Dogz Review

By Eurogamer staff Published 20 December, 2005

Dogz' dinner, more like.

Version tested: GameBoy Advance

You've got to feel sorry for the creators of the Petz series - all those years spent producing endless pet sims, only for Nintendo to go and nick the idea, do it a whole lot better and make a million billion pounds in the process.

So you can't blame them for attempting to cash in on the Nintendogs craze by releasing Dogz for the GBA, really. But what you can blame them for is releasing what's nothing more than an utterly repetitive, totally unchallenging and ultimately charmless game.

It all begins with a visit to your local pet shop, where you get to choose your new puppy. This involves answering a series of simple questions (you can choose a male or female, relaxed or energetic, and large or small dog) and then picking one of 18 different breeds.

Then you take your new pup home and set about training it to become a good doggy - which is where the fun fails to set in. Your first task is to teach your puppy its name, and this is a matter of pressing the A button. Naturally your dog won't understand what you're on about at first, so you'll need to press the button again, and again, and again, until the question mark over its head turns into an exclamation mark. The end.

Tricky business

'Dogz' Screenshot 1

Little Johnny was horrified to discover that Rover had not survived the journey home.

Things do get relatively more complicated when you try to teach the dog to sit. This time, as well as pressing the A button to issue the command, you can choose to praise or scold your puppy depending on whether it did what you asked. The novelty wears off rather quickly, particularly since puppies seem to forget the tricks they've just learned with alarming regularity.

As a result, training your pet is a tedious experience - as are pretty much all the other tasks you're given. Feeding your dog, for example, involves pressing the A button whilst standing next to the food cupboard. Cleaning up its excrement is a matter of standing next to said excrement and pressing the A button. Hoovering up bits of litter which mysteriously appears in the house from time to time is a matter of getting the vacuum out, by pressing the A button, and then... you guessed it.

What's more, you can't even get on with all these tiresome tasks without being continually interrupted by your blathering parents, who will insist that you join them for breakfast or dinner (during which they will come out with exactly the same lines they came out with yesterday), or go to bed, or go to school (cue the exact same cutscene you've seen before).

Puppy power

'Dogz' Screenshot 2

Look's like puppy's trying to make a break for it. And who can blame him.

As the game progresses, you do get to take your dog for walks, visit more shops, collect new items and so on. But none of this is enough to relieve the general boredom, or to make you forget that you could be playing a much better puppy sim instead.

That said, it's not fair to offer a direct comparison between Dogz and Nintendogs. The elements which made Nintendo's effort so charming - such as the ability to interact with your puppy on the touch screen and teach it tricks via the microphone - just aren't possible on the GBA.

But surely they could have come up with something more innovative than "press the A button"? What about a few more mini-games, for example - as fun as "Puppy Reversi" is, it's hardly gripping after your seventh go. And surely they could have at least bothered to make characters come out with different lines of dialogue, rather than making you skip through the same conversations over and over again. That A button will be worn down to nothing by the time you're done.

All in all, Dogz isn't just a poor man's Nintendogs - it's a fundamentally rubbish game, regardless of the competition. Put simply, there's just not enough to do, and it's so repetitive that it's hard to see how even very young children could be entertained for more than half an hour or so. A game this shallow and lazily designed deserves nothing more than to be slung in a bag full of bricks and chucked in the river. Avoid.

2 / 10

Children's titles are rated out of five to differentiate them from the standard Eurogamer scoring system.

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
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Comments (30) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • MORZTAN #1 6 years ago

    1 out of 5??

    So thats 2 out of 10?

  • UncleLou #2 6 years ago

    Love the first caption.

    Soooooo, is 1/5 really a higher score than 1/10? :)

  • Psi #3 6 years ago

    put this game down with a dog needle

  • Yeevle #4 6 years ago

    Dogging on a weekend sir?

  • UncleLou #5 6 years ago

    Heh, I wrote that before I saw MORZTAN's comment.

  • MORZTAN #6 6 years ago

    Yeah right... ;)

  • Blerk #7 6 years ago

    Would Nintendogs have been an 'out of 5' review, then?

  • itamae #8 6 years ago

    /scolds

    /scolds

    /scolds

    /scolds

    /scolds

    Virtual killing machine, ready to go!

  • Nillsens #9 6 years ago

    I'm sure when they release Catz it will be much better.

    Just press A twice each session, let it out once, wait half an hour, let it back in. Maybe even press A a third time to feed it if it hasn't successfully killed all the garden life.

  • jonnyreb #10 6 years ago

    "As a result, training your pet is a tedious experience - as are pretty much all the other tasks you're given"

    Sounds a bit like when I was training my Whippet...........

  • thesnowman #11 6 years ago

    Sad thing is it might even sell since nintendogs is so fooking hard to get a hold off.

  • Markusdragon #12 6 years ago

    It doesn't use the graphical style first developed for the 3D fighting game 'Ballz', therefore if you ask me, it aint Dogz.

