Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
When the quintet of Littlest Pet Shop titles dropped last fall (three DS, one Wii / PC), I feared the possibility of market saturation. With so many titles released at the same time, each frighteningly similar in nature, I assumed that either one or all of the games would show lackluster sales as consumers found themselves bewildered as to which game to choose out of the five. Instead, the opposite occurred, with last fall’s lineup of titles selling almost three million units worldwide.
Hoping to continue where its three DS siblings left off, Littlest Pet Shop: Spring offers a portable LPS experience to children both young and young at heart, as they travel to a Littlest Pet Shop all their own, and are allowed to fill it with the game’s 20 pets (as with the Winter, Garden, and Jungle titles, some pets are exclusive to Spring), various playground equipment, toys, and more.
While the game is not a true sequel, that doesn’t mean it is a straight copy-and-paste job of the other three DS offerings. Like its predecessors, the game is mainly focused around mini-games, with the 16 previous games (coloring pages, hide-and-seek, dart tossing, etc.) being joined by four new activities, with three out of the four adding a considerable amount of challenge (when played on higher difficulties) not present in the original three titles.
“Snack Sort” sees blueberries and strawberries falling from the top screen towards two buckets at the bottom, one for each fruit. If a strawberry is set to fall into the blueberry bucket (or if the opposite is true), you draw a diagonal line on the touch screen that serves as a barrier, forcing the strawberry or blueberry to its respective side of the screen.
“Fruit Fling” continues the nutritional vibe by allowing some of your pets (the higher difficulty level you choose, the more pets) to wander around the top screen accompanied by pictures of fruit that symbolize their favorite one. A slingshot at the bottom of the screen allows you to fling random pieces of fruit to the appropriate pet, which is easier said than done, due to the disorienting gap caused by the separation of the two screens.
The last two additions are “Volley Paws,” a simplistic take on Volleyball, and “Remember Me,” a memorization game that asks you to memorize the layout of pet pictures on the bottom screen before they flip over. Afterwards, a random pet will walk across the top screen, and you must tap on the appropriate picture. While simplistic at first, the game does become quite challenging, due to the fact that additional pictures are added every level, and that most pets are similar in appearance to begin with.
After completing any of the 20 games, you are rewarded with game ribbons signifying a job well done and a random amount of Kibble, the game’s currency, with more Kibble obviously being awarded for a higher score or for simply completing a game on a higher difficulty level.
One glaring negative that has carried over from the original trio is the disproportionate distribution of Kibble from one game to the next. While each of the 20 games is fun in their own right, there are very few options for those who wish to stock up on the most amount of Kibble in the shortest amount of time. Once again, the coloring pages activity is the obvious choice, awarding over 400 Kibble per go on the hardest difficulty setting, but coloring the same simplistic page dozens of times just to earn up enough funds to buy the next pet or toy isn’t any less annoying this time around.
One of the larger differences between Spring and its siblings comes in the unlockables department. Six new pets are available in Spring: a dog, two bunnies, a fox, a porcupine and a cat, along with 20 new seasonal accessories that compliment the spring motif (sunglasses, hats, and scarves as examples). The order in which you unlock the additional areas within your Littlest Pet Shop has also changed.
Just like in the other titles, your basic pet shop will eventually become crowded with pets to the point that no new additions can be made. Room for your other pets must then be made at the various themed areas you unlock as gameplay progresses (a winter ski park and a colorful jungle as examples).
One constant throughout the LPS series is the graphical presentation, which once again consists of each pet and their excessively oversized head perched atop a tiny frame, complete with huge eyes and other basic features. The environments themselves carry on in the pastel and innocent theme set forth by Spring’s predecessors, and in fact, you’ll often find your pets flitting about the landscape investigating new additions or simply taking a nap by some flowers or under a tree.
All in all, it’s a very wholesome presentation through and though, made even more so by the adorable sound effects each pet often expresses – small yips, meows, etc. with a very girly soundtrack (if music can be described as such) completing the experience.
Even with the addition of three slightly more challenging mini-games to this version of the Littlest Pet Shop experience, Spring still undeniably caters the pre-tween or younger crowd, but with the addition of said challenge, offers enough content and replayability to endear itself to the oldest in that group, and even some open-minded adults.
Special thanks to Erica Thomas and EA for providing a copy of this title.