izigame.me

𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋𝐋: ★★★½


𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐒:
- DOGS!! A simple point, but important, nonetheless. When looking at the Steam page for this game, I was sold on concept alone. This game can easily fall into the cozy category because why doesn't want to take care of some cute dogs?
- The art style is absolutely adorable and contributes to the comfy vibe that this game presents. c:
- Gameplay loop. Not even going to lie, the first time I picked up this game, I played for AT LEAST for five or so hours. It's not exactly the most satisfying when you get to late-game, but it's good to pick up between other games as a bit of a palate cleanser!
- Accessibility / options are done wonderfully in this game! There are "minigame simple modes" which act accessibility toggles for each of the minigame options when you play with the dogs. More difficulty options include the time tick rate, disease spread rate, adoption difficulty, and fee scale. I feel like early-game can prove to be difficult, so I haven't really played around with these settings, but they may be helpful for giving late-game equal difficulty! Finally, there is a toggle you can select for the option to euthanize OR send away dogs. While I haven't had to use this mechanic, I feel like this is very important for offering a less intense version for those who want a calmer experience.
- The game (I believe) has been handed over to a different development team than the one who created it. This being said, there are fixes being made, although there's still a ways for it to go.

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒:
- Bugs are... an issue, to say the least. I'm not much of a person to find issues with more minor things, but there are a lot of incredibly noticeable issues. Most of them you can brute force through with a level of inconvenience, at least.
- The gameplay loop does grow a bit stagnant, unfortunately. Early-game feels hectic and a bit chaotic when trying to manage, but then late-game feels TOO slow in comparison. It could just be a me thing, but yeah.

𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐔𝐄𝐒:
Just as a heads up, this section will outline specific bugs I have encountered!
- Staff. One of the mechanics is that you can hire on employees to help tend to the dogs' care needs. They are incredibly helpful when functioning, however, sometimes they will freeze in place for entire days at a time.
- Playroom. When putting dogs into a playroom, sometimes the counter will not acknowledge the input of a dog despite being within the bounds of the room. I have also had dogs get permanently stuck in the playroom and unable to be leashed. I ended up deleting the playroom and the dog was still visible and unleashable just sort of... running around both inside the shelter and out as a ghost dog. Then, MANY days later, he showed up in the area for newly dropped off dogs.
- Adoptions. I had a really weird glitch where the adopters would not leave after being spoken to, but would just stand in the display room and stack atop each other. It only lasted for one day, but still.
- The aforementioned minigame simple modes, most work, but the one for the minigame Itchy Scritch. No matter how many times I toggle it, it refuses to remain toggled.
- Lastly, the building. The connecting of rooms is extremely limiting at this current point, and won't allow you to connect rooms that fit in the front areas. You also can't have a room with doors that connect it to the outside?

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐒:
- Achievements! Personally, I'm a bit of an achievement addict hehe.
- More dog variations. I've seen every breed in this game at this point and they are all adorable. That being said, I can't help but wish for more in a future update potentially.
- More player variations, as well! There's only a few lil guys to be, although I appreciate the unlockable shopkeep with the froggy hat. I'd love some more options, though!
- Once the bugs are resolved... a DLC, perhaps? Despite it's flaws, I really do enjoy this game. I feel like a DLC for cats (and potentially wild or farm critters) could be implemented for sure.

