off-the-wall kind of gaming experience that is generally reserved for overseas
markets. As it stands, however,
the ability to do tricks and relieve yourself is an interesting if not wholly
unsanitary distraction from the game's core of run-of-the-mill repetition.
The game's plot, such as it is, revolves around a country dog named Jake, whose
girlfriend Daisy has been dognapped for Mysterious and Ominous Reasons. Naturally,
it's up to you to guide Jake in a third-person perspective through the various
locations and levels to find out who took Daisy and why. However, doing so is
actually far less interesting than the initial gameplay might suggest. In order
to progress through the game, you have to earn bones - the game's currency - by
activating various quests and mini-games in one of two ways, the first being the
simple act of "talking" to any one of the quest-giving individuals just standing
around a level. Quests activated in this way often doing something within a certain
time limit, like fetching batteries or sheets of music, keeping certain dogs or
birds at bay, and so on. These quests tend to encourage a certain amount of exploration,
and are usually the more entertaining ones to push through, sometimes even requiring
some very basic problem-solving.
The second way to activate quests and
mini-games is by using Jake's apparently patented Smell-O-Vision, which switches
you to first-person perspective. From this vantage point, the world appropriately
becomes black and white, which allows you to clearly make out the various colored
smells that litter the surface of the gameworld. By running over these smells,
you "collect" them; collect all the smells of a given color, and you enter into
a specific type of mini-game. For instance, collecting all yellow smells in an
area may activate - yep, you guessed it - a peeing contest with the area's resident
pooch. Other smells activate digging contests, tug-of-war, treat races, and so
on. With perhaps the exception of the treat races, all of these mini-games involve
little more than rapid, non-stop button-mashing in order to push Jake to act faster
than his opponent. The hitch with these is that each opposing dog for the area
has a certain "bone rating", and unless you've got a nearly equal or superior
number of bones than your opponent, you're not going to be able to beat him. This
means that in order to defeat certain opponents in these types of competitions,
you're going to have to run around, completing quests and mini-games in other
areas before being able to even consider beating them. The "collect the upgrade
before trying to access this area" dynamic is often seen in these types of games,
and the way it was adapted to this particular game works well enough, though it
doesn't exactly remove the monotony of doing the same thing over and over, from
area to area. As a result, the core gameplay feels rather dull and repetitive.
Now, while it might sound as though Dog's Life is perhaps less
than impressive, one should keep in mind that it is intended for children. The
criticisms offered above aren't exactly from someone within the target age group,
so consider that if you've been considering picking this one up for a son or daughter,
brother, or younger cousin. What you should also keep in mind, however, is the
extremely bizarre, dark undertone that the game has. As previously mentioned,
there's a mystifying, almost psychologically fascinating obsession with fecal
manipulation, not to mention any number of other strange items, such as an incident
where your efforts to help a farmer (who actually uses the word "crapulous," incidentally)
end up leaving you the target of a band of rogue crows who will violently and
continuously crap on your head any time you enter the area. Another particularly
odd incident occurs when you're tasked with helping to provide eggs to some neighborhood
children, so that they can then throw those eggs as hard as they can at the local
butcher's crotch, for no reason whatsoever. What's more, you actually see the
action from the egg's perspective as it soars through the air, only to forcefully
thump into the poor butcher's groin. Hell, the plot even has a Hestonian whiff
of Soylent Green to it. I wish I was making all this up. It's all rather
mind-bendingly odd, and quite frankly, a little subversive. To see this kind of
thing in a supposedly wholesome kid's game about a likeable, friendly dog is not
unlike watching Sesame Street, only to have the Count interrupt his obsessive-compulsive
actions and take a giant dump on his palatial dinner table, and then start muttering
under his breath about how he'd like to kill Big Bird so he can eat him, and thereby
absorb the Yellow One's power. Then he goes back to counting. That's more or less
how jarring the sudden moments of bizarre darkness are in Dog's Life.
Of course, there are other elements to the gameplay, such as the graphics and
sound, though neither of these really bear too much discussion, as neither has
a particularly significant impact on the experience. Given, the movement animations
for the dogs are actually fairly impressive, which is easily counterbalanced by
the hideous textures and nearly illegible menu screens. The same goes for the
sound effects and music, which are middling to fair. The only truly comical aspect
of the sound comes with the voice acting, which is humorous without ever intending
to be. The voice actor for Jake is decent enough, though when he looks at the
camera and mutters, "Mmmm, bones," and proceeds to make drooling noises, it's
awfully difficult to not picture some guy in his mid-30s dribbling onto a mic
in some studio somewhere.
Overall:
4/10
Ostensibly a kid's game, Dog's
Life is currently being marketed towards children and adults with child-like
spirits and a love of dogs. This is a somewhat deceptive approach, as the marketing
should instead be focused upon fecalphiliacs who enjoy repetitive, rote gameplay
and would like an innocent-appearing virtual forum in which to practice their
obsession. I suppose, however, that this would make for a much more difficult
ad campaign, however representative it might be of the gameplay. To be fair, the
underlying theme of all things crapulous isn't the dominant one here; however,
it is a significant part of an entirely bizarre videogaming whole, which is equal
parts grating repetition and ungodly, unexplainable strangeness. As an actual
kid's game, it is somewhat questionable, though probably rather harmless. As a
game for anyone else, Dog's Life is a fascinating curiosity, a schizophrenic
wolf in lamb's clothing. If you want to be able to say that you've crapped, farted
and urinated in videogame format - even Postal 2 was only able to nail
two out of those three bodily functions - then you may wish to give this strange
little beast a rental.
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