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Fun for kids

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: January 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I'm the mom of 2 girls, 5 and 9 who got this game for Christmas.

To start with, basic reading skills are required. Important information is highlighted, and its possible to get the gist of what to do from the highlighted text, but having a reader helps a lot. Characters prompt you to go to specific areas to achieve various tasks. The storyline and gameplay are almost exactly the same as Petz Catz 2, so owning both is a bit repetitive unless you need to play as both a cat and a dog.

There are multiple layers of gameplay. You can change your dogz clothes, you can buy wardrobes for the town's inhabitants, you can unlock new patterns and colors by catching insects and digging up vegetables or flowers. There are mini games to unlock (which can then be played 2 player) But, mostly you need to follow the storyline, and work to save the magic hat from Ivlet.

As the previous poster mentioned, the slow dialogues get tiresome and there is no way to skip them. However, not too far into the game a magic creature appears who teaches you "how" to save. There are then save blocks (and later warp blocks) which can be used whenever you wish. They don't move, or disappear, or become unusable.

My girls feel that this game is excellent, great for any kid and expect long term enjoyment. However, as an adult, they have both nearly met the main objective in a little over a week of rainy vacation day playing. It's cute, its worth playing. You don't need both Catz and Dogz, and I wouldn't pay $50 for it. Amazon's price was great.

Not as described on the game box or the

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 21
Date: April 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my 5 year old daughter. The back of the box described exactly what she likes to do: "choose a puppy and make him cuter with clothing and accessories"; "create a comfortable pet village and guide your lovable bundle of fur through 60 fun adventures"; and "Compete against your friends in mini-games such as racing." Wow is this description ever wrong! I opened the manual and learned the game was actually about defeating an evil wolf (Ivlet) and his evil minion. Through the course of the game "enemy animals are on the way. Ivlet cast an evil spell on the animals in the fields to make them go wild and they will attack you if you get too close to them." Your puppy can actually DIE in this adventure. There is far too much evil, attacking, illness, etc. to make this game fun for a 5 year old girly girl. You can't even dress up your dog until you play the games and earn money to buy clothes - and the first game is "cops and robbers" - again, not suitable for a 5 year old girl. Re-read the product description and look for the mention of the evil wolf. It's not there yet it's the primary mission of the game! I am going to return this game as it is truly not what's advertised.

Laborious, poorly designed, frustating, buggy...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 31
Date: December 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I don't know what this game is like on other consoles, and I don't know whether there would eventually be a payoff in pleasure if you invested enough hours in skill-building, but after an hour of what felt like hard work, my wife and I are ready to dump this thing.

To begin with, the game is full of what I can only call bugs. Not crashes, but frustrating and poorly designed UI elements.

For example, when your character gets close to another dog, a screen prompt tells you to "talk to" that character by pressing controller button A. When you do, you get a linear, preprogrammed, slow exchange of dialog in the form of talk balloons. You have no option except to press button A repeatedly. So far, so good, but when the dialog is complete, you are still in the vicinity of the other dog... and the game again prompts you to talk to the character by pressing button A. If you do so, you are subjected to the identical dialog... with no apparent means of escape... slow talk balloon after slow talk balloon. And when you are finished, it prompts you again.

The game begins with a seemingly endless video preview, with nothing to tell you that you can stop it and begin the game by pressing button A.

The game begins with a very lengthy indigestible bolus of exposition about a magic hat, presented one slow line of text at a time. Your character then accompanies a companion to a police station, where you are subjected to another lengthy chunk of exposition about an evil wolf named Ivlet. At that point, just when you are anxious to begin discovering things about the hat and the wolf, your companion says "Well, let's go back and see Ivlet tonight. For now, let's just go play around Dolphin Point." Meaning: you are diverted from the main thread of the plot and forced to spend number episode in what seem to be training exercises.

Each of them sets you a task, and you have relatively little in the way of options except to get your butt in gear and go off and do what you are told. Even here, things are frustrating. You are told, for example, that you can fish "off a pier." In fact, there are several piers on Dolphin Point, but it is not explained that you can only fish off one of them. If you go to the wrong one you can spend a lot of time pressing buttons and shaking controls trying to figure out how to start fishing, with no help offered. (If you go to the right one, you get an on-screen prompted telling you to press button A to start fishing).

Obviously, some of these exercises are oriented toward acquiring skills and resources that you may need later in the game. Puzzlingly, the resources the puppy is holding are invisible. You do not see the puppy carrying them. You do not even see a graphic onscreen "inventory" of what resources the puppy is holding. Holding and carrying things is a strictly left-brained exercise.

Opportunities to stop and save the game are few and far between, and there seems to be no way to quit except to go on playing until you get to a "save" opportunity. Even so, either the save mechanism is buggy or confusingly presented, as we have had trouble restarting a game from where we left off instead of starting all over from the beginning.

The puppy characters are cute, and cutely animated. They are genuine charming. They are, however, coupled with a completely discordant adventure plot reminiscent of Zork or the Scott Adams games... in an environment with beautiful 3D rendering, but extremely clumsy adventure-game implementation.

