains, rocks, koi ponds, flower gardens, statues, waterfalls, trees, fences, walls, shrubs, paths and more. The past few weeks Tap Zoo has been in the Top Five for in-app iPhone purchases. This doesn’t surprise me given that they are selling Farmville girt cards at Target these days. While I don’t think this app is for the majority of people, I suspect those that do like this will be quite addicted and play it a ton.