  • MORZTAN #13 6 years ago

    Imagine a petting-sim called Ballz...

    Now thats a mature Nintendo
    Edited by 1 at 20/12/05 @ 10:28

  • Kiigan #14 6 years ago

    "Children's titles are rated out of five to differentiate them from the standard Eurogamer scoring system."

    That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

  • Yeevle #15 6 years ago

    "Children's titles are rated out of five to differentiate them from the standard Eurogamer scoring system.

    That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."



    Actually no, reading the review should be enough. On a scale of 1 to 10..... wtf?

  • Cyhwuhx #16 6 years ago

    .::: Actually this game has very little to do with the Petz series. It's a Japanese pet-game UB simply brought over here to slap Dogz on it. It's not incredibly bad, and after completing the main game you get an 'always-together' mode allowing the boring school-parts and such to be stripped out. The catch being that the pup won't be able to learn anything else, so you need to train it before unlocking always-together, giving the entire game a (slightly) more strategic feel.

    As such, it's far more a real game than nintendogs, which will suit some people far better than others. Combined with the rather nice graphics it's certainly not-as-good-as, but it's far from the ultimate disaster the 1/5 makes it out to be.
    Edited by 1 at 20/12/05 @ 11:52

  • Chtulie #17 6 years ago

    Maybe they should've made it for the PSP?

  • smelly #18 6 years ago

    1 out of 5??

    So thats 2 out of 10?


    OH FFS. Give it a rest, you sad geeks!

    Read the review, look at the score. It's a shit game thats not worth buying. Thats ALL you need to know!!!

  • MORZTAN #19 6 years ago

    OH F, yourse... no, better not start
    Edited by 1 at 20/12/05 @ 13:42

  • UncleLou #20 6 years ago

    lol, smelly, you've got a lot to learn. :)

  • smelly #21 6 years ago


    lol, smelly, you've got a lot to learn. :)

    No the geeks which keep going on about the flipping scores have got a lot to learn!

    If I've upset some of them, im sorry - but they really do need to learn to get a life.

    It's this kinda crap which gives us gamers a bad rep amonst people. You dont see people moaning about movie/book reviews being out of 3 or 5 or whatever do you? The fact that games geeks do, just makes the rest of the non gaming world laugh at us, and look down their noses at our past-time.

    I dont know about you lot, but im fed up of being a tard with the "geek" brush just because i play games, and it's PURELY down to geeky comments going on about whether 1/5 means any more than 2/10 or 1/10 or 10/100 or 3/100. It's MEANINGLESS!

    And it's worse still when you start going on about how DARE they only give game X 4 out of 10. Magazine Y gave it 60%, so you MUST be wrong, yadda yadda yadda. Stuff like this makes me EMBARRASED to be a gamer.

  • krudster #22 6 years ago

    Just wait 'til the Top 50 gets going...

  • MORZTAN #23 6 years ago

    Actually my first comment was a failed attempt to write something amusing. I don't give a flying hoot about the low score. Sorry for ruining your day, and life. ;)

  • Cyhwuhx #24 6 years ago

    .::: A Top 50? :) I hope you've taken precautions.

  • Kiigan #25 6 years ago

    smelly said:

    "Stuff like this makes me EMBARRASED to be a gamer."

    How about your spelling, does that embarrass you at all?

    As for the pointlessness of scoring games in a review: whatever you may think of that, it is the norm in videogames journalism and Eurogamer is no exception. If it troubles you, don't look at the number. The point under discussion here is not the actual score awarded to the game at hand but rather the decision on the part of Eurogamer to arbitrarily switch their scoring system for certain kinds of products. It makes no sense whatsoever.

    You could certainly argue that it merely serves to underline the pointlessness of scoring games at all, but at the same time there's no point in acting all surprised when regular readers of Eurogamer exclaim "What the fuck?" in unison at such baffling decisions.
    Edited by 1 at 20/12/05 @ 15:06

  • kangarootoo #26 6 years ago

    I'm with smelly on this one (possibly a first, though I feel a little less "passionate" about the subject). The comparison to movie and book reviews was right on the money (except in online forums about books and movies of course, where everyone is just as bad).

  • Beanie #27 6 years ago

    Since this is a kids game, I feel the need to ask if you were reviewing it with the potential gamer in mind being a child or an adult?

  • urban #28 6 years ago

    lol

  • mustardkid #29 6 years ago

    ab/c · (a2+b2)/c + ab/2 = ab + (ab/c · a2/c + ab/c · b2/c)/2 ab/c · (a2+b2)/c/2 = ab/2, or (a2+b2)/c2 = 1

    just to clear things up here is ellie's working out

  • smelly #30 6 years ago


    As for the pointlessness of scoring games in a review: whatever you may think of that, it is the norm in videogames journalism and Eurogamer is no exception.


    Everyone's moved on from this now, but i think you've missed my point.

    My point isnt on the pointlessness of score, but on the pointlessness of geeks arguing about or comparing scores. *sigh*, but i dont know why im even bothering to try to explain this.