Another Nintendogs wanabee
I have to admit, seeing DS titles with pets on its cover is something that I usually won't even mind checking out. And I almost always automatically dismiss the chance of those titles (other than Nintendogs) to be of any good. But since this is a game created by Ubisoft, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it. And up to now I can't believe that I even bothered playing it.
The game starts off with a very familiar process of acquiring a pet. You open up a door, and end up on a dogs play pen. You can then zoom-in on one of them and play with them for a bit. Give them a couple of rubs and the game will ask you if you want to take the dog home with you. Say yes and the dog will end up in your living room, looking lonely and confused .. yeah that's original. As with real life, a sight like that will automatically trigger you to pet your dog. And that also works with this game. Rub it numerous times and it will gain a single heart level. The game will then inform you that if you reach 3 heart levels the dog will grow up, but you're probably not going to be able to watch that happen due to numerous issues with the game.
Once inside your house you have the option to go inside the kitchen, closet, backdoor etc. You can also open up the fridge to get the dog's food out. Which is a feature that is not available with Nintendogs. It sounds good at first but because the game gives you a clip of the door opening up while the dog walks in the particular section of the house every single time you go to a different section, it does nothing but disrupt your game and I couldn't figure out how to skip that part. And later you'll realize that its just the game's way of separating the items like accessories, dog food, etc which are all easily accessed via a menu with Nintendogs.
Yes you can go to a playground and let your dog play with other pets like with Nintendogs and it seems like there's a lot more places you can visit but all of 'em besides the playground is locked. How do you unlock it? Maybe you need to level up the dog first, or maybe you need to gain a dog friend ... I really don't know. And that's one of the problems with this game. Once you take your pet home with you, you'll be pretty much gonna just experiment on your own and wonder what else is there for me to do other than rubbing my stylus on this dog non-stop to keep it happy?
The graphics on this game is average. It's not as polished as Nintendogs. The dogs doesn't even look all that cute in my opinion. The animation is quite poor as well. The transition between one animation to the other doesn't look good. Right now the dog is sitting for example, the next thing you'll see is that the dog is already standing up on two feet. And it tries to copy Nintendog's animation wherein a dog is leaning against you, but here, it looks more like the dog is standing on its own because its meters away from you.
The sound is okay. While the controls is mostly controlled by the stylus. Giving your pet a snack for example requires you to shake the bag up-and-down to let the chips fall out of the bag. While pressing on the directional pad switches to different views and adjusts the camera elevation a bit.
I'm not sure how to close this review out because the game from the very beginning did not show any originality. And the developers tried to add new things on to this game only to end up having the player spend half of their time moving around the house than focusing on the main character of the game which is the pet. If you're desperately looking for an alternative to Nintendogs then I guess you can give this title a shot. Don't say I haven't warned you though.
.:My reviews are only as good as everyone else's. Take every single one of them with a grain of salt:.