Touch Pets Dogs is for the animal lover in you. It's also for the little person inside your heart who wants to dress up your dog, but doesn't want to risk getting both hands stapled by a pair of angry jaws.
Touch Pets Dogs plays a great deal like Nintendogs, the 2005 pet sim title that launched the Nintendo DS's popularity into the stratosphere. Touch Pets Dogs doesn't quite compliment the iPhone the way Nintendogs pulled down the barrier between gamer and console with the DS's touch screen, but there is a lot to do, and a lot of fun to be had. Just be prepared to continuously trickle money into the game if you want to experience all of it.
Touch Pets Dogs lets you adopt up to five puppies from various popular breeds, including German Shepherds, West Highland Terriers, Portuguese Water Dogs, Labradors, Dachshunds, and even Robodogs. You do all the things with your virtual pup that you'd expect to do with a real dog: you throw sticks, play with toys, feed him, groom him, pick up his mess, and make that no-good lazy bum get a job. Oh, and you shop for various outfits and trinkets that you use to deck him out like a Christmas tree. Of course.
Please, please please… do not try this at home.
Touch Pets Dogs is free to download and play. You start the game with your doggie, a few bags of food, and a pocket full of “Puppybux.” Puppybux will buy you accessories, toys, treats, new dogs, and the tools they need to embark on careers. Strangely enough, Puppybux won't buy you new food. Kibble is purchased through the “Puppy Master,” who will slide you a few bags of food in exchange for real life money—the same money you use to pay your rent and buy pizza and beer.
A dollar will net you ten bags of food, plus eight “bonus” bags. There are package deals on the App Store that will net you the game, plus several dozen bags of food. Seems reasonable at first, but these dogs zip through their rations fast enough to make a sonic boom. The more you play with them or work them, the more food they consume. If you run out of food, your dog goes to sleep and won't wake up until you make with the horsemeat.
There's also the matter of Puppybux being difficult to earn. If your dog is exceptionally happy, the Puppybux start rolling in. Making your dog happy is easy enough: by petting him and playing with him, you build up various stats, which are also useful when he seeks out a career. If you keep those stats high, you get paid. Unfortunately, you only get a few bucks at a time, and most items in Touch Pets Dogs cost thousands.
You're under arrest for naming me Fido.
The idea is to grovel at the feet of the Puppy Master once again, and exchange bowls of food (in other words, real life money) for several thousand Puppybux. So what if your dog is in a permanent anti-food coma? He still looks adorable in his little police hat.
Grooming your dog for a job as a rescuer, scientist, policeman or politician(?) is the highlight of Touch Pets Dogs. When you meet certain requirements, you can send your canine to answer pleas for help. You even get a snapshot of the mission to post on Facebook and flaunt in front of your friends and their boring regular pets. But missions require significant stat build-up and “career tools,” which cost—you guessed it—thousands of Puppybux.
Really though, the dogs are pretty adorable (once we got past the slight creepiness of their biiiiiig eyes) and a lot of fun to train and interact with. If you're dying for a super-portable Nintendogs experience and you're okay with dishing out money for food, Touch Pets Dogs is worth fetching.
10 Comments
I thought we agreed with Eliminate that we would review based on the game, not the pricing model?
Well, the pricing model for TouchPets really took away from the game in our opinion, so it was unavoidable.
I think that's a fair goal, to try to put the pricing model out of mind in reviewing a gameunless the pricing model starts to get in the way of gameplay. In Eliminate, you can keep playing without paying, but in Touch Pets the game requires a constant diet of green bucks.
Another poor review.
Care to elaborate? We are always looking for our readers opinions (feel free to post your own reviews in the user review section as well!).
For the pros, you forgot to mention that this game is free. And for the cons, you mentioned that this would cost you a lot of money if you want to play it for a long time. Firstly, this game lasts longer than all other free games. Compared to the other free games, this would be a 4. Other free games probably last for 5 minutes. So why are you comparing a free game to other paid games and giving it a poor score.
3 out of 4, or "good", is a poor score?
Not everyone wants a game you can play for free but isn't that good. Most people are willing to pay for a fun game. If you wanna play this much it will costs lots of money. That it's basically free doesn't matter if you just wanna play a lot. (sorry for my poor English)
I think ngmoco over thought themselves with this game. The pricing model in Luc Bernards words is "raping the customer." Eliminate is a different scenario as there are servers to maintain and you can still play without paying. This game should just be like any other normal game and have a set price and have unlimited food
I just started playing this game and actually think it's quite entertaining. It seems to work similarly to Vampires, Mobsters, Kingdoms in that you have a pot (in this case dog food bowl) that needs to be kept full, and there are various ways to achieve this. I read elsewhere that you will continue to accumulate food, albeit slowly, even if you don't achieve all the goals (i.e., play with your pet, clean them, find friends, engage in careers). You can also buy food which I'm guessing will become much cheaper as more people sign on to play. Vampire blood has gotten a lot cheaper - and was even being given away constantly a few months ago - and I suspect this was due to gamers (like me) playing less frequently because they didn't want to shell out the bucks for blood.
Back to puppies -- they're much more delightful than vampires and the simulation is excellent. The barking, whining, movements and social techniques of the pups is amazingly believable. (Just try not to become attached!) The interaction with other puppies is wildly entertaining. I find myself reading the feed just for laughs - and when I come across a pup that is "lonely" or "thirsty", we invite him/her over. As an owner, I seem to be getting more points that are leveling me up when I care for pups other than my own, but I don't earn puppybucks. You might want to be judicious about feeding too many other pups, but when you're good to them they want to befriend your own pup. Keeping your own pup happy does earn you some puppybucks, so keep that in mind.
Oddly, this game has made me a little more sensitive to the needs of my REAL dogs (!) and is really good fun. I haven't figured it out completely yet, but look forward to learning exactly how it works. In the meantime, nothing beats the "adorable" factor of TouchPets Dogs.
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