3/14/2023 0 Comments One dog story switch review![]() ![]() The cats, are generally less well realised: there’s fewer ways to interact with them overall and none of the three breeds available are great to look at – most have gigantic soulless eyes, unusually polygonal bodies and ugly mouths that flap about sinisterly as you pet them. This is the best the game has to offer – most of the dogs look sufficiently cute and respond adorably to being petted and played with. There is, for instance, no way of deviating from the fixed route and there are no encounters with other dog-walkers (in typical Little Friends’ style, the function of this element is replaced by flashing up a “misbehaviour” icon that you dismiss with the ‘A’ button).īack indoors, you can give your pets food, water and a good brushing to keep them happy, as well as petting them and throwing various toys for them to play with. This walk is a fixed circuit that you’ll have seen all of on your third trip, and it is therefore less free-form and honestly not as interesting as the Nintendogs template. The Friends Plaza allows you to acquire more dogs and cats once your first dog reaches level 15 – once you acquire any more than three total, you’ll have to start placing your pets into the euphemistically named “Friends Hotel” for later retrieval – let’s not think too hard about the animal welfare implications there.ĭog walking sees you take a stroll around a full-3D park, with a quota for distance, reward digging and territory marking for your dog to fill before you return. The only other ‘going out’ options are to visit the Friends Plaza or take dogs for a walk. It’s not exactly heart pounding stuff, but it’s functional and fun content in a game with too little. In handheld mode you throw discs with a combination of the sticks and a throwing button – motion control takes the place of the stick in TV mode (with some occasional unresponsiveness). Instead, the disc catching game cuts a lonely figure in the game’s ‘Going Out’ menu – you can practice for a tournament (essential for improving a dog’s hidden catching stat), or play a beginner, amateur, semi-pro, pro or master variation. With the Switch, you would perhaps be subject to the occasional imprecision of the Joy-Con in docked mode – not that this prevented the inclusion of a disc throwing/catching game, nor precludes the creation of some kind of new idea to help make things feel more substantial. These mini-games relied on the DS touchscreen to guide the dogs around obstacle courses. ![]() Little Friends also lacks an equivalent to an agility trial or lure coursing game. By contrast, when Nintendo made Nintendogs + Cats it acknowledged the shortcomings of the microphone and found a way to improve the content (AR cards, though these are similarly inaccessible in the Camera-less Switch) rather than just omitting the idea entirely. Nonetheless, this was arguably part of the charm for younger players and the absence of voice commands leaves several holes in the experience.įor example, your Little Friends pets can learn tricks, but without the possibility of voice commands there is no Obedience Trial equivalent to actually use them in. It is perhaps the case that many will not miss speaking to their digital doggies through the DS line’s tiny, temperamental microphone. The loss of a microphone, a camera or guaranteed access to a touchscreen are the main issues here, and the result is an already minimal format stripped bare. Unfortunately, Little Friends’ commitment to that Nintendogs formula goes a little too far, with it failing to bring any new ideas of its own, even when trying a new approach is all but essential because of the fundamental hardware differences between the Switch and Nintendo DS. And they’re not wrong – from the moment you start Imagineer’s pet simulator and choose one of six dog breeds (Shiba Inu, Chihuahua, Toy Poodle, Labrador Retriever, French Bulldog and German Shepherd) from a line-up outside a quaint cottage, you’ll find yourself re-treading the familiar adoption and settling in process that propelled the original Nintendogs to mass market fame 14 years ago. “Finally, somebody made a new Nintendogs!” rejoices every preview, news article and comments section about Little Friends: Dogs & Cats on the internet. ![]()
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