GoPets Vacation Island is a bit of a strange beast. If you're over the age of 30 and just joining the GoPets family you will find it feels a bit like that activity we enjoyed in a different format back in the old-skool days, Tamagotchi. Tamagotchi lives on in various games and toys, but it missed the boat by not going into the online space. The boat has sailed and a new generation of games like GoPets Vacation Island filled the void. DS players will come to understand that GoPets Vacation Island is really just a fragment of the larger online universe of GoPets. Playing on the DS only allows you to experience some of what GoPets has to offer, so you may be happier connecting online depending on your priorities.

The visuals on DS are not terribly different than what players online experience, just lower res characters and a smaller screen. There are not many places to explore right away in the game, which makes this a little bland compared to its big, persistent-world version. The characters available for interaction and the accessories for your pet are also scaled back compared to what online players have available. Jumping into the world of GoPets Vacation Island could be compared to another animal-themed world, Animal Crossing: Wild World. GoPets Vacation Island doesn't hold up very well in comparison and it feels less focused. The free-roaming, exploration that marks a game like Animal Crossing: Wild World is missing in GoPets Vacation Island. Instead of feeling like you have a world around you, it feels more like a large room you have to explore each time you click on a new location. There are some cute trappings in terms of sounds and music within the game, but it's all quite forgettable after a few hours of play.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are fun for the most part because they offer a chance to interact in a game world with virtual representations of real people. The game world is only part of what we come for, judging by the wide range of online worlds. GoPets Vacation Island is an annex to its online cousin. You can connect with other players via the Nintendo WiFi to host a party and interact with their pets. You can also release your pet into the virtual world while you disconnect from the DS and go about your business. It's possible to see new pets traveling through your world once you start playing frequently with the WiFi connection enabled. Without the online component, you'll burn through the available characters quickly, adding them as friends as you explore the island. The benefit of adding friends offline is to open up various parts of the game world.

Aspects of the game world include mini-games that are not all that exciting. Matching tiles is fun, for the youngest gamers maybe, and there are some other games that involve throwing darts to pop balloons, cooking, and blowing bubbles. The cooking game is the best by far, but everything is so darn tiny on the screen! The minute portions of food you'll cook look huge compared to the ingredients you have to select from when cooking. It's no Ratatouille, but it's a fun diversion. If you aren't playing games, you're messing around with your pet or entertaining visiting pets and exploring to meet new friends. GoPets Vacation Island includes a pictorial language, somewhat like semaphore, called Iku. It's possible to send messages using Iku and you'll find that new friends express themselves this way through messages to you. Iku messages always feel somewhere between a haiku and a Zen koan. You can collect new items attached to messages and buy things at the shopping pavillion on the island. Decorating your room is fun, but it all feels familiar in a "Deja Animal Crossing" kind of way...

GoPets Vacation Island isn't measured in terms of difficulty. The most difficult thing is entertaining yourself unless you happen to have a posse of friends logged into the game religiously. The mini-games are challenging to some extent, but anyone over the age of five will have mastered them quickly. The challenges here are more in the vein of collecting items, building complete sets of decorations for your house and making sure your pet is the most delicious fashion-plate ever. Contentment is a nice goal for your pet, but it's not like a pet dies if you don't give it attention. You'll see indicators that show your pet's level of happiness according to specific categories like food, thirst, play, and cleanliness. You'll find ways to cheer up your pet, and you can even adopt a new pet if the old one seems too high maintenance. It's intended to be a pleasant, relaxed road for gamers that enjoy the ride, but this trail has been blazed in a superior fashion by other games in this genre and even on this platform.

The navigation through GoPets Vacation Island is handled with tabbed menus and icons that don't always tell you much about their function. In the Web design world, navigation like this was compared to "mystery meat." It looks interesting, but you aren't exactly sure what to do with it... Eventually you figure out what everything does, or you can cheat and read the manual like I did. The conversion from a large screen with hot-keys and menus that fit neatly on the side or bottom of the play space has not been kind to GoPets on DS. Everything feels crammed into the screen and there appears to be a golden rule that the GoPet must never leave the screen. The use of icons in place of text is likely a bid to engage with younger gamers that may not yet be reading. Whatever the case, it's downright confusing to try and get around on GoPets Vacation Island in your first few minutes of play. After you figure out what everything does, it comes down to moving things around the screen and clicking through the details on your pets and the pets of your friends. Where this translates to hours of gameplay, we're not quite sure.

GoPets Vacation Island is probably just a gateway game to the larger, online version that supports premium members and offers a deeper game experience. On the positive side, parents will not find any trashy or objectionable material in this game, and the use of Iku prevents gamers with bad intentions from saying terrible things to other players. At the end of the day, this all doesn't equate to a very fun experience. Safe gaming fo youngsters is great in theory, but only if the game is truly entertaining. There isn't anything especially entertaining or educational in GoPets Vacation Island, and it may well serve no purpose other than a gateway into a larger online world that little kids aren't yet able to appreciate. Brilliant marketing, if that's the case, but pretty shabby gaming.