My Pet Hotel 2 review (DS)

Since the popularity of Nintendogs, the DS has never been short of virtual animals. If the original, sickly sweet trend setter didn't quite quench your thirst for these minimum effort, faeces-free substitutes you get for your kids at Christmas (they didn't write “real”), then you should be pleased to know you're no longer limited to indefinite puppies.

Yup. There are DS games for horses, dolphins, and even babies – the latter being for those especially disturbing Christmas lists. My Pet Hotel 2 doesn't include dolphins or babies, though, or I might be reviewing an entirely different game altogether: My Human Rights Violation + Dolphins.

Anyway, there isn't much of a story to the game; rather a gradually increasing level of difficulty executed through bigger and better animals to care for – from fish to cats to horses. At the start of the game you're tasked with very basic chores such as cleaning fish tanks, building rodent cages and buying animal food, but within five or six minutes your first customer arrives, explains their presence and unloads their rabbit on you.

Smelly Cat

Naturally, you take care of the animal until the owner returns, and it's within these tasks that the game's micromanagement makes an appearance. Of course, My Pet Hotel 2 differs greatly in complexity from, say, Everquest – where micromanagement can consume several hours of play, but it still poses a challenge that the younger generation would most likely find rewarding.

In layman's terms, the idea is to keep each of your animals alive and happy until they are picked-up. Doing so requires you to pay attention to any individual animal's statistics, which function on a scale of one to 100, and act accordingly.

Each statistic is relatively easy to maintain; drag and drop food from your bag on to the animal's face; drag a brush across it to groom, it's all simple stuff. But when you've got six different animals to care for, each in different locations in and around your house, it actually becomes quite engaging.

Rewarding?

It's a rewarding experience to successfully manage a collection of animals, buying all the appropriate food, treats and cage upgrades, but monotony soon rears its head. It's fair to assume the game is less likely to bore its target audience as caring for cute animals is likely to be overriding for them, so I wouldn't promote the game to anyone above 13, but I'm sure that's fairly obvious from the onset.

The graphics would likely also receive a more favourable judgement from younger eyes because, though not particularly bad, are rife with prime colours and arrangement akin to fairy tales. It's not as if that's inappropriate, though; it's actually rather complimentary to the overall ethos.

Still, one thing about My Pet Hotel 2 grown-ups and children are likely to mutually despise is the sound. In terms of sound effects there's extremely little, but all your activities about the hotel are themed with the most irritating music I think I've ever encountered on DS. It's hard to describe it because it's not actually a song of sorts, but a basic midi-esque melody with infuriating vocal... sounds. I don't know how to describe them without swearing.

An Ideal Gift

My Pet Hotel 2 is still a very adept and worthwhile game for younger DS owners. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but then again why would I? What's more important is scoring the game well based on the fact that it's very well suited to its target audience and, I think, of great education utility – even if the responsibility is far from realistic, there's a good lesson in cause and effect for the youngsters.

It's yet another addition the virtual pet phenomena, but it's by no means an obsolete contribution.