Play fetch: The Game.
Long story short, Jake's, the dog you play as, love interest gets kidnapped so he must come to the rescue. But it ain't that easy, you must get in shape first, and that means collecting bones that make you... perform better? Yeah, the game tells you that the more bones you've got the better you'll perform, but I'm not sure what that means. Maybe it makes the other dogs' AI dumber? I dunno. Oh, and all throughout the game, you'll be able to hear Jake's thoughts, and he's quite a silly dog. Quite clearly, the tone of the game matches its silly premise.
Believe it or not, this is a semi-open world game, semi because each area is clearly defined by a loading screen transition, however, you can move around at your leisure. That's right, from the moment you take control of Jake you can move all around town, the only thing that prevents you from moving onward to the next town is a mini challenge vs another dog, the pound's dog, for which you must collect bones to outperform him. The final bone checkpoint in the game requires 90 bones, I finished the game with over 120 and I skipped a few since there were smells I just couldn't find, plus, I'm pretty sure the snowball fight bone got bugged since try as I might I couldn't get my bone.
While most of the game is played under a 3rd person camera, you'll be frequently entering the black-and-white first person mode because of two reasons: Firstly, it's the only way to spot and collect smells(Yes) and secondly, because it highlights important NPCs or bones. Each area has between 7 to 8 bones, one must be dug up after finding it through the first person point of view, one or two are usually lying around the section, 3 or 4 are gained after a smell minigame and 2 are obtained from NPCs. The smell mini-games are triggered by collecting every smell of a certain color. For example, every section has a 50-purple smell bone for you to obtain, that one's easy since you only need to find every smell, however, if you collect 8 yellow smells you'll trigger a... peeing mini-game against another dog, in which you must pee different spots for points. Green smells trigger a race against another dog, red smells are lame 'cause you don't get a bone out of them but rather a new trick, purple is a chase minigame and orange is a tug-o-war minigame.
As you'd expect, mini-games are repeated quite a few times throughout the adventure, but they ain't too bad. The simon-says minigames did get on my nerves though, my memory is horrible. After you defeat a dog for the first time instead of getting a bone you get to hijack their body for a short while. To say that they have different abilities would be selling it too highly, as the other dogs play exactly like Jake, however, you usually need them for one of the NPC fetch quests. Maybe a dog is slightly faster than Jake, won't slip on ice, might swim faster, etc. So you can't really say that you get new abilities. Sometimes they play exactly like Jake but the game requires you to use a certain dog for the fetch quest. There's one hijackable dog per area, so solutions are pretty simple.
NPC quests are, quite appropriately, fetch quests. Most of the time they want you to find something and bring it to them. Sometimes they want multiple somethings, and since you are a dog... you have to return to the NPC with every item you find, since Jake can only carry stuff with his mouth. I don't know if this was a meta-commentary on fetch quests in videogames or maybe one long joke, but they stuck to their guns. There's this particularly egregious quest in which you must help a girl build a snowman... and you have to fetch her FOUR pieces of coal. That's four trips back and forth, not to mention have to find both arms, a hat and a carrot. And this fetch quest is worth a single bone! That said, these quests aren't too bad most of the time, they are quite decent to be honest, but every now and then there's one like this one. It's not like you have to have absolutely every bone in the game, so you can just skip the quests you don't like.
Overall, I'd say the game is fun. I didn't really get tired of collecting smells and finding bones, however, I did give up on a few of the 50 purple smell bones since I just couldn't find one or two missing smells. And while dog minigames are repeated quite a lot, I think they are spread out in a fashion so that it'll be very unlikely to get the same mini-game in two sections that are connected. Thanks to the game's silly sense of humor, the NPC fetch quests don't get too boring either.
As for what holds the game down... let's start with spotty movement, as sometime maneuvering around can be tough, as turning left or right is more cumbersome than it should. The platforming can be super imprecise too, and sometimes it can be hard to aim your jumps where you want them to go, not to mention that sometimes Jake will refuse to jump just because, so you must take a few steps backward.
The health system is pretty awful too. You can't actually die in the game, but you can get hurt, for example, by falling down from a high ledge. Getting hurt means Jake's speed will go down immensely, and now you must either find a bone or a treat. Treats are fairly rare, supposedly you can get treats by begging humans, but every time I tried I got scolded. So I had to slowly make my way to a new bone, sometimes, I had to change locations to find new bones. Saving your game, which is done by visiting a doghouse found at every location, should've have healed you to make things more lenient.
Despite its issues, I found Dog's Life both original and entertaining. There are few, if any, games with a premise as wacky as playing as a dog on a semi-open world collecting flippin' smells. And thankfully, even though it has a few control issues, the game is fun to play, so I'd say that this game is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
7.0
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