PlayStation Vita Pets Review

Let’s get one thing straight about PlayStation Vita Pet: its title is a bit broad. The focus here is clearly on pets of the canine variety. Seeing any screenshot from Vita Pets gives the instant impression that this is a carbon copy of Nintendo’s Nintendogs but, while that is true to some extent, particularly in terms of your basic interactions with your adopted companion, there is more to this than feeding, washing and playing with a pet.

But before you get to that, you’ll need to pick your chosen pet from four breeds, and it’s also at this point where the charm and cuteness of these cuddly puppies is negated somewhat by the fact that they speak – which instantly brings back memories of Look Who’s Talking Now (shudder – Ed). For those who are too young/don’t remember that 1993 cinematic “classic”, that’s in no way a compliment. I like my dogs without irritatingly chirpy American accents, please.

Once you’ve taken your pup back home, you go through the usual tutorials, showing you how to play and take care of your dog, including an unnecessary prerequisite where you have to take a picture of your face every time you start the game, which has absolutely no point whatsoever. You are encouraged to use the microphone to give your dog a name, and can use it to assign voice commands to tricks. Mercifully, this is entirely optional.

From then on, the real game takes a totally unexpected turn and becomes an adventure, wherein you must solve a mystery left by a long-departed king and his faithful dog, Cosmos. There’s a decent-sized map to explore, objects to sniff out and dig for, and relatively simple puzzles to solve (most of the answers are given to you, but this is a kid’s game, after all). There are also moments where you’ll need your dog’s skills to get past certain barriers, which leads to my biggest problem with PlayStation Vita Pets, and that’s its incredibly slow pace and grindy nature. You need to level up your dog’s abilities by taking part in various mini-games, but you’ll need to constantly replay these very limited and repetitive diversions in order to level up.

You’ll grind and grind until your dog is suitably levelled to get past one barrier, then you’ll soon come to another barrier which needs you to level up a different ability, and the cycle continues. It just feels like extreme padding to a game which, truth be told, wouldn’t be nearly as long if it weren’t for the endless grinding, as well as the incredibly slow pace of pretty much everything, from your walk speed to having to watch your dog’s animations finish before you can interact with things.

Also, I didn’t experience a single session of gameplay that wasn’t ended by some sort of bug or crash that required me to restart the game. There were times when my dog disappeared, or kept walking into a door and stopping me from interacting with anything, which became all the more frustrating when combined with long loading times. And, oh my God, those annoying voices.

VERDICT: There were actually moments where I was enjoying myself with PlayStation Vita Pets, because, for once, here was a virtual pet game that actually seemed to have a point – but in the end that just made the glaring issues all the more maddening. There’s a very good idea in here, but it’s buried under the monotony and the snail’s pace, and while it might be fine for a younger player that really likes dogs, I would hesitate to recommend this. It could have been so much better.

AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.

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Review code provided by publisher.