Animal Shelter

Animal Shelter (or Animal Shelter Simulator according to one logo on its Steam page) is a fairly relaxed management/simulator game in which you are in charge of running and developing, you guessed it, an animal shelter!

- Mike Crewe

Publisher: Games Incubator, PlayWay S.A.

Developer: Games Incubator

Genre: Adventure

Release Date:Out Now

Platform: PC

As someone who has recently adopted a rescue dog, I jumped at the chance to see what this game was like, all whilst saving some virtual cats and dogs in the process. It's a genuine shame then that I eventually found myself bored and lacked any interest in these digital doggos after such a long period of play.

Starting up Animal Shelter, you're asked to pick a name for your new adoption agency (Belly Rubs Inc. was my choice!) and to choose which species dog or cat - you'd like to start the game with. You're dropped straight into the tutorial where you're tasked with taking in your first animal. It starts out simple enough, with the game taking you through each step of how to feed, water, and house the animal. The tutorial goes on for quite a while but doesn't completely restrict you from doing what you want, allowing you to freely pick which dogs (or cats if you chose the option in the beginning) from a small list of ones that need rescuing.

Progression slowly grew from here, and I was appreciative of how Animal Shelter never overwhelmed you with things to do in the early stages of the game - particularly as later on, a fully upgraded shelter running at full capacity can get very hectic - as it allows you to get to grips with the mechanics and gives you small snippets of each facet of gameplay. I liked this approach as it felt I was constantly rewarded with new things to try out as opposed to having everything dumped on me in a wall of text tutorial.