![]() ![]() Try to pick up a pup or kitten and there’s a three-second delay before you actually pull it off. It’s not only the feet that feel like they’re locked in concrete. It’s leaden to the point of being a constant infuriation. Our seven-year old daughter who, we should add, played and loved this game inexplicably on PC, ditched it after five minutes because, and I quote, “he’s not moving right, Daddy”. You can improve it in the Options, but it merely upgrades Amnesiac Man to a polystyrene block. Your amnesiac animal shelter dude has the turning-circle of a concrete block. ![]() Get away from the PC and things aren’t much better. Forget the latest Hellraiser remake – this is the true cenobite puzzle box. We could rarely tell where our cursor was button-mapping is almost wilfully obscure (backing out of a menu is a different button each time, and the Build menu expects you to realise – without telling you – that pushing in the analogue sticks will hide and unhide the things you want to build, with them hidden as default) and icons bear little relation to the things they hide. Trying to navigate this knotty thicket is near enough impossible, and it’s a lesson in how not to design interfaces. You need it when you’re shopping for dogs (which, by the way, never feels comfortable, since you’re often picking the nicest, least troublesome of dogs and cats, which feels back-to-front), setting up dating profiles for them (again, utterly bizarre: nobody actually turns up to shop for a four-legged partner, presumably because Ultimate Games didn’t fancy modelling human people), extending the shelter’s grounds, and purchasing the odd litter tray and syringe. To do almost anything in Animal Shelter Simulator, you need to use the shelter’s PC. If there are two things you don’t want to get wrong in a simulation, it’s them. Take that Bezos! Then you’re making the animal as comfortable as possible, which – to start with – means feeding, watering, stroking and playing.īy this point, you will have been fully exposed to the two huge, great dane-sized issues that Animal Shelter Simulator has: its interfaces and its controls. You get your choice of dog or cat (don’t worry, you’ll get them both eventually), which you can order off the internet and have it arrive in the space of seconds. So, when your amnesiac dude wakes up in his new Animal Shelter kingdom, their first job is to adopt an animal. Having played the rather good-looking Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories recently, we can’t help but feel that there’s another path for these kinds of games. ![]() They’re all sharp-lined buildings and dead-eyed characters. When you buy any of those firefighting/police/fishing/airport/mechanic/etc sims, there’s an uncanny realism that can’t help feeling cheap and floppy, like the sets would fall over if we puffed them hard enough. It’s got the simulator ‘look’ to it, too. We desperately wanted to put up some posters for the cats and dogs, to add some colour, or leave some paint cans out so they could do their own animal-prints. It’s grey, brown and with the odd splash of green. ![]() Coming off the back of My Fantastic Ranch, which was so colourful that it felt like we were wearing Fruit Pastille spectacles, Animal Shelter Simulator can’t help but feel drab. ![]()
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