Here's something a bit different for the log: A little bit of coverage of Little Friends: Dogs & Cats - a title by Imagineering which is the first, and currently only, virtual pet/life-simulator game of any sort on the Switch. It seeks to fill the gap left by Nintendogs not (yet?) having a Switch installment, though unfortunately it falls a bit short.
Compared to Nintendogs (which is something that I will have to do several times here, since it's still the best-in-breed pet simulator for consoles of any sort
), some of the models and movements are unnatural and occasionally uncanny, and sometimes animals will run right through each other. They also won't respond at all if you accidentally poke them in the eye or the nose - ouch!
The flow of the game is unnatural, as well. For example, Nintendogs is a game that has a slow pace, where you can easily slot quick bursts of play into your daily routine alongside, say, Animal Crossing and Brain Training, because all of them run in real-time and are designed for that. Meanwhile, Little Friends: Dogs & Cats is a victim of "Achievements" culture - everything seems to revolve around getting stamps and bits of text that say that you did something or went somewhere, and earning enough money to collect various types of items (whose effects and looks aren't as differentiated or well-detailed as what you would find in Nintendogs) and outfits (which all look a bit awkward when worn by your pets). You get text notifications rather than actually seeing gradual progress and behavioural changes - for example, you don't teach your dog to sit, you'll just randomly be told by a text pop-up that they learned it, after you've carried out several unrelated activities. It also constantly breaks immersion by having on-screen counters for marking and searching spots during walks, and by occasionally displaying giant, brightly-coloured "LEVEL UP!" text above your dog. It doesn't run in real-time, either.
Still, on the plus side, the game
is cute, so here's a look at my German Shepherd, Donna;
Different developers will always take different approaches to the same concepts, and there's nothing wrong with that (after all, I bought this one to see how the devs had approached the concept that Nintendogs popularised, since it's seeking to plug that gap in the Switch's library), but in this case I would recommend waiting for Nintendogs to show up if you want a proper life-simulator for the Switch.
Then I struggled to hold my camera still because I kept laughing while I was trying to take a photograph of him.
