Graphics: The environments and character models are bright, colorful and well-animated. The various locales you visit wouldn’t look out of place in Nintendo’s own Animal Crossing series, making this game a good fit on the platform. A good deal of attention was paid to constructing and animating the pooches and each one looks very cute in a strange, surrealistic way. While the bodies share similarities to the realistic hounds on display in the Nintendogs series, the heads are large, super deformed noggins that give the dogs a close resemblance to the Animal Crossing avatars. It also gives them personality and you’ll quickly get used to their unique look. This game is pitched squarely at the Nick Jr. crowd and I employed my own 3-year old daughter and 5-year old son as a litmus test for the characters’ appeal. They both enjoyed watching the dogs scamper about, performing human tasks and instantly fell in love with the onscreen rendition of their own beloved pup. Sure, there’s not a lot of complex geometry employed here, but it’s not required. The Dog Island boasts a crisp, clean cartoony aesthetic that represents the property well.

Interface: The game is controlled solely through the Wiimote. With that said, some of the actions could have benefited from the addition of analog control afforded by the Nunchuck attachment. In order to guide your character through the environments, the player must move an onscreen icon (a paw print) that the dog follows. The closer the icon is to the dog, the slower he’ll move and by nature, the further away you move it, the faster he’ll run. By pressing the B button, the player can instantly initiate running – useful for avoiding the various animal predators that crop up during your island excursion. The A button is selected to prompt your dog to follow one of the onscreen context sensitive actions (i.e. Exit a room, talk to a character, etc.) As the game was developed for the PS2 as well, which does boast analog controls; I feel these IR-centric controls were shoehorned in for the Wii build. While that’s fine for the mini-games (i.e. fishing, digging, etc), they’ve crammed too much activity into a controller that wasn’t developed to handle the workload. Of particular note are the camera controls that are mapped to the d-pad at the top of the remote. Games like Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess have demonstrated elegant control schemes for navigating a 3D world using the Wiimote/Nunchuck combo – thus eliminating the camera frustrations that can crop up during this game. Overall, there seems to be a lot of unnecessary point and click actions that could have been remedied by co-opting those proven control schemes.

Gameplay: The Dog Island features a surprisingly lengthy adventure that should keep younger gamers entertained for a good period of time. Sprinkled throughout the proceedings are a number of mini-games that utilize the Wiimote in various ways, adding some variety to the standard hunt and fetch activities employed throughout the main story. True, most of the actions have been seen in other games (fishing and its standard yanking motion make yet another return in a 3D Wii platformer) but the actions are simple enough that the target demographic should enjoy these brief respites from the main adventure. Animal Crossing fans will delight in the various side-missions that provide currency for your pooch and thus open up a myriad of customization options to really dress up that doggy. Taking a page from Nintendo’s book, there is a great deal of text to page through in the cut-scenes and spoken dialogue is sparse, so those parents with gamers who are just beginning to read (or are not there yet) may want to play alongside and help them work through the adventure, as a number of tasks are relayed through written instructions.

Intelligence: While the game pays less attention to enemy encounters (there is not much in the way of actual combat), there are simplistic AI routines governing the various “enemy” creatures that one may encounter on the island. The enemies themselves take the form of natural adversaries, meaning your pup is bound to run afoul of snakes and bears and other ferocious beasts. This being a chlildren’s game, the “combat” is primarily based around which creature can scare the other more. So the snakes will hiss (thus depleting your health bar) and your dog will utilize his mightly bark to stun his challenger into submission. That’s about as visceral as the combat gets – afterall, this isn’t Michael Vick’s Dog Island. So, while the AI may not be complex, the characters all follow their routines and during my playtime I never encountered any game breaking bugs or glitches.

Difficulty: This is a children’s game and the difficulty is gauged appropriately – with some very light puzzle solving providing the most challenging aspect. The mini-games all feature simple motions that are a snap to learn so even the youngest players should find themselves adept at navigating the adventure very quickly. The focus is on exploration – while advancing it’s storybook narrative – and the task at hand should prove accommodating for most young gamers. As noted above, there is a large amount of text within the game, perfect practice for blossoming bookworms, but some children may require assistance from a parent or sibling in order to decipher what they need to do next.

Sound FX: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Yukes is head-over-heels in love with Nintendo. Not only did they co-opt features from Nintendo’s games catalog, they’ve also cribbed from some of their curious design choices. One of the most prevalent complaints lobbed at the big N is their outright refusal to embrace full audio voiceover (a feature of most games since the mid-90s). Yukes has followed their lead and presented, in true Zelda fashion, pages upon pages of text where every once in awhile the character will pipe up with a short, two-second snippet of audio (think of Link and his audible ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ when being told of his next challenge). Here we have dogs delivering the dialogue which results in a mere ‘Bark’ or ‘Woof’. It occurs just often enough to drive any real dogs in your house crazy as they tear the place asunder seeking out the phantom pooch. The case could be argued that these are dogs, after all, and thus real speech would be impossible, but these dogs are also working for the postal service, so tell me on what Bizarro World does that make any sense?

Music: The music for Dog Island is pitched just about right – light and bouncy during the exploration segments while dark and ominous as some mild grim shadings color the tale. Nothing gets too scary, but the music does a nice job of matching the mood onscreen. That said, none of the tunes really stuck with me after the fact. The mark of a good or bad game score is how easily it gets stuck in your head. As this one vacated my noggin the second I powered down, I’d call the music right down the middle – appropriate for the onscreen action but it’s not winning any awards either.

Overall: The Dog Island boasts a surprisingly lengthy adventure that coupled with the various side missions and the myriad of customization options could keep some players quite busy. It is obviously built for younger gamers in mind and through its quest structure and large world comes off as an amalgamation of Nintendo’s hot properties Animal Crossing and Nintendogs with a dash of Zelda thrown in. While not nearly in the same league as those titles, this is a pleasant little diversion for the younger crowd who I have no doubt will be charmed by these canine adventurers. For those gamers who stare wide-eyed and oblivious at the mention of Noggin, Sprout or a Backyardigan, this title is certainly not for you, but the kiddie set should lap this one up.