The world of a dog is pretty simple and the only things that the main dog, Jake, cares about are: bones, food, and his favorite girl dog, Daisy. Everything was copasetic in Jake's world until Daisy gets dognapped and Jake is off on an adventure to get her back. This takes him through farms, towns, and ski slopes as he follows the clues and gets plenty of bones along the way.
In every area of the game there are a few different quests to complete, each providing a bone as a reward. If dog's love anything in the world, it's a good bone and Jake is willing to do anything to get one. To find most of these bones, it's necessary to enter into Smellovision where the camera goes into first-person perspective and odors in the world are represented by colorful clouds. All of the humans leave a scent trail and buried bones are shown by a glowing orange cloud. The real challenge, though, is in collecting a set number of one color scent to initiate a challenge.
One of the colors in each area will reward a bone to the nearest doggy bowl immediately, but the other colors will start a challenge with a local dog. These can be simple racing challenges or, our favorite, a pissing contest where each dog tries to claim the largest amount of area by peeing everywhere. Other contests include tug-of-war, a digging contest, and a Simon Says challenge, but it was definitely the peeing that caught our hearts and minds, so to speak.
Once a challenge is completed, Jake can then take control of the defeated dog for a limited time and explore the environment in a different way. This can be done just for the fun of it or even to help recover a bone that Jake couldn't get on his own. For example, in one of the early levels Jake couldn't fit through a tiny doggy door that another one could. By swapping dogs, the little dog could get the bone and bring it back. While we loved collecting all the bones this way, it was just fun to run around with a different pooch and see the world a little differently. Either way, it's a fun way to play with different dogs.
All in all, the basic gameplay of controlling the different dogs and completing different quests is simple and well-executed. There can be some difficulty in tracking down all of the different scents in order to get the bones sometimes, but this is just a matter of persistence and roaming around as much as possible to discover everything. While this can be a bit of a hunt, we rarely felt that the developers put anything in impossible to find spots and that the design did make sense.
The only downsides to Dog's Life are the graphics and the sound. The visuals look like the game was ripped from a PSone title and the audio is all over the place. Countrified electric guitar gives way to thumping techno and the voices are some completely accidental comedy in their own right. It's a bit of a rough treatment overall, but with the goofy gameplay intact, kids shouldn't have too much of a problem with it.
The only big complaint that we have about the game is that the presentation is pretty horrible. The pause menu shows the current status in the pages of the book and shrinks down the information into complete and total squinting territory. Flip the page to the set of moves for the dog and it gets even worse. A couple of the moves were a process of trial and error. It was a hassle, but since we only rarely had to deal with it this problem is pretty bearable.
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