Very buggy, but a charming and fun game. Most bugs will go away if you close the game and open it again. I think it's still worth playing! That being said, I have A LOT of ideas for things that could really really make this game even more engaging!
Some improvements/features I would love to see would be:
- Ability to rearrange things once placed. Seriously, why is this not already in game? I'd love if I could fully rearrange the shelter or at least move the medical/supplies rooms around as the shelter gets bigger and bigger (or at LEAST let me add an additional medical room so I don't have to travel what feels like miles just to bring a dog from the complete other side of the building)
- Making the foster network/dog log, leashed in/staff management, and barkbook/events their own tabs on the computer. There's room for more tabs down at the bottom, so I don't see why they can't have their own tabs.
- The ability to encourage good traits to develop by playing with the dogs or something like that
- Some kind of training minigame
- More floor/wallpaper options (I would adore a little bone-themed wallpaper fr)
- Allow metal upgrades to the run kennels
- Ability to choose the playtime minigame maybe? There could be a tugging toy or in the play pens and maybe if you just click on the dog without anything while loose, it would start the petting game. I think this would pair well with giving each dog/breed their own favorite game (favorite would give the most happiness while others would give 2/3 or half, I imagine)
- More player speed upgrades (that could just be a me thing though, since I like to play at the fast tick speed lol)
- Treats to give dogs to increase happiness (or start the aforementioned training minigame) - there could even be a consequence of making a dog sick if you give them more than 1 in a day or something like that
- 7 hours in, I'm rolling in cash and would love to have some money sinks! Decor for outside kennels, toy upgrades, cute beds or fancier bowls, cute uniforms for employees, front desk/entry furniture upgrades. This could come from another sales NPC or shop even that you can unlock on leashedin
- I'd love to be able to buy advertisements rather than just waiting for a pop-up asking if I'd like to promote fosters/adoptions
- Ability to send an employee or the player character to a timed rabbit hole up to once a day/3 days/week to perform a rescue event to bring back 1 or more injured/sick dogs. Being a rescue could be its own trait as well. Sometimes the shelter is lacking and I'd love to have more control to intentionally find dogs if I'm low (although I've been lacking less since I expanded to 60+ slots and now have around 30ish at a time)
- Search bar in the dog log for traits (or anything, but especially traits. It's not that bad, but it'd be great not to have to scroll through 3-4 pages of dogs to find which ones are intelligent, lol
It's a lot of suggestions, but I also don't think any of these are NEEDS (except maybe rearranging things...), just more things that I really think would make this good game a great one.

I honestly wish I could recommend this game to people. It's very cute and is a decent management sim at its core, and the fact you can switch character models at any time is very nice. Lots of dogs to choose for your companion dog is also fun, and you can switch that out at any time too. The way it rolls out skill points and events is fine, and the skills seem fairly useful with some being some difficult choices of one over the other.

However, unfortunately I think it's biggest sin is that it gets boring real fast. The gameplay loop is the same day in and out, and the story is barely there at all. And while managing it and all the dogs by yourself can be overwhelming, I had so much money for most of the game and I hired some helpers and the only overwhelming thing for most of the game after that point was trying to beat the helpers to the holding pen so I could put the dog(s) into kennels before they got a bath. The foster network was a neat idea, but ultimately I used it like twice and had filled up all eight pages with foster homes.

A smaller nitpick in the vein of it being boring, there isn't really a lot of variety in dogs in the shelter. At one point, someone asked for a lost dog that was an exotic puppy and I had brought them five dogs before finding the right one because they were literally all the same look and everything and had like two different puppy litter drop offs of the same dog type within like 3 days. And while there is a skill to increase the likelyhood of dogs gaining positive traits, I kinda wish there was more to that overall outside of getting lucky and getting a random event to train some bad traits out of random dogs. Also, the special npcs look the same as regular adopters, and on days they both show up it was a guessing game to remember which was which in the time it takes to go look at dogs to show for adoption.

There's also a sort of frustration to the building mode being very bare bones, and the fact you have to destroy, checkout, and then rebuild it to move a room is very annoying. Often I would be trying to set up the play space and because I didn't line it up with the door properly so it was partly blocked, and simply moving it would have been an easier option than destroying it, rebuilding it, and hoping it wasn't put into a similar position. As others have said, I wish there was like the ability to actually rearrange the shelter rooms that are built. You can buy up to ten plots, but I never bought more than two, and it didn't feel like I needed more than that. The dogs were either very frequent with no visitors or no dogs with frequent visitors, so I always had space for more with what I had.

I wouldn't have minded the bugs if they both weren't so incredibly frequent (and often disruptive), and that the only option to report these bugs is a link to join the community discord. Why should I have to join a discord just to report bugs? That just seems counter-intuitive to actually collecting and fixing bugs in my opinion. The bugs that also almost always needed me to reload (one such as all my helpers didn't show up for multiple days despite being in the staff management screen) made me decide whether it was worth it to restart that day from scratch or wait until the next day for the saving function to kick in so as to not to lose any progress on dogs getting adopted. My biggest bug (that I quit the save just to try to send a report for because I hadn't seen anyone talking about) was that my grants, which were already completed, would refuse to roll over/complete and did not let me choose any other grants from week to week. Reloading the save and quitting and opening the game again did not fix this. It literally only fixed itself on the very last week of story mode.

Overall, very sad I don't think I can recommend this to other people. It's cute overall, but the story mode is bare bones and doesn't really connect you with the end scene due to the mechanics and nature of the game, and most of the time once I had the money I pretty much automated everything and found myself with not much to do. This game is full of frequent bugs that cause you to reload the save/game, and with no manual quick save function losing progress was always guaranteed. I got this with a small bundle that was offered alongside a few other games, and I don't think this is really worth getting it at full price if you're really keen on playing this.