Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls is another enjoyable game in the Paw Patrol universe for all ages. There are however some niggling issues such as long load times on Xbox One and missing interaction icons in main missions.
Back in May of this year, my daughter and I got stuck into Paw Patrol Mighty Pups: Save Adventure Bay on the Xbox. Her initiation into gaming has been via these Paw Patrol Xbox games as they’re easy to play, recognisable to the TV show she watches and there’s no violence. The franchise’s first full length feature film Paw Patrol The Movie released in cinemas a few weeks ago, so my wife took our daughter to go watch it. When she got home, we jumped into Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls on Xbox by Drakhar Studio and published by Outright Games.
The game released on August 13, 2021 on PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and PC. Ryder, along with Chase, Marshall, Skye, Zuma, Rubble and Rocky are ready to roll, along with a new pup addition to the team, Liberty. When the pups learn that Humdinger has become mayor of a buzzing metropolis, they must race into action to save Adventure City from his selfish scheming. You get to play as your favourite pups on exciting rescue missions, explore new locations, level up with vehicles and gadgets, play minigames, and save the day!
We initially played the game on my original Xbox One as that’s in the theatre room on the big screen with comfy couches, and it’s where my two daughters play and we watch Netflix together. But boy, does this game take a long time to load on the original Xbox One! I timed it, 1 minute and 54 seconds each time we wanted to play a mission, and the same for loading into mini games.
My daughter who is 4 and has only ever played these Paw Patrol games so has no real measure about how long a game should take to load, but even she made comment about how long it was taking. We jumped into my study where I have my gaming PC and the Xbox Series X, and thankfully the load times were super-fast. My daughter promptly said it was much more fun playing in here, and that I should move the Series X into the theatre room.
Much like Paw Patrol Mighty Pups: Save Adventure Bay, Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls can be played in co-op and this is primarily how we played the game. My wife even got involved as our daughter is getting much more proficient with the Xbox controller. I was pleased that there seemed to be a bigger collection radius around the pup treats as it meant you didn’t have to be right on the treats to pick them up like in Adventure Bay. Even treats that were on boxes sometimes were collected as she struggled to time her jumps effectively.
This meant she had a much more enjoyable time and didn’t get frustrated when she couldn’t get the pups to where she wanted them to go. The game plays very similar to Save Adventure Bay, just with new levels. The level design though has altered slightly. Being located in Adventure City, there are more inner-city metropolis style levels including parks where you can see people walking through in the background. There are also times where the pups are on sidewalks near roads that have cars travelling and beeping.
I was pleased to see that, when the pups started to cross a crosswalk, the cars automatically stopped and waited for the pups to cross the road. While my daughter is still only 4, it is still an opportunity to keep educating our daughters about what we do when we approach curbs and roads. No doubt this is a good tool to remind older kids about road safety too.
There are eight main missions in the game, and each of the missions have multiple phases. Most of them start with two pups collecting treats. There is a new pup called Liberty that features in the movie and is playable in the game. Once the pups get to certain blockages such as fallen rubble, fallen trees or they need to cross from one roof to the other, each pup has unique abilities that are prompted to help clear that stoppage. Rubble will use a drill to get rid of fallen rocks, Marshall has some axes that he can use to chop down wood, Chase has a grappling hook, and so on.
However, one major fault here is there is no large paw print on the ground where the pups need to stand to activate their special abilities. At one point I thought the game was bugged because we ran into an invisible wall and couldn’t progress the game. However, it was a section that required a pup to use their ability, but with no paw print location on the ground, we had to run in grid patterns around the level until the prompt to press ‘Y’ flashed on the screen. It was quite frustrating for us but after a while we learned where we needed to stand to activate them. It would be good if the large paw print was returned to these locations to help the kids understand what is required.
At a certain point in each mission, the pups will need to jump into their vehicle to cross to another section of the city. It’s here where the game changes to being in control of one of the pup’s vehicles where you’re travelling on a three-lane highway, or in Skye’s case, flying through the sky. Liberty’s new vehicle is a motorised scooter and was pink.
You need to collect treats that appear just in front of the vehicle. I struggled myself with collecting all the treats in these levels. They spawn almost too close to the vehicle, and I couldn’t get the vehicle from the far left to the far right in time to hit them all. I did just turn 40, so it could be my deteriorating skills. It did take me multiple times to collect them all, and it was frustrating because you can’t just repeat that section, you must repeat the entire level just to get those 2 or 3 treats you missed.
The multiple modes within the main missions in Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls does provide good variety in the missions, and usually it switched focus around the time my daughter’s attention span starts to wane. The driving and flying modes were a little advanced for my 4-year old’s skill level, but she did enjoy flying or driving in the pup’s vehicles. which my daughter loved driving, especially in the mini games.
This is another similarity to Paw Patrol Mighty Pups: Save Adventure Bay, there are mini games to play with different gameplay mechanics. These are much shorter and fun missions that my daughter enjoyed. Ok, I enjoyed them too. There’s Time Trial, Collect-Them-All, Obstacle Race and Pup Pup Boogie, with most of them having three tiers of difficulty. We were quite disappointed to learn that they haven’t included the singing of the lyrics to the Pup Pup Boogie song. This was something we really enjoyed from the previous game as my daughter preferred singing along as opposed to playing it. In fact, none of the pups had any voices throughout the entire game. My daughter didn’t notice but older kids might.
Overall, Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls is another enjoyable game in the Paw Patrol universe for all ages. There are however some niggling issues such as long load times on Xbox One and missing interaction icons in main missions. The main missions being split into different gameplay mechanics was a good change as it broke up the monotony of pup treat collection to keep each level interesting. Paw Patrol The Movie is still playing in cinemas as of writing this article, so it’s great for immersion if the kids watch the movie and then come home to play as the pups in that universe.
This review utilised an Xbox key provided by Swipe Right PR and Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Steam.
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Written by: @ChrisJInglis
