To The Rescue! by developer
Little Rock
Games and publisher
Freedom Games—
PC review written by
Jim
with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
I love a good simulation game and I have
built and run everything from amusement parks (Parkasurus), malls, hospitals, and so on (Tharsis) but this was the first I have ever
seen that lets you run your own dog shelter. As an animal lover, I was excited
to try To The Rescue!
In terms of gameplay, there are two
modes, story and sandbox. Sandbox mode is like any other sandbox mode out there
so I spent most of my time in story mode. You start with picking one of five
skins for your character, name them and then you pick a companion dog and name
them too. Unfortunately, after doing all this is when I ran into my first
problem with the game as it was extremely laggy and I knew it wasn't my
computer as other games worked just fine. A few days later a patch came out and
it fixed that issue but I had to restart my save file which luckily wasn't very
far in.
Moving onto the story, you move to a new
town called Yawning Falls where you find a stray dog in your yard and you end
up taking it to a shelter where your friend works. You find out that no one has
been looking for the pup and that the shelter has no room so you decide to
build a kennel at your house to keep the pup there until you find its owner
while posting “Dog found” signs all over town. After this, your friend calls
you and asks you to work at the shelter which then sets the game into motion.
This all works as a tutorial so while most of it is just story, it does show
you the ropes before sending you off to work in a shelter.
Starting off, the shelter you work at is
full of dogs so things can get overwhelming from the start of a game. It does
however show you everything you can do from feeding dogs to bathing them,
playing with them, what to do when a new dog comes in to finally and most
importantly, how to get dogs adopted. When a visitor comes they will tell you
what kind of dog they are looking for and you will then pick out five of the dogs
in the shelter to show to them. They can ask for just a dog and not care about
its traits or sometimes they will look for a certain breed of dog or a certain
trait like playful or trained. Dogs will sometimes gain traits from random
events and later on when you can plan community events. The visitors will rate
the dogs you are showing them on a 1-5 scale and the higher it is the more
likely they are to adopt a dog. There is a bar on top of the screen you must
fill by finding dogs they like or they won't adopt. Like in real life puppy's
are more likely to get higher ratings than older dogs.
On the subject of work, you will have to
clean the kennels from the above mentioned poop with the poop scooper, give
dogs water by filling a bucket and bringing it around to fill each dog’s water
dish and bathe them when they are dirty which starts a little mini-game. To
wash a dog you must click on a bar as it reaches the ends to the right or left
making it move faster but also making the bath also finish faster. Finally to
finish up your work you will have to take care of any sick or injured dogs by
getting a medical room where you can use vaccinations to cure or protect the
dogs from things like worms and parasites and so on as well as use a med kit to
heal any hurt dogs. Later on in the game you can add kennels where you can add
more than one dog to it and sometimes they may fight and that will cause an
injury and sometimes they can earn a negative trait from it.
One other thing you can do in the medical
area of your shelter is euthanizing dogs. It's an odd thing to add to such a
cute-looking game, and yes, there are some shelters in real life that do this
but many have been going no-kill including my local shelter. If putting dogs
down is not your thing you can change a setting to send away dogs instead of
killing them. In my time playing, I didn't have to use the euthanize option so
it may not be something you need to use as long as you keep adopting out dogs
and have room for new ones.
You also get money in the game from
adopting out dogs, from random events, community events and by completing
grants which are objectives you must complete to gain money. You can also gain
money by completing milestones like cleaning up so much poop or adopting out so
many dogs. You lose money by buying things, building and also by random events.
You also gain or lose reputation from things you do on a scale of -100 to 100
but it was easy enough to get to 100 and stay there.
Later on in To The Rescue! you will
unlock the Barkbook and LeashedIn. Barkbook is like a Facebook app that lets
you read what people are saying about the shelter though mostly I see “I wish
they had cats” which was probably the developers trolling you. It did feel
strange though at the fact that most shelters do have cats, dogs, and even
other kinds of animals making this game feel less like a shelter sim and more
like a take care of dogs sim.
One other thing you can do with Barkbook
is host community events. Community events take time from your working day and
can be free or cost money but they can give you things like money, reputation,
give dogs traits, and find foster homes. After a while, you will be able to
foster dogs out and they will get adopted.
LeashedIn on the other hand lets you use
skill points you get at the end of each day to unlock skills that can make
items like food cheaper, build new things, make adoptions easier and so on.
This is unfortunately where I started to see the most amount of bugs. I would
unlock run kennels in LeashedIn but they wouldn't unlock. Dogs wouldn't be in
the kennel and running around and I couldn’t leash them unless I went to the
kennel they are supposed to be in to leash them there even though the run
kennels were not there. Also, when I loaded a game the name and skin of the
companion dog I picked could be wrong unless I reload the game again, I could
start a day with 10 skill points but when I loaded the save file it only showed
3 skill points and skills unlocked on LeashedIn were greyed out. I did contact
the developers about this and was told to restart the game and so for the
second time I restarted the game but having to restart from that point yet
another time was a bit demoralizing.
Restarting once again, this time I got to
where you can hire a helper to help around the shelter. You can pick what they
do but you must build an employee room first. They will go around and do what
you told them to do like clean poop, feed / bathe / play with the dogs and so
on. I ran into the same issue with loading the game and the dog I picked was
wrong unless I reloaded again, and again the LeashedIn skills were greyed out
when they shouldn't be. Grants wouldn't complete even when it said I completed
it so I never got the money and after unlocking the skill that makes the store
cheaper it wouldn't allow me to buy food unless I bought something else like a
medkit and even then the price was wrong. They ended up patching the game but
when I loaded the game all my dogs were gone.
Summary
Overall To The Rescue! is a cute game
but I can not recommend it as it currently is with as many bugs as it has until
they are fixed allowing someone to really play through without risk of having
to unintentionally restart.
The developers though have been
updating the game a lot since its launch and with 20% of the sale profit going
to the Petfinder
Foundation charity is a nice thing.
Score: 5 / 10
Based off of the
current version 1.0.26
