LifeisXbox’s Animal Doctor review | Time to delve into the world of veterinary practice as you come to the aid of a range of animals that need your help so they can be treated and make a full recovery. During your internship, you’ll venture across a small area to assist customers with their pets and livestock with the assistance and teaching of the animal hospital owner who has taken you on in an internship position. Throughout, you will be instructed to get the necessary equipment for treatment, fetch sick and wounded animals, and even help locals with side quests should you want a break from the main quest line of Animal Doctor. Gaining experience from both main and side jobs will ultimately allow you to make progress in which will allow and unlock access to the next main quest. Animal Doctor is developed by Caipirinha Games and published by Toplitz Productions to provide you with an educational journey and a front-line look at what it means to become and be an Animal Doctor for everyone who has a passion to care, treat, and help injured animals of every kind. Where would we all be without animals?
VicciVulpix played Animal Doctor for five hours on Xbox One S. This game is also available on Xbox Series S/X, Steam, Playstation 4/5, and Nintendo Switch.
What we liked!
- Upbeat background music | Notably, one of the first things that caught my attention when I started playing Animal Doctor was the amazing sense of positivity that comes with the cheery background music. It was the kind of music I could see myself dancing to quite easily because it was full of energy. With the game looking like it’s set in the countryside around the forest and natural areas, I don’t think there could have been a more well-suited background soundtrack to enhance the happiness and optimism than this. Seeing animals frolicking around in front of you. I really couldn’t get enough.
- Positive atmosphere | Along with the background music, we are greeted with the personalities of the various people you will encounter across your playthrough. Everyone has been voiced to sound incredibly friendly and helpful. They always thank you for helping them and give you guidance should you need help knowing where to go. Markers are put on your map so you can always look to see what you are required to do next. It really does set a rather relaxed tone. In my opinion, as I feel Animal Doctor is almost certainly aimed towards a younger target audience, the gleeful ambience is wonderful.
Somewhere between
- Repetitive guidance | Going back to when I said Animal Doctor was probably made more to appeal to a younger target audience, it’s features like this that make me think only children could enjoy this. The game constantly needs to remind you that ‘now the choice is yours’ every single time you finish a quest, whether it’s a main or side one, but I felt that it was pretty self-explanatory the first five times, let alone the twenty or so afterwards. Of course, younger ages need some guidance and that’s completely understandable but I think there was perhaps a little too much of the same thing being said numerous times.
- Inverted controls | Probably something that irritated me more than it would other people was that you could not change the controls so your vertical movement wasn’t inverted. I’ve never inverted my controls and I feel if you design the game to have this built-in as standard, you should be able to change them as with most games. I slowly but eventually got used to them however it did mean that when I switched to my main games, I was struggling to play because I got so accustomed to the inverted setting of Animal Doctor. I just think there should always be an option to change this to the players preference.
- Substandard graphics | The graphics were quite ambiguous in Animal Doctor. I found the environment to be beautiful with the wind blowing through the trees and having the lovely bright grass all around you. The houses were alright, not the best I’d ever seen but overall what let the graphics down were the people and the animals. These both seem like pretty important parts to Animal Doctor as the whole idea is to be spending time interacting with one of the two or both relatively frequently. There could have easily been more detail in the characters and the animals and I think it’s a real shame these elements were not given more attention. It almost feels like two different games dependant on where you find yourself.
What we disliked
- Walking simulator | I dare say that probably over half the time I spent playing, I was walking or riding from A to B or in search of what was required next and it was incredibly dull. It did get tedious and exceedingly boring when you originally thought the idea of the Animal Doctor would be learning, helping, and gaining knowledge to help you pass your internship, therefore, training to become a vet, not training for the next big race you have coming up. You do get a horse to travel around on shortly into the game but this still wasn’t enough to stop the dreary traveling from one place to another with minimal interaction that you’d expect to see coming from a vet.
- Unimaginative gameplay | My biggest issue whilst I was playing Animal Doctor was the poor and unrealistic gameplay that ultimately made me think I was just running errands all the time and not learning anywhere near as much as you would expect. I ended up picking bottles up off a long stretch of road because the delivery driver had lost them and delivering milk/eggs for the local farmers which I don’t believe would be in the job description of a vet. I think the most I did was take some temperatures before being told I’d completed my internship that to me made absolutely no sense. Not only this but all the equipment you had to collect for treatment was just laid out on a table in a back room. Syringes, medication, ointments – this should be stored safely. Maybe I’m being picky but it just looked unprofessional.
- Poor animations | The animations in the game were of poor quality. When people spoke, they didn’t even open their mouths which I find is important so you can be more immersed. The animals barely moved when you came into contact with them, apart from the ones roaming and running the wild forests. When you watched treatments being given to animals, it looked fake as they were often nowhere near the animal. Also, everyone moved like a robot. All in all, Animal Doctor was a huge letdown when it came to looking realistic. Having this improved would have made a massive difference to the game as in the current state, you would not think it had been released in 2021.
- Short game and no replayability | I played Animal Doctor for five hours and completed every quest to finish my ‘internship’. Some of the achievements appear to be bugged as I completed every main quest and reached the max level which are the requirements but a handful still remain locked for me. Other than maybe having to revisit for those achievements once they’re fixed, there really is no reason to return to Animal Doctor as everything can be completed in one playthrough and if you haven’t collected every picture piece, which are the collectibles, you can free roam at the end should you wish to. It’s a shame the game didn’t have more to keep me interested.
CONCLUSION
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Hello, I’m Victoria. I’m from the UK and have been playing video games for as long as I can remember; back on DreamCast. I’ve pretty much fallen for Xbox since I was around eight years old and remember BioShock being my first game on the Xbox360. Although I find it thoroughly enjoyable to not only experience gameplay, I also find comfort in getting lost and engrossed in the online worlds that sometimes differ greatly from what we know. Another side of my Xbox passion would be achievement hunting and gamerscore. I thrive when I hear the little sound of one popping up on the screen and I’m always finding ways to work on my backlog when possible. Horror is my favourite genre so if you have any recommendations, don’t be afraid to send them my way!
