It’s funny how I seem to start with one game of a certain genre and end up reviewing a small chain of them. I did it with the Roman city-builders, now I’m doing it with pet and vet games.
Fortunately for me, Pet Pals came as a much better vet experience than both Pet Vet 3D and The Sims 2 Pets for DS combined.
Pet Pals: Animal Doctor is a vet sim created by the same team who made Zoo Vet. You play a veterinarian who just got a job at a clinic. The game is presented from a first-person point of view where you go about your daily activities as if you were a real veterinarian.
After being briefed and meeting the team that will help you take care of your soon to be patients, you are placed behind the counter of the waiting room. Having a look at your surroundings can show you a number of things.
First, there is your desk, where you will find a computer, answering machine, photo album and later on, an Employee of the Month trophy if you perform well enough. In the computer there are a number of things to have a look at. There is a troubleshooting guide, an encyclopedia for medical terms, a list of breeds, a memory game, a trivia game and jig-saw puzzles. The photo album will showcase photos of the animals you have treated, while the answering machine will let you listen to the happy owners’ thank you messages.
To the right there is an exit to the kennel where you can groom animals that are staying at the clinic. There is also a display case for trophies you have won for achieving perfect scores.
If you look around the waiting room, you will see some posters on the walls. You can click on them to enlarge the images. Your diploma will also be hanging there, as well as any other awards you may earn as you treat each round of patients successfully.
Sitting on the chairs will be your patients and their owners, with pets ranging from dogs to cats, birds, mice, spiders, fish and reptiles. You can click on each to view a summary of the reason why the pet was brought in, and then treat them in the order you want.
Pet Pals offers three difficulties of gameplay, Easy, Normal and Hard. Easy mode offers you guidance through every treatment. The tools glow when you need to use them, the PDA (info window) will tell you what to do next and you can use hints whenever you feel the need without losing points. Normal difficulty is basically the same, but you are only allowed two hints per case. Hard difficulty shows the info as data (you need to be familiar with the terms and abbreviations at this point) and asking for hints costs you points.
Once you choose to treat an animal, you will be taken to the examination room. A brief cut-scene between one of the technicians and the pet owner will give you a little bit of information to work with.
When in the examination screen, you will notice the tools display at the bottom and the info display on the right. The info window is constantly updating with every action you take, so read it carefully to know what to do next and what is going on with the animal. You also get to ask a few questions to the pet owner, but only ask what is relevant to the animal’s condition. In the end, when you sign out you have to decide what the diagnosis is.
You earn points for every thing you do right. Asking the wrong questions, using treatment tools in the wrong places or doing unnecessary treatment will cost you points. The maximum score you can obtain is 1000.
The game really shines in the examination room. From a using stethoscope to taking blood or stool samples for testing, administering medication or oxygen to taking an x-ray or inserting a thermometer in the animals’ rear, this is as realistic as it gets. In some cases you even get to perform small surgical procedures.
Occasionally your examination will be interrupted with an emergency situation. You will need to drop what you’re doing and treat the emergency patient as quickly as possible. Once you’re done, you will be taken back to the patient you were treating before.
After treating each case, the Head Vet will comment on your performance. You get to see an overview of the patient, what you did right, what you did wrong and what your score was. If you get a perfect score, a little trophy will be added to the trophy case in the waiting room. Get perfect scores in all patients and you will get an extra surprise.
On the technical side, I enjoyed both the look and sound of the game. The graphics are well done, particularly the animals, and the animations are very smooth. The voice acting is really good, and I especially enjoyed the great sense of humor. I actually bursted out laughing when one of the technicians introduced my next patient in this unexpected manner: “We have a winner in the non-stop vomiting sweepstakes!”
In sum, Pet Pals: Animal Doctor is as entertaining as educational. It would make a great gift for aspiring vets, and I actually was one too at a certain point.
Granted, you won’t be qualified to perform surgery on your cat after playing Pet Pals, but you will more than likely be able to recognize certain symptoms and situations that require immediate veterinarian attention, thus saving you and your pet precious time in an emergency situation.
A game that manages to teach a pet owner this much is definitely worth playing.
Special thanks to Charlie Duldulao and Legacy Interactive for providing a copy of this title.