What am I doing here writing a review for Paw Patrol World nearly a year after its launch? I think the question is why are you reading a review for Paw Patrol World nearly a year after its launch? The answer to both questions is that we have made questionable choices in life, but that is okay because the Paw Patrol is here to save us from ourselves. When the Gamepass Roulette landed on this game I was fully expecting to hate the game due to it being a bad game made for dumb kids, and that was only partially true. I will start with that this game isn’t a kids game in the vein of the Lego games being kids games, this is a game that anyone over six would likely not find any enjoyment out of and definitely not one that you will find any mental stimulation from. Let's get into it though, what IS the 411 on Paw Patrol World.
Paw Patrol World, from my understanding, is the first one of these games to go “Open world”. That is only in quotes because there are still 4 different unconnected areas so it's not a true open world. The areas in the game are all decently varied, you have the starting location in Adventure Bay, a city based area, as well as a jungle, a snowy mountain and a fake british castley city with a beach. The areas all look nice and I found myself having a decent enough time traversing the world exploring for collectables. The problem comes in when you are going through the missions, side or otherwise. This is because they are all extremely basic and, as I mentioned previously, a 0 on the mental stimulation scale.
Each mission is almost entirely, go here, do things while they hold your hand extremely tight and move on. Repeat that 10 times for side missions and another 10 for the story missions per level. The game design gives the player next to no agency in the completion of these missions despite each character having the ability to complete pretty much all of them based on the tools they have shown the dogs to have previously. Instead they force you to complete each action as a specific dog that feels arbitrarily chosen. I think it would have been a good learning experience for the player if they had to do a LITTLE logicing the figuring out the mission. They could have done this by either allowing multiple dogs to do the action or by having it so only one dog actually has the tools to do the job and not because some game designer said so.
This is why I am on the fourth paragraph and just now going into talking about the different dogs, it really doesn’t matter that there are 8 of them. Each dog has their own job that the characters are based on such as cop, firefighter, construction worker, and so on. The only one I really want to talk about is Tracker, because Tracker, which is supposed to be a Chihuahua but doesn’t really look like one, would occasionally talk in Spanish. This isn’t really anything but one of the things you can do throughout the world are these little one off side things for extra points, like going down a slide, fixing a broken bench, stuff like that. These actions are largely dog dependent, the construction worker dog fixes the bench, the cop dog yells through a megaphone, but what did they give the Chihuahua? They let him trim hedges, and maybe that's true to the show, but either way it seems a little questionable to me.
Throughout the game the main missions you are going about all, loosely, tie back to the evil cat having mayor of the neighboring town ruining the day with his loud blimp advertising his competing cat themed festival. Each individual mission is not at all connected to the mission before or after them so it all feels disjointed and lacks any cohesion. The climatic ending to each area is a boss fight against the mean Mayor Humdinger’s cat blimp, which just involves going to a circle and tapping a button a couple times. I know it's a kids game, but shouldn’t the game be trying to promote some kind of learning experience or enrichment to the kid playing the game, because this whole game lacks any of that. You do this same boss fight a total of four times, one in each area, and then, SPOILER ALERT, through the power of friendship you convince Mayor Humdinger to combine his cat festival and the Paw Patrol Day festival into one big festival for everyone. Fairytale ending.
I don’t want to necessarily call Paw Patrol World a bad game as I am clearly not the intended audience; unless they intended for achievement hunters to play it because those are super easy. I think even for the intended audience they could have made some relatively minor changes to the basic gameplay loop and structure that could lead to some mental stimulation or enrichment of the kids and maybe actually be somewhat playable for anyone older that doesn't live for achievements. So long story short, if you are older than six or don't care about a number on the internet getting bigger this is an easy pass, even for “free” on Gamepass
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