Dog's Life - Game Review (PS2 game)

I think it’s safe to say there’s no game quite like Dog’s Life . It’s such a weird and original game that takes a fairly common idea; play an animal, and somehow makes it great fun with surprisingly varied gameplay.  It admittedly consists of a lot of mini-games but they’re manageable in number, quite diverse and fun to play so I don’t mind them at all. The game itself is childish but fun and though aimed at young children I’m still enjoying it now, at 22 years old. Whether that’s down to the game or my own immaturity is yet to be decided.

Yeah, you wish the graphics looked this good.

The main plot is surprisingly gruesome for a children’s game; you’re a farm dog called Jake who’s used to living a fairly comfortable life but who has failed to grab the romantic attention of neighbouring female dog, Daisy.  One morning, Daisy is then suddenly captured by a couple of dog snatchers. Jake attempts to save her and finds himself captured along with her and shoved in a cage in the back of a van. There’s a moment of sad realisation as the two captive dogs stare out at each other through the bars of their cages then, as the van goes over a bump, Jake is thrown from the van and the cage breaks open, allowing him his freedom. Unfortunately, Daisy wasn’t so lucky and she is driven off to some unknown location whilst Jake nurses his, most likely permanent, head injury. As Jake regains consciousness he vows to find Daisy and bring her back to the farm, Jake doesn’t know it yet but Daisy’s fate is… spoilers… to be turned into cat food by a dog-hating business owner called ‘Miss Peaches’. Think, the farmer’s wife from Chicken Run or… Mom from Futurama. Only this one turns pet dogs into cat food, which is kind of worse than the Chicken Run premise if you think about it. You’ll be playing Jake as he journeys to find out where Daisy’s been taken and to rescue her from her grisly fate.

Gameplay

Storyline aside, now that you’re a dog you get to do lots of new, dog related things. If you were unable to this would be a pretty rubbish game so it’s great to see that the developers went overboard with the dog activities. You can dig holes, beg for food, bark at cats and chickens, mark your territory, use your snout to track down things, knock over bins to snuffle about for any scraps, play tug of war with other dogs… there’s a fair bit to do and it’s a great laugh to bumble around like an idiot mongrel. There is, of course, stuff to do to progress with the storyline and it generally revolves around bones, pretty appropriate for a dog I guess. Despite there being only three main places you’ll visit; the rural place, the ski resort and the city there’s a lot more to explore than that. Each of these three places are divided up into smaller areas and each of these smaller areas have missions, mini-games and its own local dog that comes with its own special ability. Local dogs are important; you’ll compete against them and you’ll also need to befriend them by impressing them with your doggy skills. Take a rural area that consists of a lake and a lumberjack’s home; he owns a Dalmatian dog that is remarkably good at swimming, living by a lake and all that. By befriending this Dalmatian you get to possess him and nab yourself a bone that only Speckles can retrieve. 

Now this is more like it.

Collecting bones isn’t just about your own personal gluttony, it’s actually an essential gameplay component because you need an increasingly higher number of the meaty treats to access new areas and thus progress through the storyline. As you enter different areas the local dogs will also have a greater number of bones, meaning that they’re stronger than you and will not only be harder to beat in challenges but will be un-controllable until you have more than them. You can grab bones by completing mini-games that consist of stuff like territory capture, tug of war, races, pursuit challenges and other things like that. Another way of earning bones is by helping out humans as you progress through the game, each area has two or three humans that need help with something or other.  The missions are all fairly different from one another though retrieving something is a pretty common theme such as filling a basket with eggs scared from chickens so some local kids can pelt a butcher, fetching someone’s runaway kittens whilst trying not to let the other ones escape and finding a lost axe by following the scent footprints of the lumberjack. Sometimes bones are found hidden in special places or are buried underground and to find them you’re best off using your nose.

Dog’s Life features a pretty cool feature where you can go into first person perspective and see the world as different coloured scents on an otherwise muted background. This is appropriately called ‘Smello-O-Vision.’ Some scents are hovering about in the air where the colour of the scent means it’s for a different purpose. For instance, collecting four red ones will start a ‘simon says’ type mini-game whereas collecting all 50 purple scents of an area will give you another precious bone.  Smello-O-Vision also shows up the footprints of dogs and humans which are useful for following where they have recently gone.

Totally realistic representation of what dog vision.

 Each area has around 8 or 9 bones to collect, four scent related challenges, a couple of hidden ones and the rest will be set by missions. Everything is all fairly manageable and you won’t feel swamped with the task of completing everything since you can easily bypass several tasks if you want to just get into a new area. This is especially useful if you find one of the challenges particularly difficult as you can usually skip over it and just make up your bone numbers elsewhere, so no big deal. You can keep progress of how many bones you’ve collected in one area and how many are left to collect by checking in the main menu, which features a scrap book of areas along with everything you need to know.

Despite it not being difficult you’re not free to do whatever you feel like at no danger to yourself, Jake can take damage. If you’ve taken damage you’ll know about it because Jake will plod about slowly with his ears down and his whole body slumped, he’ll be unable to jump effectively which makes continuing on in this fashion basically impossible. If you can’t be assed to beg for food you can usually find more by knocking over bins and boxes or stealing it off meat counters in the town and city regions. In these more built up regions there are these weird little salons where you can undergo a fairly intensive grooming session so Jake looks all clean and shiny. By running about so much you get a lot of mud and dirt up you so sometimes it’s nice to freshen up and get a new collar design. In the rural areas you can chase chickens and, if you’re feeling particularly barbaric, pick them up and shake them until their feathers fall off and they drop a dog treat (no, I don’t know why either). You save the game by sleeping in a dog house that also conveniently comes with a bowl of dog food beside it that you can munch on if your earlier scrounging activities didn’t produce anything to eat. Overall, there are a lot of dog related interactivity bits included in the game but the core portion of gameplay is the mini-games and the collection of bones.

