Pet Pals Animal Doctor puts players in the shoes of - you guessed it - an animal doctor (or veterinarian). Players assume the role of the new head vet at a snazzy pet hospital, so be prepared to deal with all kinds of animals and their eccentric owners as you delve into the world of animal medicine. In striving for a realistic simulator experience, the medical cases within the game were all created by real vets.
Controlling the game is primarily done through the stylus. Tap once, and you can see the info on the patient or tool, and tap twice to select it -- it is that simple. During the actual medical exam on all the cute patients, the controls range from “tap in the proper area” to “connect the dots” to “hold the stylus within this big circle until the green bar fills up”. Unfortunately, it gets old fast.
Players that think this game will be “Trauma Center: Animal Edition!”, are gravely mistaken. The game is clearly designed with a more intellectual audience in mind, and there are really no adrenaline-pumping scenes. Most cases involve some unseen problem that usually requires an x-ray (don’t get excited thinking you’ll get to see the inside of a puppy, the x-ray is just a tap on the screen at the right moment, and then the game tells you via dialogue what the results were), so this is good news for the faint-of-heart, as there is no blood or gore - game is rated E for Everyone afterall.
Game progression goes something like this: Click the next patient, ask the owner the right questions, treat the patient. Rinse and repeat. Not to mention that the wrong questions are so blatantly obvious, it seems rather pointless. It is not hard to realize that a question like "What is Scruffy's favorite colour" would be a pointless question to ask in a real vet situation.
To take a break from the busy life of a vet, one can play a few games on the office computer. These games consist of a sliding picture puzzle, a memory game and a trivia game. The trivia game is actually really interesting, and has many neat facts about all kinds of animal related content.
Every now and then a random animal will be delivered to the recovery room. It is then the player’s job to make sure all its needs are met. This portion of the game is, sad to say, a joke. Particularly “playing” with the animal to raise its comfort level; the game takes you to a screen, the animal does a weird twitching movement (which is understandable since their leg is always bandaged), and then the meter is full. You don’t even have to touch the screen to make this happen - it feels extremely pointless and tacked on.
Visuals within the game are pretty generic. There is nothing really amazing about them. The animals look cute and strive for a more realistic feel, though they're mostly just lying on the examination table. The office where you select your patients just looks like a typical medical office. There isn’t anything too exciting to see or do, just like if one was really sitting waiting at the vet: tacky paintings, greenish-white tinged walls ... you get the idea.
As for the soundtrack, if one could call it that, there are only about two tracks that just loop as you play. There is the “waiting room” music, and then the “it’s kinda tense - treat the animal” music. These tracks can get old fast, but it’s easy enough to block them out as you treat the animals. One neat thing is they actually have the animal noises: as your patients sit on the treatment table, players will occasionally hear a tense bark, mew, squawk or squeak as the animal waits patiently (no, sadly the animals don’t bite you if they’re scared). If players make too many mistakes in the treatment, the animals’ comfort level will go down, increasing the frequency of these noises.
Pet Pals Animal Doctor has virtually no learning curve when playing on the easier settings. Whether playing the game on easy or normal, the game does not really require any real thought on the part of the player. Just hit the hint button and it literally tells you what to do next - on easy the tool to use next is also flashing. At that point it just becomes a matter of “tap-tap-slide, done”. On hard difficulty, hints aren’t given and tools aren’t lit up, thus making the game frustratingly hard.