A fun game for kids

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: March 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I got this game for Christmas, and I thought that it would be a fun game, and it was. You get to run around the island completing tasks for other dogs. The tasks are fun, except some of them take a while to complete and then they become boring. Moving around is different, because you point and click with the Wii Remote where you want to go instead of using a control stick. This game also does not take very long to complete. I completed it in about 3 days. The ending is disappointing, too, because you cannot save your game after you defeat Ivlet and save Pawville. Instead, after you do that, you go back to the menu screen, and the next time that you play, you are back where you were before you defeated Ivlet.

This game does have variety. There are a ton of different breeds of dogs to choose from when you first start the game. After you choose the dog, you can pick what color you want the dog to be, then its name, and whether you want it to be a boy or a girl.

If you don't want to do the story mode, you can play mini-games instead with another person or by yourself. Story mode, however, is not multi-player.

This is a fun game for anybody who likes dogs, although it does seem like a kids game.

Fun game, too difficult, must read a lot, and horrible storyline.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Bougth this to play with my 5 year old girl, PROS: She loves dogs, loves to dress them, buy clothes for them, interact with other dogs in the game, and truly looks forward to play a little bit everyday. CONS: Storymode is only one player, the storyline is too Eve and the Forbidden Fruit, in that "you" actually disobay authority to release an evil dog from jail that causes all the havock in the town that you have to fix. There is a lot of detailed reading that you must read at every step to your kid. I wish they would have made it cuter. PS: She had nightmares of the evil dog more than one night, I had to skip these scenes.

Fun for kids

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: January 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

My eight-year-old loves this game. She spends hours playing it. She likes creating different dogs and solving the puzzles. As you solve the puzzles, you earn gold points that allow you to buy accessories for your dog characters. She has had some issues saving her characters, and accidentally overwrote an existing one.

It's probably not a great game for adults or older children, but kids ages 6-10 would enjoy it (some reading is required).

Fun game, especially for the price!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I got this game primarily because it had a miniature schnauzer available as a breed(!), but I actually find it fun and a great way to utilize Wii gaming without such fast-paced gameplay as I get with Mario Kart Wii, PES 2008, or Guitar Hero III. The graphics are solid, the different locales in this game are expansive, and the tasks are numerous. Also, this game seems to be very similar in style to The Dog Island for the Wii which came out more recently (both from UbiSoft), so I recommend this one if you want to save some $$$ but get a fun-to-play game at a great value...

Games for kids

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Bought this game for my daughter but she liked the Catz version better. Disappointed that the dog and cat are exactly the same. I would have only bought one, not both. Still very enjoyable for any child who loves animals. I actually played and did have a good time. Took me about 2 hours to beat the game. Nothing hard but my daughter enjoyed watching. We had a great time together.

PET DOGZ FOR WII

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

THIS GAME IS OKAY, IT LACKS ALOT, BUT WOULD BE OKAY FOR A YOUNG CHILD.

Fun but misleading

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

You gotta wonder if the product descibers and the product manufacturers were on the same page. Seven different breeds, mix and match, keep a journal, rewards, etc. all lies! This game starts with you choosing and naming your puppy (And there are about forty breeds to choose from!) and then you guide your puppy through a virtual world according to instructions from others, like, go to Dolphin Coast so we can play. Although other characters talk to you, you have to imagine what your puppy is saying back, to some extent. For example they'll say, "I need some cloth." and your puppy will bark, and they'll say, "Oh, you'll get some for me? Thank you!"

About the plot. As everyone has said, it is about an evil wolf named Ivlet. Naturally, the box neglected to mention this all important fact and made it sound like, "Oh, happy day, la la la, I'll just dress up my puppy and design my village" when it really is so much more than that. You can't "design your village" anyway; what they're referring to is helping to rebuild the village after Ivlet destroyed it; you have absolutely no say in what the building looks like. The only designing you do is planting flowers.

As someone mentioned, this probably would be too violent for a five year old, so maybe you should wait until your child's a little older. However it is extremely mild for a game with a villain (you defeat him by throwing pebbles).

This game can get boring after a while; all you do is run and find people and/or sniff out objects. There is very little variety. Also, at some point the aquarium guy asks you to catch a fish for him in Polar Fields. You apparently have to go to a special dock to be able to catch it. I found the dock and fished for fifteen minutes and I still haven't caught it. Talking of fifteen minutes, there is a really long cutscene near the beginning of the game that takes about that long if you skip the text.

But the worst thing about the game is more of a moral issue. Your puppy is sent by adults into very dangerous situations; although your parents tell you to let the authorities get the Magic Hat back from Ivlet, Beat (Who is supposedly the good side of the magic hat) convinces you to go get it back anyway; worse than that, you are later encouraged by several adults to fight the monster instead of them. The fish the guy at the aquarium wants you to get is to cover up a lie that he'd already caught it himself.

All in all, this is a fun game which can get a bit annoying at times, but don't let your child learn morals from it.

~Russian Blue Witch (RBW)

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