Controls

Though the game is, by no means, hard, that’s not to say it isn’t without it’s difficulties. Dog’s Life is one of those games where you need a very fine hand on otherwise awkward to manage controls, when you’ve only just started playing you’ll find that the camera has a mind of its own and you’re your movements are less than smooth. Jumping from ledge to ledge a bloody nightmare and it’s very easy to overshoot, causing Jake to fall off and get hurt. The camera is diabolical and seems to have a mind of its own. It can be operated by the right analog stick and looking up and down is pretty extreme; straight up at the sky or down into the mud but you do get used to it after you’ve spent enough time in the initial area.  You’ll probably find that the easiest way to manoeuvre certain parts of the game, especially tightly confined areas, is to just go into Smell-O-Vision since it offers you a first person perspective.

Jake jumps like he’s drugged and runs like a drunken maniac so, combining the two, does make for some very interesting situations. When you’re trying to do all this, when it’s timed, during a race, you may find yourself getting frustrated at Jake’s sluggish and sporadic movements. Admittedly though, it is a fairly realistic representation of a dog’s movements if my pet Labrador is anything to go by. The controls are otherwise easy to manage though; button taps for interactive things and the D-pad for things like sitting, laying down, performing tricks and relieving yourself. The multiple of tricks you can learn are all listed for you in the menu so you don’t have to remember them all which does make things easier.

Graphics and environment

So let’s talk graphics, it’s a PS2 game so the graphics aren’t exactly beautiful to look at but, baring in mind this came out in 2003, they’re fairly reasonable. Around the time there were better graphics available for PS2 and this one is just slightly above the level that PS1 was working at but, frankly, the graphics aren’t terrible and they get the job done. The game looks bright and fun, it’s a very vibrant and colourful game and the dogs are really well designed so you can tell the different between the breeds really easily. There’s quite a lot going on in the areas so the game doesn’t feel at all bare, every area has features that are appropriate to it and, overall, everything is quite detailed.

I mean that's not too bad is it?

It can’t be ignored though that everything is a choppy, non-textured and straight edged and that the humans in the game look hideously blocky and malformed.  For what it is however, the graphics are adequate and there are nice efforts made in certain areas like deep snow, fish jumping and visibly swimming in a lake and little critters running about between the trees. Overall, the graphics are reasonably suited to the kind of game this is and you probably won’t care that the people look like they’re made out of cardboard and the grass looks like cheap carpet. 

Oh my GOD. I take it back!

So as I've mentioned the game consists of three main areas; Clarksville, Lake Minniwahwah and Boom City. Lake Minniwahwah is a ski resort, Clarksville is a rural area  and Boom City is just that; a city. Each of these three main areas are divided up into smaller areas like districts and farms and this makes the environments genuinely different and interesting. Lake Minniwahwah has plenty of snowy areas with icy lakes and terrain that is both frustrating and painful, especially when you have a time limit on collecting scents on a huge, very icy, lake. 

Music and audio

The dialogue in this game is reasonably funny, if you’re not taking the game too seriously. There’s quite a lot of toilet humour since it’s aimed at younger kids and since dogs are filthy creatures. If you’re not into that then you can easily bypass it as it’s not a constant in your face type deal, just now and then there are some pretty gross things going on. The game has funny bits of audio that often have underlying adult themes, for example a sleeping grandpa will wake up when you bark at him exclaiming various things like, “no officer I found her like that, dressed up in this shiny tight red… oh, hello Jakey...” Jake often breaks through the fourth wall as well, exclaiming things to the player like “I lost? Are you playing with oven gloves on?” which keeps the tone light and humoured, if anything this isn’t a game that takes itself too seriously.

You can gamble! Not really, this isn't a Rockstar game you know.

The voices could be a lot better; Jake’s voice doesn’t suit him in the slightest and the voice acting is pretty bad but, after a while, you get so used to it you stop noticing. The dialogue is generally pretty cheesy and sometimes repetitive and annoying but usually people have a multitude of different lines so unless you hover around them for long periods of time, you won’t notice the receptiveness. Everyone has a voice though, if that’s a good thing, and even the average Joe in the street has something to say. Though they’re only really voiced to respond to your actions like whether you’re pissing on their leg or pawing at them for food. As a point of interest, a voice actor has literally got the record for the most characters voiced by one person; 32 characters were voiced by Kerry Shale so in that sense it kind of makes sense why some of them sound so… unusual.

The music itself is quite pleasant and offers a nice background buzz that’s non-intrusive and varies from area to area. The music is always well suited and pleasant as a backdrop to the gameplay and tends to have a happy, carefree vibe to it that’s appreciable during play.

Overall

This game is genuinely fun and quirky to play and can give you a surprising number of hours’ worth of play if you do everything and don’t bomb through the storyline. It’s a great game for younger players as it provides reasonably challenging and diverse gameplay with the unique feature that you’re a dog, able to do dog related things. The storyline is reasonably engaging and the ending is worth seeing, given the grotesque nature of Daisy’s fate should you give up halfway through the game. Although the mini-games sometimes repeat on themselves it somehow doesn’t get repetitive and boring but instead manages to maintain originality by mixing things up a bit in new environments and with new challenges. The audio could be a lot better and the graphics are a bit dire but if those things don’t mean the world to you then you’ll manage just fine with them the way they are. Nowadays this game is super affordable to buy and is really worth the money if you fancy a jaunt about in this weird little game. If anything, it’s a great way to relieve stress and frankly, just talking about it makes me want to play it some more. 

Score – 6/10  

Gumball before you leave?

If you're playing this game or thinking of playing it then maybe you'd like to use the cheats or hints available for Dog's Life, found here.