Writing
Review: Horsez - Published by N-Philes, Jan 30, 2007
A gaming goddess once told me, "Ubisoft does a really good job with their games." Her words are words of truth, Charlie's Angels notwithstanding. When the company announced a number of games under the Petz brand, I thought that their time would probably be better spent locking Michel Ancel in a room with a Wii devkit and starving him until he's created Beyond Good and Evil 2.
But that's probably why I'm here reviewing Horsez and not in France running Ubisoft.
The first important thing to know about Horsez is that it's nothing like Nintendogs with equines instead of canids. In fact, the big draw to the game is an all-out adventure mode where Ginger, a horse lover who attends a riding academy to mingle with snobby country club types. And learn about horses. The bulk of the adventure revolves around mastering three popular styles of horse competitions: dressage, cross-country, and show-jumping, as well as caring for your horse and having a social life by interacting with the other four students until you're more popular than a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Every day for six weeks, you have to schedule and complete four activities, be it competition practice, horse care, library readings, or even private time in your room. At the end of the week, you're graded on your dressage, jumping, and cross-country skills, popularity, and your horse's happiness. Failing any of these means repeating the week, which any sane person should avoid at all costs. Passing permits regional competitions in all three categories before starting the next week.
The touch screen is used for pretty much everything, from brushing the horse and playing with foals, to moving around within the academy building. The screen can also be used to navigate the courses, but using the D-pad is much easier. While simple, the control set-up isn't perfect. When competing in the dressage runs, you're forced to deal with awkward icon-tapping and occasionally unresponsive shape-drawing.
As time passes, the competitions and their practice courses get progressively more difficult, though never so hard that a perfect score can't be regularly attained. The landscape also progresses from summer to fall to winter in a matter of weeks. I don't know of many places that can go from summer breezes to snow-covered ground so quickly, but it does help to spice up the game's otherwise basic visuals.
Just about everything in Horsez is in 3D, sometimes across both screens, but neither the graphics nor the art style is out to win any awards. The game's textures don't look too bad in motion, but they're pretty awful close up or when the horse is stopped. This is a shame because Horsez is one of the few games that use the two screens to give two different perspectives on the action. The lower screen is closer to the action where the weak textures are much more noticeable.
There are little touches in the game's presentation that do impress. For example, the brush or the hand will curve with the horse as its stroked, and each of the students' rooms in the academy is uniquely decorated to match their personalities.
Musically, the score to the game is actually rather bizarre. It ranges from overtures both epic and majestic to drawn out medieval instrumentals, to something you would hear in a low-budget porno. Hypothetically. Hopefully one without horses. Despite the variety, it's not something you want to listen for for hours at a time.
Horsez' six-week academy program can be grueling. The problem with virtual pet games is that they get boring fairly quickly. When the Tamagotchi was first introduced, I was done with it after a week. Nintendogs, the shining jewel of virtual pet games, didn't even last me that long before I moved on to more exciting things. Here, you're pretty much doing the same dozen tasks over and over. Instead of asking you to do two or three horse care chores, which consist of brushing, washing, hoof cleaning, and hay changing, the game pretty much forces you to do all four. Each dressage training session can sometimes take over five minutes to complete, and I can only take so much random screen tapping while watching a horse slowly walk in circles. The game could benefit from a shorter school week, or if each individual task took less time to complete.
If you manage to make it through the adventure mode, and feel that you need more Horsez, there's a foal-raising mode where you get to look after a baby horse. While you aren't riding it around a track, this mode is pretty much like story mode, without the rigid structure. Training, feeding, and taking care of the foal will increase its stats, which makes others pony up more dough if you choose to sell it. You can also sell your foals to a friend via local wireless.
The big disappointment with Horsez is that there's no real reward to playing. You can place first every regional championship and not have a single medal or ribbon to show for it. Hell, you don't even get extra tokens to shop for new sweaters and saddles. An extension to this is the lack of bonding with the horses. Trusting your riding horse is a pretty big deal in the equestrian world, but it plays almost no role in Horsez. Even through six weeks of dainty strolls and painstaking care sessions, there's no sense that you and your horse grow closer. That horse-rider development would have fit well with the gameplay and the story.
Slight Pulse - [I]Yay or neigh? Depends on how much you like horses.
Horsez has some flaws, but I think they can be overlooked by people who don't mind virtual pet games, all of which are built entirely on simple, repetitive tasks. An adventure mode is rare for this kind of game. And while it's interesting enough to justify the time spent playing it, but there isn't much beyond Ginger's trials to keep you playing. Horsez may teach a thing or two about equestrianism, and is a definite must have for people interested in horses. However, if you or someone you know is into smaller, cuter animals, there are better games on which to spend your money.