Nintendogs + Cats review [3DS]

Posted March 30, 2011 by Jen Allen.

If you feel nothing when you see a cute puppy walk past, and you’re after a game with loud explosions, then clearly this is not for you. Nintendogs + Cats is designed for a very specific audience: children (or those who are children at heart) who love cooing at their virtual pet. Anyone else need not apply.

You’ll almost certainly know the concept by now. Indeed, if you’re like me, you saw it on the launch line up, felt a slight urge to get it, then realised you’d never be able to survive the ridicule from your friends. Thank goodness for this job, eh? You pick from one of three varieties (in this case, I played the French Bulldog edition) of Nintendogs, thus acquiring nine breeds of dogs to start with, and also, new to Nintendogs + Cats, three cat breeds too. You then care for the animal, take it out for walks, teach it tricks and so forth. It’s all very, very cute. Perhaps not quite as adorable as the Xbox 360′s Kinectimals, but upping the ante from the previous Nintendogs title by a huge margin.

Picking which dog breed to start with is a disarmingly difficult decision. In my case, I was spoilt for choice thanks to being a big fan of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Basset Hounds and the Siberian Husky. That’s without bearing in mind that the other six breeds were still far too cute for words. Once this awkward decision has been made and the guilt from leaving the others has faded, it’s down to training and caring for your new pet.

This is where Nintendogs + Cats falls into typical Nintendogs fodder. You’ll spend much of your time either feeding or stroking your dog, just like before. The content is there but, thanks to the puppy getting tired after a short while, it’s not really a game you can play for hours on end. Instead, it’s a game that’s more suited to dropping in for 30 minute sessions daily. I found myself mostly switching the game on to take young Harry the Husky for walks and training sessions. Walking doesn’t take long at all, and you can find various items such as leather shoes and keyrings. Clearly, you walk along some rather strange areas to be able to find single shoes so readily. That, or my dog is a kleptomaniac.

Training is a simple enough process, albeit something you might feel uncomfortable to partake in if you’re in a public place. A few gestures with the stylus and the puppy is putty in your hands. Each trick needs to be reinforced with voice commands, though. Believe me when I say you feel a bit of an idiot, loudly exclaiming “sit!” at your 3DS. I suspect any self-consciousness would evaporate if you’re in that target audience, however.

Besides training, there’s a series of competitions that you can enter, such as the Flying Disc event seen before in Nintendogs. Obedience training now uses the AR cards that come with the console, projecting your puppy onto the card: a nice touch, if a little simplistic. Lure Coursing is another new event in which you encourage your puppy to run around a track by gradually reeling in a lure.

Then there’s the aforementioned cats side of things – something that feels underused, sadly. The cats are there once you have enough money to buy one (they’re rather expensive and money is quite tight in the early stages) but they’re frankly a bit rubbish. I could throw in a dog-biased joke about how this sums up cats entirely, but I’m a big fan of cats, and these are exceptionally distant in their behaviour towards you. They’re happy to ignore you, they won’t participate in competitions and you can’t teach them tricks. They just antagonise your puppy instead. Oh dear.

That doesn’t stop Nintendogs + Cats, on the whole, from being ridiculously cute. The 3D effect is frequently quite subtle, but it works perfectly, with your chosen puppy feeling that little bit more real. Its ability to recognise you, thanks to the facial recognition tech, is a lovely touch, one that’s bound to enthral younger players. While it might not offer much extra above the original DS game, it doesn’t really matter: the graphical boost is clear to see, and while the addition of cats isn’t far-reaching enough, there’s still plenty here for those who want a laid-back experience, rather than a full-on game.