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TLDR; Don't get this game unless and until the developers really try to get rid of the copious bugs this game has had for years. The devs have not fixed most, if not any, of them and there isn't really much communication at all between the community and the team about this. It is not worth trying to sit through all of the bugs for a cute dog game that can basically make your whole save unplayable at any moment. It becomes a waste of time and a waste of money at that point.
This game is fun and cute, and it really sucks that I have to leave a negative review on this. Unfortunately for every adorable dog in this game, there is a less-than adorable glitch. I've tried to just bear it, as games always have some sort of glitches and glitches don't exactly mean that a game is bad. That's unavoidable. But this game is so broken to the point where I'm very certain my entire save file just got corrupted for no reason.
Every time I try to play this game normally, something tends to go wrong. Sometimes (pretty commonly and not hard at all to do on accident) the character will get stuck behind the table of food and you can't get out. This has apparently been an issue SINCE 2021. This game has received a few patches and this is STILL an issue. Hell, they added an unstuck button for situations like this... AND THE UNSTUCK BUTTON FAILS TO WORK? I've pressed this button a few times and the one time it actually worked and teleported my character out, I wasn't even actually stuck and was trying to see if it even did anything. Its basically just a nothing button. You're forced to reload the save over and over whenever something like this happens, and it happens A LOT. It's like plastering duct tape on a leaking pipe and expecting it to work forever without actually fixing anything. When your bandaid patch doesn't even work, for YEARS, and you've already acknowledged that this is a problem? That is an issue.
Okay so the food table is avoidable if you're just really careful about entering the room. That one was the first glitch I encountered and it wasn't too big of a deal except for losing an entire day of progress. The next thing I encountered was that sometimes I'd get completely stuck on the adoption screen when the client has reviewed all the dogs. There is no dialogue and the player gets absolutely stuck. You're forced to reload the game, once again. I'm assuming this happens when you click too fast through the adoption because I'd been clicking a bit fast through it. Okay sure. Just go slower, that one is avoidable and not too much of a hassle at all.
The third glitch was when every single one of the dogs just froze and didn't move. They'd refuse to eat and drink and they'd all just get hungrier and thirstier without any control. You could take them out and put em back in their kennels but that didn't do anything. (Usually when a dog refuses to eat or drink for some reason, you can just take them out of a kennel and put them back in and they'd start doing it. This was a case where it is not fixable though and affected every single dog instead of just one.) Theoretically if you had enough foster homes you could have just loaded any frozen dog into there and waited for them to get adopted out. Inconvenient but still, playable. But this was EVERY dog, and you probably won't have enough foster homes to save every dog without negatively impacting your shelter. Reload the save once again, lose the day once again.
The final nail in the coffin for me was when my save just.. Basically died. There was no solution I know of to save any of it, not reloading, not closing and reopening the game, it was BAD. I was able to go for a little while through the game without any major problems until I got myself stuck on the adoption screen again. When I reloaded the save... EVERYTHING BROKE FOR SOME REASON. The employees were stuck and would not move. (They're usually kind of buggy anyway, they grab dogs through walls across the building and they have some really questionable pathing sometimes. Sometimes they do get stuck entirely when the day starts but usually you can reload and it'd be fine.) I could not pick up the ribbon to put the dogs on display. I could not take the water bucket. I tried to go through an adoption again after I manually lead the dogs to the display kennels and I wasn't even clicking fast this time. The skip button was gone and I sat through the review process, and there was no dialogue and my character was stuck once again. Upon reloading, the same issues were still there and I was stuck with them. I tried a lot of things to try to salvage this save but I got too fed up at this point to even try to work with it anymore.
I'm usually a really tolerant person when it comes to glitchy games. Because as long as the game is playable and these things can be avoided (Even if the avoidance is sometimes inconvenient) the game can still be fun. To The Rescue however, has a lot of unavoidable glitches that you really can't even find the source of. Some of these can be avoided if the user is cautious enough, but a lot of them are also not user error at all. Most of these like the food table glitch are encountered very early on in the game and can happen within the first couple of days (As it did for me). Every single glitch piles up, small or major. And when every glitch starts to make this game unplayable and not fun, you give up.
I will say some positives about this game at least in that it's really cute and that I really dig the manager game style. I really like animal care games and so the concept of this game really appealed to me. I do appreciate the toggle of the words "euthanize" and "send away" as it does make some harsh decisions a little more bearable for some. This game does a pretty decent job at conveying the reality of the issues with costs of operating a shelter, overpopulated shelters, how hard it can be for some dogs to find homes, and the choices shelters need to make for the sake of the dogs.
Unfortunately, with how good of a game concept this is and how cute it is, it's still outweighed by how poorly the game runs. It gets to the point where the game starts to get less and less enjoyable. You end up putting more work into trying to play the game than operating the shelter itself. It sucks to leave a negative review on this game, as I did have fun and wanted to have fun with To The Rescue. But I'm tired of this game already and I gave it enough chances.