NOKIA GAMES

Dogz for N-Gage is a puppy simulator, supposedly related to the long-running "Petz" range of PC games, but in reality this version of Dogz has absolutely no connection to the originals. This is more like a very poor attempt to copy Nintendogs.

You start by choosing a dog from three breeds (Labrador, Jack Russell, Shiba Inu), and for some breeds you can choose a colour too. You give it a name and take it home.

There then follows a laborious tutorial process where one feature of the game is introduced at a time, after which you have to exit and restart the game if you want to find out about the next feature. However, by the time you've finished the tutorial you've also exhausted all the gameplay that Dogz has to offer, and there isn't really much more to do or explore, because none of the game's activities have any lasting appeal.

The gameplay is made up of a few basic tasks, all of which require little or no skill:

- Feed Or Water Your Dog: Put a bowl of food or water on the ground, the dog consumes it. It doesn't really matter if you do this though, as it takes a very very long time for the dog to notice anything amiss.
- Stroking Your Dog: Click on the dog, then click on various parts of its body. Nintendogs-style glitter appears.
- Throwing A Frisbee Or Ball: You throw the frisbee or ball at a certain angle and power, the puppy goes to get it and returns it to you. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that Gameloft have dared to use the word "Frisbee", which either means they've paid for the licence or they'll be receiving a knock on the door from Wham-O's lawyers very soon.
- Digging For Treasure: You mark a spot in the garden or on the beach and the dog digs there. You will either find a gift (some kind of food, frisbee or ball), or the dog will point in a particular direction where you can try digging another hole.
- Going To The Vet: The vet says your dog is fine, even when the game's indicators say that the dog is starving and thirsty.
- Tug Of War: You pull on one end of a rope, the puppy pulls on the other, and you have to keep it going as long as possible by watching a strain meter. The longer you keep it going, the happier the dog becomes.
- Playing With Other Dogs: There's a beach next to the house which always has another dog on it, and in theory you can take your dog there so they can play together. In reality it's just two dogs running around and occasionally running through each other (yes, through, it seems that the developers forgot to put any solidity into their 3D engine).
- Washing Your Dog: You click and move a soap bar back and forth over the dog, then a shower head, then a brush.
- Picking Up Dog Mess: If your dog does a poo, you click on it.
- Swimming Pool: Your dog swims through a swimming pool while trying to avoid moving inflatables. Press the direction pad button to go down, let it go to go up. If you touch an inflatable you lose. Incidentally, when you do touch an inflatable the game plays an animation which implies the dog is drowning, and may upset younger players.
- Slalom: Similar to the "weave poles" of dog agility, you have to steer your dog through the correct sides of a row of wooden sticks by pressing up and down on the direction pad. It's not quite like real life though, especially as some of the poles move about.

None of these activities are things you would want to return to after playing them once. It takes a few minutes to try each one, so there's a total gameplay time of about 30 to 40 minutes for Dogz, and all of that is pretty dire gameplay too.

What makes it even worse is the really clumsy interface, which has a constant row of icons at the bottom of the screen that have to be reached either with * and # or by scrolling the pointer to the bottom. The camera angle also demands a lot of attention so you can see where you're supposed to be doing something. The default settings on Dogz make it difficult to play in horizontal mode on slider phones (N81, N95 etc) as you can't reach the camera controls so you're forced to use the keypad. You can redefine the keys though.

Graphics & Sound

The still screenshots of Dogz give the impression of a reasonably pretty phone game, but the truth is rather disappointing. Yes, the locations are in 3D, but it's jerky and the camera is at an atrocious angle most of the time. To add insult to injury, you can ony change the angle left or right incrediblyslllllooooooowwwwwllllyyyy, with no option at all for up or down. The camera angle is so narrow that it's often very difficult to see where your puppy is, or even just see the current location properly. Sometimes the camera puts you behind a fence or other object so you can't see anything.

The graphics are also very deceptive as they show lots of objects that you cannot interact with at all. For example, if you try to throw a ball from one side of the garden to the other it bounces off invisible walls before it gets anywhere near the edges, so despite the large location you are effectively stuck within a small box.

Of course the graphics star of games like this is the dog itself and its animations, which are supposed to be as sweet as possible. They're okay as far as they go, but there aren't really enough of them, and watching the dog playing gets boring very quickly. It spends most of its time walking round in circles, which is pretty much how the player feels about this game.

Sound consists of awful, dreadful music. It seems they've tried to ape the soundtrack from Nintendogs and Animal Crossing, but the result is unlistenable. There are occasional sound effects but nowhere near enough, and this reviewer kept the sound switched off most of the time.

N-Gage Arena

There's an online rankings table, but the score you upload is just a measure of how often you've done the game's activities. If you throw the dog frisbees lots of times you'll get a higher score, it doesn't matter if they catch it or not.

TV & Keyboard Test

Some N-Gage-compatible phones (e.g. Nokia N82, N95, N95 8GB, N96) have a TV Out feature which lets you connect the phone to a television set. This can be used for playing N-Gage games, or for any other phone function.

All N-Gage phones are compatible with Bluetooth keyboards that use the HID Bluetooth standard, and such a keyboard can be used to control games or any other phone function.
Dogz through TV Out runs without any problems, though a lot of the textures do look very pixellated when close to the camera. The dog's shadow is especially bad, but the dog itself looks good, quite detailed and high resolution.

Our Bluetooth keyboard worked fine, the game responded instantly to commands, and the option of redefining the keys in Dogz allows you to alter the controls to suit your keyboard.

Overall

Dogz is quite simply the worst next gen N-Gage game released so far.

N-Gage's other puppy simulator Sims 2 Pets has fast, smooth and pretty graphics, good camera angles, okay sound, an excellent intuitive interface, but suffers from a severe lack of things to see or do. You can read our review of it by clicking here.

Dogz has jerky and slow graphics, annoying camera angles, poor sound, an awful interface, and has an even greater lack of things to see or do. It's a worse game than Sims 2 Pets in every way.

It's a mark of how boring and unimaginative Dogz is that its point pickups are things like playing frisbee thirty times (80 points) or uploading your score fifty times (200 points).

Pet simulators aren't meant to have conventional gameplay of course, but they are meant to offer at least something to occupy the player's time. Games are meant to entertain, but Dogz doesn't. It feels a chore to play and there aren't really any rewards to unlock or things to customise. Nothing develops, nothing changes, there's no progression or genuine interaction with your virtual pet.
As a real life dog owner it's also very frustrating to see this game, like Sims 2 Pets, perpetuating the myth that a dog must be punished to be house-trained. For most dogs it's far more effective to use positive feedback, i.e. reward the dog when it does its business in the right place, and ignore it completely when it does it in the wrong place. (The same technique works for potty-training humans, interestingly enough.)
Dogz' lack of any kind of gameplay will put off most children and adults, and the difficult controls will put off the youngest gamers. It's impossible to imagine anyone getting much joy from this game beyond the first few minutes.

Even the most casual player can probably explore all of Dogz in well under an hour, with absolutely nothing to tempt them back.



download here