Littlest Pet Shop Winter Review

Written by: Tracy Bosworth Posted: 19th January 2009

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Fancy running a Pet Shop?

Littlest Pet Shop Winter Details:

	Casual
	Nintendo DS
	EA
	EA

Out Now

1-2

It seems that the Nintendo DS just can’t get enough of cute fury animals. It draws in the younger and, dare I say it, ‘girlier’ gamers looking for sweet and innocence rather than the blood and guts of more ’grown up’ titles. The first and most obvious example is Nintendogs which gave you your own puppies to look after and play with. Then we’ve had the various vets games, other virtual pet games and now, the Littlest Pet Shop!

So, the Littlest Pet Shop basically does what it says on the tin, you get to own your very own pet shop where you can buy and trade various cute and slightly anime style animals. There has already been three versions of this game out, Garden, Jungle and now Winter and each version brings with it a certain type of animal. Jungle for instance brings you animals such as monkeys and tigers whilst Garden offers more conventional pets such as dogs and cats. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the Winter addition brings with it the kind of animals you would expect to be mooching around in the snow including polar bears and penguins.

Although the types of animals differ in each version, every Littlest Pet Shop game has a common goal, play mini games, earn ‘money’ and buy in new pets or accessories for your existing pets.

So the game starts off with a tutorial introducing you to the games mechanics and this is when you acquire your first pet. After naming it, your pet is set free in your garden and it is up to you to care for it and keep it happy.

The majority of the gameplay here involves mini-games which offer three difficulty levels. The games range from colouring in a picture (which is strangely addictive!) to more traditional games such as a treasure hunt which requires you to search a garden with a kind of metal detector to find buried treasure.

Depending on your efforts during the games, you are awarded a sum of “kibble” which is the game’s currency. This allows you to buy new pets, toys or accessories for your existing pets such as sunglasses or collars. This in turn, improves your pet’s mood and basically makes your pet shop a happier place!

As your pet shop grows, so does your environment as new areas are unlocked. Starting off with the Pet Plaza, as you progress new areas become available such as the winter area, the garden and the jungle and you can keep up to six pets in each area allowing you to really populate your game with a variety of animals.

It’s fair to say that an average 25 year old man will find no fun in this game at all. It IS a child’s game and therefore can become quite boring very quickly to anyone over the age of 10. The whole point of The Littlest Pet Shop: Winter is to collect as many pets as possible, play with them, buy them things and play a load of mini-games in the process so in order to judge it fairly, the question is: would a child enjoy this game? The answer is Yes, probably. The game is appealing to young children as the concept of gameplay is simple and the player is rewarded for their hard work with new pets which children would probably find enjoyable to collect. The controls are simple, there is little to understand and the game should prove just the right amount of challenge to keep the little ones happy.

Graphically, the game is how you would expect it to be. Bright, cute and cheerful and should definitely please young eyes. The animals jump around happily as they interact with each other and their surroundings whilst the game’s environments are also eye catching and pretty.

The Littlest Pet Shop: Winter does what it intends to do. It gives young gamers the chance to run their own pet shop, collect lots of cute animals and have fun with mini-games in the process. The three difficultly settings should stretch the life of this title out slightly further than it would have been had it only had one setting but I can still imagine the game to have a limited appeal. It’s the type of game that a child would be absolutely obsessed with for a couple of weeks before the appeal runs dry and never touches it again. So in closing, a good little game but with a somewhat limited life-span.!