PAW Patrol World Review

PAW Patrol World is a third-person open sandbox game from 3DClouds and Outright Games, featuring my kids’ favourite animal-based rescue team. Full disclosure, I’m a grown adult, so not the target audience for this game. That said, so many other games aimed at the young’uns have managed to cross the divide, why not this one?

The plot follows the town of Adventure Bay trying to celebrate PAW Patrol Day when that dastardly Mayor Humdinger and his Kitten Catastrophe Crew spoil the fun. Give chase to the elected head of Foggy Bottom as he escapes aboard a blimp to spread mischief across the world of the PAW Patrol cartoon!

What makes PAW Patrol World stand out from previous entries in the franchise is the fact that each level is an open sandbox. There have been third-person games before, but never one that lets you explore wherever you want, from the beach, to the lighthouse, to the grocery store. Each level is filled with familiar faces (voiced by the cast of the show), and most of them need help from PAW Patrol. Can you find every piece of shopping that someone dropped and somehow wound up buried at the beach? How about locating a load of juicy wild blueberries? Those benches look beaten up, how about using a drill to fix them? Okay, I’m highlighting some silly things, I know, but my kids loved it so who am I to complain?

You can swap the pup that you’re controlling at any time with a button press, so the whole crew is available at a moment’s notice. For instance, Skye is the only one who can fly, Rubble does the aforementioned drilling to fix things, Zuma’s vehicle can go on water… Vehicles are summoned with another button press and dismissed the same way, so you can go from using a ladder to floating across the bay very easily. The control scheme is very accessible, and in fact the whole game is as a whole.

One feature that stands out is how every menu option gets called out by Ryder as you select it. I know this is something that some games have started doing with text-to-voice, but it’s much friendlier to have the main character of the show talk to you. Along the same lines, each pup will say their name as you’re switching to them. I mentioned the controls earlier, and you can give this to a young child and they’d have little issue, especially as by default the camera remains behind your pup (for the most part), and the right stick does nothing, though you can make it fully manual in the options. Each special action that a pup needs to do, like watering flowers, requires you to tap the button, or you can just hold it instead. Better still, playing in co-op lets the other player “cheer” you on to increase the effectiveness of each press.

The co-op in Paw Patrol World means that an adult can help out at a moment’s notice, or two players can explore together. Each player can warp to the other’s side by holding a button, so even if you’re at the other side of the map you can be there on the double when someone yelps for help. The game limits what you can do separately, which is probably for the best, meaning that you have to both agree to start or change your current mission or travel to another level, and only one pup can complete a task at a time. However, you can speed things along if, for instance, one player goes to collect some stuff, while the other hangs out near Mayor Goodway to hand it in immediately.

As well as the main missions, the inhabitants of each level need your help which certainly pads out the playtime. Not only that, there are flashback missions which replicate events from select episodes of the show for you to play!

I’ve seen and/or played most of the PAW Patrol games, and PAW Patrol World is definitely the biggest and best. We only encountered one issue, where one player glitched into the ground, and while trying to warp to get free the game crashed. Not a common occurrence by any means, and probably wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t playing in co-op.

Overall, PAW Patrol World is a great game for kids, and honestly as an adult you won’t mind at all when you’re asked to pitch in and help. It’s surprisingly big, too, so you won’t be done in one sitting. I mean the kids won’t be…