'Dog's Life' game offers little to sit up for

By JOHN GAUDIOSI
SPECIAL TO WASHINGTON POST
Video games have featured such critters as hedgehogs, bandicoots and Tasmanian tigers, but "Dog's Life" (Hip Games/Frontier Developments) is the first one to have you play as a canine. You star as Jake, a farm dog on a quest to find recently dog-napped girlfriend Daisy.
Since everything takes place from a dog's-eye view, you hear Jake communicate in words instead of barks -- when a human asks if you want a bone, he'll reply with something like, "Does a dog poop in the woods?" (Speaking of which, the inclusion of that perennially popular dog pastime somehow earned this game a may-not-be-suitable-for-under-13 "Teen" rating, a profoundly silly notion.) Jake can run around a landscape filled with farms and country roads and fields, meeting an assortment of other breeds of dogs as well as those humans.
The developers paid a lot of attention to making dogs look and move realistically, but they seem to have spent less effort on people and scenery. The humans' lip-synching is especially bad, and Jake's canned responses to their commands grow old quickly. The same goes for the game's basic challenges.
X"Dog's Life" is for PlayStation 2.