Real Adventures: Pet Vet

"Let's Slice These Damn Kittens"

Alright, here we have the game that everyone has been waiting for. Real Adventures: Pet Vet. It's everything you expected and more. Pet Vet hurtles you into the position of a rookie vet. Astoundingly, it also hurtles you into the position of a stand-up comedian. Trust me when I say the dialogue in this game is A+, very memorable and purely astounding. As a vet, you must diagnose injured pets. These pets are like the kid with the runny nose in pre-school. They get sick constantly, and horribly. These pets have broken legs, ring worm, kidney infections and anything else you can think of. Its intense and surreal, to have these lifelike pets thrust into your arms.

The game is simple. Use magnifying glasses, gloves, x-rays and rectal thermometer's to discover what is wrong with the client's pet. A minus here is that you have to constantly tap hint, because you have no idea what to do. Sometimes, it'll say “I recommend you use the glove on the patient's chest” when it actually means “use the blood test on the patients hind leg”. That is rather aggravating. Also, things like the rectal thermometers can be annoying to use. You have to stop it on the line, and if you miss, your patient loses comfort. Every time you use something incorrectly, the patient loses comfort. Use the stethoscope a pixel to the left? The pet becomes distraught and whimpers. The stethoscope and glove are the two worst instruments in the game. They require you poke circles when they appear. These circles appear for about half a second, and if you don't poke them right, the patient loses comfort. You have to take it very slowly if you want a perfect test score.

The game also has side quests. Renegade pets enter the recovery room. They happen to all have a broken front leg. You must clean their wounds, feed them, clean up their waste and the food you dropped, bathe them and play ball with them. Disappointingly, to play ball, all you had to was tap the screen. I was expecting a Nintendog's approach.

Another downer with the game is the graphics. They are good looking 3d models, but there is little animation. You'll see a tail wag every 10 seconds or so and that's it. Plus, the instruments you use are just cropped images of real medical devices. Which looks crap by the way. And the sound is poorly done. I think there is two music pieces in this game. Each music piece is about 3 seconds long and loops. Over and over and over until it's drilled into your skull. Drilling of skulls does not occur in the game either, unfortunately.

When I received this bundle of joy, my heart wept tears of happiness more pure than that of an orphan finding a loving family. My expectations were that this was an animal version of Trauma Centre. I was wrong. Dead wrong. Actually, I wasn't. There was one balls to the wall intense and heart-pumping mission in which you had to dive into an iguana's leg with a bonesaw and rip out everything you could find. It was the peak of the game. In every other mission though, most of the work is done by asking the patients owner questions, such as “Does Goldy like blue cars?”

Overall, this game would be a masterpiece if it had decent music and a better story. It has three file saves, which is three times better than any pokemon game I've seen at least. And the story is, literally, that you are aiming to become an Ace Vet. What the heck is an Ace Vet? Ace isn't even used in the common language anymore. Jesus Christ, Swell Vet would have sounded more modern. Anyway, you learn real life sicknesses from the game, the dialogue is entertaining and the graphics aren't god awful. Overall, this game is a 10/10.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/08

Game Release: Real Adventures: Pet Vet (EU, 10/12/07)