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Pet Pals: New Leash on Life
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Graphics & Sound:
I've played and reviewed Pet Pals games in the past, and to be honest, I haven't been too impressed. However, it seems that the dev teams have been listening to the complaints and making improvements with Pet Pals: New Leash on Life, which is a very good thing.
Graphics were never really an issue, however. The animals look appropriate and each tool is easy to see and identify. Your areas to work in are your clinic room, the community room which is where you will play with the animals and help to acclimate them to people so they can be adopted, the office and the kennel where animals are housed, awaiting treatment. All look fine and have little touches like your veterinary degree hanging on the wall, which is clickable. However, the load times are abysmal and I don't really see why. Sure, the graphics look pretty good, but not good enough to warrant the long load times.
Sound is a mixed bag. The animal sounds have improved. While they weren't all bad in previous iterations, some of them didn't make any sense. If you are sticking a needle or a scalpel into an cat or dog, he is probably going to make a little more noise than a disinterested meow or ruff. Here, they seem to vocally respond more appropriately and some of the sounds they make are quite endearing. The people, on the other hand - your assistants sound downright stupid. I wouldn't want these people in a clinic room with me and if so, I'd prefer that they remain mute so we didn't look like a team of stupids. Also, when you skip through a cut scene, the audio will continue to talk and it is really annoying. |
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Gameplay:
In Pet Pals: New Leash on Life, you are the new vet at a clinic that rehabilitates animals so that they can be adopted out to families. As such, you'll start out as a newbie, with the director of the clinic sort of holding your hand. There are two vet techs to help you, plus an enrichment specialist to advise you as to how to rehab the animals.
You have a PDA in the top right corner of the screen that you can click to have a reference as to who your patients are for that week. The downside is that after you have clicked and viewed the list, you have to click the corner to close it up, whereas it would have been much more user-friendly to simply be able to click somewhere on the screen and have it go away. Once you know what your tasks are, you go to the kennel and select the animal you need to care for. Then you are in your treatment room and the animal is on the table. Your vet tech is nowhere to be seen, but will voice hints for you or sometimes say inane things. You must first ask the correct questions of your vet tech to elicit info that will help you determine a diagnosis for the animal.
You then will examine, monitor, test, maintain, operate and medicate to patch the animal up. Treatment will include taking temps, feeling for a pulse, drawing blood, administering medication either orally or by syringe and many more things. You might have to excise an abscess or file down teeth on a rabbit or simply verify that a kitten is healthy before adopting it out. Your tasks will be fairly varied.
Once an animal is determined healthy, you'll rehabilitate it by playing with it, grooming it and training it. Once it is determined that the animal is ship-shape and ready to be adopted, you'll play a mini-game like memory match. Successfully winning this mini-game means your pet gets adopted by a good family. There are also other mini-games available on the computer in the office like slide puzzles and things like that. They are more of a diversion that anything else.
There's also a glossary with terms that will help teach you about everything you'll encounter, plus a wealth of information on your office computer to teach you what you need to know to do well in the game, everything from info on the animals to their illnesses.
One of my primary issues with this game is that the steps required to get a perfect score on the game don't seem logical. It seems as though the techs get aggravated with you if you do things in the wrong order; I don't really see what difference it really makes whether I palpate the animal first or take its temp? The other thing is this - when I completed a group of tasks, I was promoted, but I had to take a quiz first. Fine, no problem. But the quiz included topics that I hadn't covered yet. Luckily, I am a good guesser, but it just seemed odd. |
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Difficulty:
In Pet Pals: New Leash on Life, you can choose either Easy, Medium or Hard and depending on the difficulty level you select, your game will give you a different experience. On Easy, you can play through the game, your hints are automatically displayed for you, so what to do next is a no-brainer; there's really no challenge at all. On Medium, you can ask for as many hints as you want with no penalty, but they aren't displayed for you. On the Hard setting, you can still ask for hints, but each time you get one, you lose points. In other words, there's a maximum number of points you can achieve on each case, say 1000 points. Every time you ask for a hint, you lose about 20 points or so, such that you can never achieve a perfect score if you are on Hard, if you ask for a hint. The only real reason that matters is because you an earn tropheys for perfect scores which will be displayed in your case.
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Game Mechanics:
You have a pallet of tools at your disposal, including various tools, implements and medications, plus some devices for surgery and the like. Controls are as simple as point and click. You select whichever tab has the items that you need, such as examine, and then you select your glove to palpate or check blood pressure, your thermometer to take a temp, etc. You might need to test stool for bacteria or put an oxygen mask on a hyperventilating kitty or administer fluids to a dehydrated pup. Some of the steps are obvious, but some threw me. And some devices looked like torture implements. The cat wearing the orogastic speculum was disturbing.
I didn't find that the enrichment portion of the game worked too well. Your goal is to rehab an animal by grooming it, playing with it and training it until it has a full and happy meter of love in all of these departments. Playing simply consisted of throwing the ball at the animal and it picked the ball up. That's it. With a mouse, I could have imagined that you could play with a ball and string and have fun watching a cat scurry around after it. There just could have been more. If all I did was throw the ball one time for my dog, he'd disown me.
The training has you making a sound to get the animal's attention, then there was a meter with a bar that went from left to right. When the bar was in the green area, you click to get the animal to react. If it does it at the correct time, its been trained. It was somewhat lackluster.
There are links and info about the Humane Society within the game and I think that's great. I applaud this game for trying to educate people about pets that need homes and about what the Humane Society does. In addition to that, a donation is made to the Humane Society for every game of Pet Pals: New Leash on Life that is purchased. That being said, the game is still a little on the boring side. However, if you fancy yourself to be an armchair vet or have a child interested in pursuing that career, they will probably find some enjoyment in this game. It is interesting to learn about what the proper vital signs are for the various species and I can't say that I didn't take some very helpful knowledge away from the game. And after all, its for a good paws, I mean cause. |
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
Minimum System Requirements:
Win 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista 600 MHz Intel(r) Pentium(r) II Hardware, accelerated 3D graphics card 128 MB |
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Test System:
Intel P4 1.8 GHz, 480 MB Ram, Integrated Sound and Video |
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