Super Pet Hero Review

Everyone loves animals. Everyone loves simplicity. Everyone loves playing games while they’re on the toilet. The sum of all these parts yields Super Pet Hero, a casual F2P iOS title where you have to save innocent animals from being run over on a busy crossroads. Right off the bat, that sounds like an immeasurable amount of excitement for a videogame – hopefully the small confines of the iPhone can handle the commotion.

The premise of Super Pet Hero runs as such: moving on a limited 5 by 5 grid, you must move around and collect animals while avoiding traffic on a busy crossroads. Cars and trucks are intent to run you and the baby creatures down, so the game demands nimble work to slip between the gaps as the flow of traffic gets heavier. This is a lightweight and compact concept that works perfectly well within the boundaries of mobile gaming, but the idea largely works better on paper.

Control is pared back heavily to fit the “pick-up-and-play” aspirations common to most mobile games. Super Pet Hero is played by swiping – the idea being that your character will slide deftly to the neighbouring block of the 5x5 grid as gracefully as you swipe. This is combined with a jump function that allows you to hop over oncoming cars that you’ll likely never use, as swiping is just faster. However, as elegant as this is designed to be, the controls possess two fatal flaws that end up killing the game dead. First of all, the sliding controls are flawed as the game is wishy-washy about registering your input, meaning if you try to slide to the right and don’t do so in an exact enough fashion, you’ll either not move, or zoom straight into the path of the oncoming traffic.

The second problem is that the control and set-up of the game clash horribly. As the setting of the game is a busy crossroads, you’ll have traffic looking to turn you and the animals into a fine mush from north, east, south and west, but your dominant hand will always end up obscuring either east or west due to the nature of the swiping mechanics, and just how damned precise they need to be. As such, because your big, monstrous hand is blocking the way, you won’t be able to see traffic approaching, meaning there’s a real possibility of getting blindsided that deflates the fun you could have had, if the shoddy swiping controls weren’t already enough to convince. Of course, there is an option to use on-screen buttons which works a lot better than swiping, but by the time you’d have discovered that, you might have uninstalled the game altogether.

Thankfully, the graphical approach taken by developers Amused Sloth is fun and altogether pleasant: it’s heavy on colour to pull in the kid market, as well as using chunky Minecraft-esque 3D models for the player-character, vehicles, and animals, and it works very well, and would have even more returns to success with a generation raised on Minecraft Steve, so it’s a very clever move. The music is decent as well – nothing that would take you on a spiritual odyssey, mind you; but a serviceable soundtrack that takes cues from the surf-rock subgenre, resulting in a happy-go-lucky set of songs that sound like they were tailor made for surfer dudes. As such, the aesthetic of Super Pet Hero is the game’s strongest asset, but not because it’s terribly creative or anything – Amused Sloth have been extremely clever in how they’ve chosen to put the game together, by making shrewd creative choices that will amuse kids and keep them hooked with an acceptable but harmless graphical and aural display.

It’s also pleasant to see that this game is F2P, but microtransactions do not manifest themselves in any great gamebreaking ways. You can still play the game in what feels like its full package form, but some money-grabbing tactics are on display, yet they’ve been implemented nicely (isn’t it weird how in 2017, we can say “oh, thanks ever so much for being respectful when taking my money”?) and non-intrusively. The implementation of money-making is seen in two ways: you can pay for new skins for your player-character, which are extremely generic and unworthy of your time or dosh – who really wants to play as Hazmat Hank or Bunny Bonnie? – or you can watch an advertisement when you die to keep your streak going, which isn’t a horrible idea. As such, despite being a vehicle to extract cashola from your wallet, there is enough game in here for free to keep you vaguely amused.

That’s the key here: “vaguely amused”. Super Pet Hero is in no way an outrageous amount of fun, owing to how frustrating the control scheme is, and even when you switch to the vastly superior button method, you still won’t have a boatload of fun. It is simply an okay game redeemed slightly by being free, but that’s it, that’s the only real virtue of Super Pet Hero. Play it, or don’t. It doesn’t have any real meaning either way – it’s ultimately just another cutesy iOS game that vaguely works.