Okay, so not strictly true. But you get the idea; there's a lot of them. And My Pet Store is exactly the sort of title you find a lot of on the console nowadays, except that it's on mobile phone.
Which isn't to say it's not welcome, obviously. We're as happy as the next person to while away a few hours stroking cats or dressing dogs up in Wellington boots and pink collars to make them look ridiculous.
My Pet Store gives you a bonus incentive for all this silliness, too, by enabling you to take in-game photos of your pet shop or individual pets and send them via text with a message to a friend. We can see this being pretty popular among girls of a certain age. Note: that's not girls of my own particular ancient age. I was tempted, but didn't actually send any pictures of cats with devil horns to my friends because they would have promptly deleted my number from their SIMs.
Photographing your pets aside, My Pet Store's overriding goal is to sell happy pets to customers. The happier the pets you sell, the more hearts you receive as payment. Hearts fill up a meter at the top of the screen and when this reaches certain points, new dressing up items become available for your animals, your shop expands or can be redecorated, and new pets become available to buy and sell. It's a well-paced game with plenty of rewards – moving from cat salesperson to hamster equivalent is surprisingly satisfying. Especially when you get to see the little critter running around a wheel so speedily it's like he's on a hot plate. On a hot plate while wearing a little elf hat.
Judging it on style and entertainment value alone, My Pet Store would do very well. It looks incredibly sweet, with well-animated animals frolicking with one another and a shop that can be transformed from a slightly barren pet prison to a multicoloured rainbow room filled to the brim with hearts, happiness and cute animals.
It's just when it comes to the gameplay that My Pet Store lacks something. The problem is that it not only quickly becomes very repetitive to look after each of your pets, but it's also not that challenging. Essentially, when your pet shop closes at the end of each day you care for your pets and buy in new ones to replace the ones that were purchased.
These games are perfectly playable the first few times but having to do it at the end of every day, sometimes two or three times in a row if you have several of that animal gets more tedious than poop scooping after a dog with the runs.
The overall game is very simple too – it's not tough to do well seeing as you don't have to open your shop until you're ready, so theoretically you should always be able to get maximum hearts for all of your animals. Hang onto one particular pet and look after it properly for days and you'll get extra hearts when you do sell it. There are also special awards to win for running a good shop.We can't argue that some will enjoy this game purely for the satisfaction of building up a pretty shop and unlocking brand new, increasingly bizarre presents for their pets. All of this is done very well. But for those after more of a management style game, you won't find it here – My Pet Store puts cute first and gameplay second. If you just want to dress up puppies to then send their pictures to friends, though, that obviously shouldn't put you off.
