Paws & Claws: Pet Vet Australian Adventures

What’s the Story?

Follow-up to the popular Paws & Claws: Pet Vet, PAWS & CLAWS: PET VET AUSTRALIAN ADVENTURES is a veterinarian simulation game in which players hop into a jeep and comb the Australian outback searching for ill and wounded animals to help. Some can be treated on the spot with bandages and injections while others need to be brought back to the reserve headquarters to be nursed back to health through careful pharmacological regimens. Players get paid for each animal they help, then use their funds to purchase new medical supplies and construct habitats for the animals they bring back. As time goes on, players build guest houses, welcome visitors to the reserve, and take them on safaris.

Is It Any Good?

As educational entertainment goes, Paws & Claws: Pet Vet Australian Adventures is a mixed bag. It has excellent 3-D models and animations for both its human and animal characters, but smallish, bland looking environments. The information distilled about animals, their habitats, and the medical treatments we dispense is succinct and interesting, but full of typographical errors and grammatical mistakes. And while the game's missions -- which focus primarily on driving about looking for animals in need and then carefully examining and treating them once found -- are fun and interesting to start, they eventually begin to feel rather repetitive.

Still, it ought to prove both educational and exciting for kids entertaining the prospect of going into veterinary medicine. They will learn a thing or two about how to diagnose afflictions such as worms, constipation, and salmonella. And there is an undeniable satisfaction in caring for one of the game's animals back at reserve headquarters and watching it get better, or finding a lost koala and returning it to its mother. It's just too bad that the game wasn't a smidgeon deeper. More environments, a greater diversity of animals, and a larger number of ailments to diagnose would have gone a long way towards making the game feel less monotonous.