Wobbledogs Review

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Fast Facts

Dog’s Life

Wobbledogs is a pet simulation game on the Nintendo Switch that allows you to look after many different wobble dogs, care for them, feed them, decorate their pen and play with them while watching them grow. You can even crossbreed them, allowing you to create new breeds, each with their own traits and unique looks.

Pets’R’Us

Wobbledogs is a very relaxing pet simulation game where the main goal is to simply hatch a wobble dog and allow them to grow by feeding and caring for them, and keeping them entertained with toys and other items. Eventually, once your dogs have reached a certain age, they will go into a pupate state for a little while before hatching. After which they will emerge from their cocoon with increased age, possibly inheriting a new trait from the different foods that they’ve been given prior to going into their cocoon. At a certain age wobble dogs can be cross bred with other dogs, allowing you to create unique breeds each with cross-traits and possibly new limbs and colours. This process take a while before dogs will actually look different though.

The core game is pretty relaxed, there’s really no rush or main objectives to complete. You’re simply looking after your dogs and trying make sure they’re cared for correctly and enjoying their brief existence in your dog sanctuary. 

Each dog has three meters that need to be kept filled throughout your dog’s life. These are as follows: the food meter – feeding dogs a wide range of delicacies such as onion rings, alien hearts and toffee apples will provide the energy your dog requires to keep healthy. These foods may also affect your dog’s gut, which may change its DNA overtime and its appearance during gameplay. The second meter is the sleep meter – if your dog doesn’t sleep he can become drowsy and become less active.

Finally the last meter is the play meter – keeping your dogs happy and entertained by playing with them and giving them praise or commands prevents them from being bad and digging holes everywhere. Each meter needs be filled by providing one of the previous actions, keeping your wobble dog happy is very important. If for some reason you neglect them, their meters decrease to a point where they’re empty and there’s a chance they may even die as a result of being neglected. 

As you complete mile-stones in the game, you unlock a plethora of unlockable content such as new rooms and toys among other things. This is biggest incentive keep playing.

DNA Meddling!

One of the more interesting features in Wobbledogs is that each pooch has their own gut health. What traits your dogs will have and how they will look over time will depend on what you actually feed them. Though it’s not as extreme as you may think. See, just like real life, the art of meddling with DNA doesn’t result in instant noticeable changes. Things can take time and you may notice subtle changes through your dog’s life through the art of crossbreeding. You may see changes to your dog’s head, eyes, body shape, colour and his limbs such as legs or tail. Though the process is slow it’s rewarding when you finally create something truly unique.

The breeding process is also pretty funny as a massive stone dog is summoned from the ground and picks up the two dogs that you’ve selected for breeding and begins to slams them together, producing a shower of hearts that rain down on a single white egg. After the chaos is finished, you’ll have a brand new wobble dog egg to put in your hatchery and eventually it will hatch and join the other wobble dogs in your sanctuary.

If you have too many dogs you can always store them in a separate holding space for later use. There is also an option to prolong your dog’s life in the option menu as your dogs will die after a certain age. I found it a little better to extend their life expectancy, allowing me to keep the dogs I liked that bit longer and it gave me enough time to cross breed them with others to get better results. While losing a dog can be sad when it first happens, you’re given a parting gift (which is a little tombstone to commemorate their passing), which you can place wherever you want.

Just beware that your other wobble dogs can eat body parts of fallen dogs that have just died – unless you clean up! If any dogs do this, or you select a body part to be consumed, it will allow that dog to gain extra traits from the previous dog. 

Slow Burn!

While the game can be enjoyable there is a rather slow burn to the whole package that may leave some gamers bored, or uninterested. Everything in Wobbledogs takes time, nothing is instant and it requires patience – crossbreeding specially because you won’t see instant results when you first do it. It may take multiple times before you see some weird creations. Also, there’s not much to actually do in Wobbledogs apart from watching your dogs, feeding them and occasionally interacting with them now, again. Otherwise you’re waiting around a lot.

Good Bad, Ugly!

Things that I like about Wobbledogs are the cute colourful graphics, quirky dog behaviours making each dog wonderfully weird. There 50+ items to unlock as you progress, hitting all the mile-stones plus I like the ability to edit my dogs’ surroundings too.

While the core game is solid, I did encounter a few issues with the game that were annoying. The biggest issue for me was the awful controls which felt really clunky to use. For example you can’t move the camera at same time as you’re moving a toy around which made it difficult to see where I was placing it – specially when trying to play with my dogs. Also there’s very little to actually do in the game, you’re simply waiting for a mile stone to be reached allowing you to hopefully unlock something new giving you a brief moment of purpose. While some gamers may enjoy the relaxed nature like I did, there will be some of you that will tire of the constant waiting.

Final Verdict

Wobbledogs is a fun and relaxing simulation that allows you to look after different dogs, play and care for them and breed them allowing you to create new species. It’s not instant though and takes time. The game does suffer from some clunky controls and a lot of waiting around but if you can get past the slow burn, there’s something here that is different to every other pet sim you’ve ever played before.

Rapid Reviews Rating

2.5 out of 5

2.5

You can buy Wobbledogs on the Nintendo eShop here