Any aspiring vets out there? If you think you’ll gain any knowledge from this game you’ll be sadly mistaken. Even if you’re not looking in that direction, the game will do nothing for you. It’s boring, repetitive and the fun factor takes a dive after the initial first impression.
Upon booting up the game you are welcomed by music from The Lion King… wait sorry, that’s just your ears playing a trick on you. The music when it boots up does sound similar to The Lion King though. Once you start a new game you are given two difficulty choices. This is misleading though as the game is exactly the same from my experience except for one small minimal detail. In easy mode you will have the hints always displayed on the top screen. In Normal mode the hints will be hidden, but all you have to do is hit a button to read the hint. You get no point deduction for reading the hints either. If you do however make a mistake in either mode, you will get point reduction.
The actual gameplay is rather dull and boring. Unfortunately the only real challenge comes from lack of information. There is no direction as to what to perform first, later I found out it was to check the heart beat. Everything can be controlled by the stylus except moving the camera around the Zoo map and reading hints (in normal mode). Getting to different parts of the animals to perform an operation is sometimes a pain as you might think you hit a certain section and it’ll bring you to a completely different one. Backing out of screens is a little odd too. It’s not always responsive. Some of the operations for medical portions is fun the first three or four times, but it gets old fast. Another odd thing I found is that there is no time limit on the examinations which adds to the game being boring. A time limit may have addressed this issue.
Aside from the actual operations, there is the Zoo map. On the Zoo map they have different varying degrees of how ill the animal is. If they’re in the red it means they’re very ill and you should treat them first.
Aside from the dull gameplay, the graphics are not much better. They use cartoonish graphics and everything is a static image. There are no animations, except in certain mini-games. The odd part is, while they’re static images, they decided to render the characters with 3D models instead of using 2D cartoon graphics. I think the style was a bad choice and hand drawn cartoons would have been much better. Sounds are kept to a minimum, there are no voices, and the only real sound you’ll hear is the music. If there are other sound effects, I didn’t hear them. The music loops forever and gets old fast.
If I had to recommend this game to someone I wouldn’t. Honestly, this game isn’t worth anyone’s time or effort. Either difficulty can be finished within three hours if you’re just rushing through. Sure you can try to play the game without the hints, and that’ll make it harder, but it won’t be fun at all. Iffy controls, bad art choice, bad music, and boring gameplay, just skip this one altogether.
