And the way that's achieved is through, finally, getting down to the true core of what Petz: Dogz 2 presents – a set of simple, traditional card and board games.
STEAM PETZ DOGZ 2 UPGRADE
You can eventually upgrade your home to include several floors' worth of rooms, with each of them filled with different interactive objects. Starting with this empty living room and blank backyard, you've got to create a more interesting and expanded playspace for your puppy to be able to have any fun. It's the interactions with different objects, toys and furniture that form the basis of the dogs' activity potential instead, so the goal of the game quickly becomes something more akin to Animal Crossing. The basic care-giving activities you'd expect to see – like feeding the dog, teaching it tricks, taking it for a walk – are nowhere to be found. You can pet, poke or taunt them with the stylus for a basic bit of interaction, but quickly you'll find that there really isn't much to do beyond that. The visuals are appealingly adorable, as the dogs of Dogz 2 have been rendered in an excessively cute style that gives them comically oversized noses and eyes while diminishing the proportions of the rest of their bodies. Then the dalmatian, beagle, poodle or whichever pooch you've picked appears in a fully 3D home, complete with an empty, furniture-less living room and a similarly sparse backyard. The Nintendogs-esque elements come in first, as you open the adventure by selecting your preferred breed of puppy from an array of 11 options. It's an odd mash-up of Nintendogs, Clubhouse Games and Animal Crossing. Though this sequel to last year's Dogz does have a handful of qualities in common with traditional virtual pet titles, its larger focus is placed on playing card games and upgrading your home with new decorations and furniture. This has been especially true for the virtual pet genre on the DS recently, as several games you'd judge to be Nintendogs clones based on their outward appearances end up being something else entirely – like this game, Petz: Dogz 2. It's a more and more frequent occurrence to find that a game's cover art has little to do with the play experience found inside.