Paws & Claws: Pet Vet: Australian Adventure
Score: 82% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: THQ Developer: DTP Young Entertainment Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Simulation
Graphics & Sound: The first Paws & Claws: Pet Vet came out a couple of years ago. It was so well liked that there have been a few sequels. Paws & Claws Pet Vet: Australian Adventures is the latest of those adventures available for us to continue healing and caring for animals. The graphics are very pretty, except for the female characters. The unfortunate female characters suffer from trying to look too human, so they end up looking horribly ugly. But since I stayed zoomed out most of the time anyway, I just didn't look at the doctor that often. The animals are really cute. The details were quite well done. When you view them from the points that you just watch from, you can see how well they made them move like real animals would, especially the kangaroos. I think they were done the best of anything in the game. The one drawback I found is that there is no widescreen mode. It just automatically puts the black bars on the side if you're normally widescreen. The background music for Australian Adventures is "Waltzing Matilda". I did get a little sick of hearing it over and over again, but since it's the "unofficial national anthem of Australia," it was a good choice to use. The non-tourist voices all have Australian accents to further give it an authentic feel of being in the outback.
Gameplay: In Paws & Claws: Pet Vet: Australian Adventures you play as a vet in the Australian outback. When you first start up the game, you get to choose to be male or female, and then you get to customize your vet to look however you want them to. There were actually a lot more choices for appearances than I expected. Anyway, after that you can choose to run the tutorial mode or just play. I would say run the tutorial if you've never played before, just so you'll have a little more time to get used to things before you have to go out on your own. The first real task that you're given is healing the sick and injured animals. Each day, you'll be give a report of where injured animals were spotted. They'll be marked on your map. So you just hop into your jeep, drive to the marked area, and search for the poor animal. Your vet moves infuriatingly slow though, so you're going to want to zoom out as far as you can and then start looking. When you see the animal, just click on it to diagnose. You'll then get a close-up of the animal and a magnifying glass. Just click in various spots until you find one that has a problem. The game will then tell you how to proceed to help it. After you've healed enough creatures, you'll start getting tourists requesting to visit. You can take them on tours of the outback to make money. You'll need that money to buy supplies. You also earn money for each animal that you heal.
Difficulty: Paws & Claws: Pet Vet: Australian Adventures isn't hard to play, once you know how. The tutorial doesn't really explain much about how to do the things it tells you to do. The first thing it tells you to do is explore the area. They could have made life much easier by putting a "You Are Here" dot on the map when you pause to look at it, but oh well. The whole area isn't that large, so you'll learn it pretty quickly. Once you figure out where the entrances to the areas are, things are much easier. Just follow the (poorly marked) roads to find most entrances. Another thing I found difficult initially was getting anywhere. There's no way that I found to make your vet move any faster. The easiest thing to do is to zoom all the way out. That way you can see the injured or sick animal and click on it from further away, which saves you a lot of time! Once you do find the animal, it is just a matter of clicking around and listening to the instructions to heal it. You don't have to memorize any of it. If you forget what's next, you can click on the instructions again. Basically, after you figure out what you're doing and how to play the game, Australian Adventures is very easy to play. It is just a matter of following instructions and managing your time wisely.
Game Mechanics: As I've already said, Paws & Claws: Pet Vet: Australian Adventures is slightly difficult to figure out how to play if you don't already know what you're doing. The first major annoyance I found was the speed of the vet. There's no way to really make them move faster, so you'll want to use the mouse scroll button to zoom out (and back in when you need to). After you're zoomed out, you'll find it much easier to find your jeep and the sick animals. To get into your jeep, just click on it. You'll automatically exit it when you come to an area that you can walk around in. To drive it and to move your vet around, you use either the arrow keys or (W), (S), (A), & (D). When you look at the map, you'll see dots on it. The red and yellow dots are animals that you need to heal. You should always treat the yellow dots first because they are the most critical. Yes, I know that logically we think of red as being the danger ones, but here yellow is more in danger. The blue dots on the map are just areas where you can sit and watch the animals run and play and jump. If you want to pull the map up at any time, just press (M). When you need to order more supplies or check out the encyclopedia or find out anything else that you might need to know, just press (P). Your PDA will then open. You can click on any of the tabs to find your information. Eventually (really it doesn't take that long at all), you'll have people want to come visit, so you'll have to order supplies to construct a guest house. As you progress, you'll unlock more animals to treat, more areas to visit, and more things to build This game really frustrated me until I got the hang of playing. The controls aren't described very well at all in-game and there's really not a good help system. But once I figured it all out, it's a really cute game. If you like city building games or anything like that, you should give it a try. Just make sure to read the instruction book that comes with the game if you can't figure out how to do something! Most things are described a little bit in there at least.
-Cyn, GameVortex Communications AKA Sara Earl
Minimum System Requirements: Pentium 4 1.2 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB VRAM DirectX 9.0 compatible video card, 600 MB hard drive space, DirectX compatible sound card, CD-ROM drive, Keyboard and Mouse   Test System: Lenovo T60p 8741-C3U: Intel Centrino Duo T7600(2.33 Ghz), 2 GB RAM, 256 MB ATI FireGL V5250, 18 GB free drive space, CDRW/DVDRW drive
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