Animal Shelter Simulator Review

I have a seven year old daughter, and much like most kids around that age, they like to watch youtubers play games, open toys, etc. Now most of the time they revolve around Roblox or Minecraft but occasionally something else will pop up and get their attention. Well I was first introduced to Animal Shelter Simulator on PC because of that. I am a sucker for a good simulation game but at the time it was only on PC, which I don’t game on that often, so I forgot about it.

Fast forward to now and it’s also available on Xbox, so I was willing to give it a whirl. Your main goal in Animal Shelter will be to look after, treat, and give shelter to those under your care. You will have plenty of work to do with the shelter, which will become a refuge for any creature in need (as long as it’s a cat or dog) and will certainly help in finding suitable future owners. Keep in mind that the future owner-pet duo must complement each other. Your main goal? Finding a suitable home for your pets!

Now you’d think this would be a heartwarming kind of game, saving the lives of stray or abandoned cats and dogs, taking care of them and then find them the best home possible. While yes, in reality this is exactly what you are doing….however it is a bit of a hot mess. The game drops you into a tutorial right off the bat and you can select to be a shelter focused on Cats or Dogs, you don’t have to worry about your selection that much, after expanding you will be able to care for both anyway. The game walks you through the basics, you go to your PC (where unfortunately alot of the games functions originate) and you online shop for a pet (which just seems cruel) and seconds later a white van drops it off for you to take. At that point you then need to care for your animal which typically requires food, water, bathing and some playtime. Once your animal is in good shape you take a photo of it and post it’s adoption listing. Once you start getting some responses in you select the best fit (based on the traits of both the animal and the adopter) and then you ship them back off to their new home. There is no actual human interaction to speak of in this entire game, which feels a little weird honestly.

The game was as I stated before ported over from PC, however the control scheme and UI is complete and utter trash. Doing even the simplest things seemed frustrating and very off putting. Not to mention the glitches I experienced (one dog I had flew in the air and then went invisible, a strip of grass floating in air directly through my entire shelter) made me really not want to play this game. If you are able to continue along and get more pets adopted you will earn enough money to expand your shelter to accommodate more animals to take care of.  Your character’s movements are just terrible and slow (which you can make slightly better in the options but not much) and they have a terrible inventory system that makes Resident Evil seem spacious.

Once the tutorials are gone and you expand unfortunately there isn’t much meat on the bone in this game. You are just doing the same thing over and over again without introducing anything new other than managing more animals at once. The animals all kind of seem the same, there is very little variety in the animal models. Overall unfortunately this seems like a very cold experience for something with such a noble mission.