Littlest Pet Shop (Wii) Review
Littlest Pet Shop for the Nintendo Wii is a well crafted virtual pet game aimed at younger girls which does a great job of catering to its target audience. It features a multitude of adorable pets to adopt, hundreds of accessories to collect, and four beautifully crafted areas to explore. Unlike most other kids games, especially those aimed at girls, Littlest Pet Shop plays well, looks great, features well designed mini-games, and has plenty of replay value. While most Wii owners will probably be turned off by the sugary sweetness of the content, there is no doubt that Littlest Pet Shop should be recognised as a well made game that caters perfectly to its intended audience.
For the uninitiated, Littlest Pet Shop is based on a toy series of the same name. What sets these toys apart is that owners can take their cute little big-eyed pets online at the Littlest Pet Shop website to play mini-games, accessorise their pet and do other wonderfully fun stuff that little girls like doing online. As is typical of any toy craze these days, there is also an animated series that goes along with the whole thing as well. It is all so very cute and adorable that it should make any child of the male gender throw up at the thought of it. Think of the what are little girls made of? nursery rhyme, and the answer, sugar and spice and all things nice, perfectly sums up the Littlest Pet Shop experience.
This sickly sweet theme is carried over to the Wii game perfectly. In the game, the player can adopt pets and play a bunch of mini-games to earn the in-game currency, kibble. Starting out in the Pet Plaza, players get to adopt three pets and give them each a name. Players are also provided with detailed instructions on how to move around and interact with the various features of the game. Initially, the plaza is the only environment which the player can access, but eventually, up to three new areas will become available. These include a snow-covered area, a garden and a jungle.
The stages are simple, but well-crafted, offering quite expansive areas for the player to explore with their adorable little pets. Using kibble, players can buy new toys and accessories to keep their pets happy, eventually convincing other pets to come and join in the fun. In many ways it is like a simplified version of The Sims, just kept a little more simple for the younger crowd.
The game is controlled with the Wii-remote only and things are kept quite simple, with a combination of gesture-based and button controls. The Wii-remote recognition is excellent and the controls, especially in the mini-games, are quite intuitive. One flaw is in the mapping of movement to the d-pad instead of using the IR pointer functionality. It is still an adequate control scheme, but it feels much more clunky than either analogue stick or pointer controls. It may also prove far more difficult for those players with smaller hands to properly hold the controller.
Older players will find that the game does tend to lead them by the hand far too much, but younger players will benefit from the very frequent and very clear instructions of what they should do next. There are a variety of difficulty levels, so even the most inexperienced players will be able to start earning loads of kibble in no time.
One of the more surprising aspects about the package is the excellent graphics and audio. Plenty of work has gone into re-creating the Littlest Pet Shop world, with colourful, but crisp, textures wrapping the well modelled environments. The pets themselves are rather simple, but they are well modelled and animated and the whole look and feel of the presentation is top notch. The animated cut scenes that introduce each of the pets is fabulously realised and really captures the look and feel of the Littlest Pet Shop products and theme. The audio is also well matched to the on-screen action and does the job quite nicely.
The technical aspects of the game are also impressive with a decent frame rate, large worlds, responsive controls and minimal loading times. The interface is clean and simple, with uncluttered menus that are easy to understand.
There is plenty of content to unlock, including more than 30 pets and hundreds of accessories and toys. Players can spend hours simply accessorising their pets and there are plenty of mini-games and ways to interact with the pets to keep things interesting. Outside of the collecting and playing with the pets there is very little to do, but the game is not about going on an adventure or completing missions. It is essentially a game about playing dress-ups, and there is plenty of content to keep most young girls entertained for weeks.
Littlest Pet Shop is a surprisingly strong title that caters well for its target market. Players who fall outside of the young girl demographic are not going to find much to enjoy in the package, but for those who do, Littlest Pet Shop is certainly a well crafted and enjoyable title. While most kids games tend to be of the cheap and nasty variety, treating kids like second class gamers, it is obvious that plenty of effort has gone into making sure Littlest Pet Shop is a technically good and fundamentally entertaining experience.
