To the Rescue! Review (Mongoose)
It's cute and pretty fun for a while, but this game definitely has struggles. Almost every time I stop playing it, it's because of really bad bugs and the only way to fix them is to exit to the menu and lose a day of progress, so it gets frustrating.
When first starting, you play a tutorial that is a bit slow-paced and you can't skip through any parts or make it go faster, which is fine unless you've forgotten how to play after a while and wanna go back to relearn a couple basics real quick. And then after the tutorial you are thrown in the deep end of a super busy shelter and it's really stressful until you figure out how to adjust difficulty settings or you make it to your shelter to start fresh and more simple. But the default difficulty is a bit too hard for just after the tutorial, cause the tutorial doesn't mention some key parts of the game, like hiring staff (who will 100% find a way to get themselves stuck somewhere, likely with a dog in bad need of help).
The gameplay is very repetitive, and I quickly learned that the point of the game isn't to do the everyday tasks of taking care of dogs in a shelter, but to just bring dogs to people over and over and over, and to hire workers for everything else, making the gameplay lose that spark of interest of interacting with the dogs. That's the only way to progress as a shelter though. The gameplay also tends to be so fast-paced that I can't get emotionally attached to any dogs because I'm spending all my time dragging them to potential adopters. And I can't seem to find any point to playing with the dogs, because it doesn't seem to change anything, so that part of the game can be easily ignored.
It's definitely disappointing that we never actually leave the shelter and go back home in the game, especially because you pick a dog at the beginning of the game and the dog is basically just there to look pretty. You can talk to the dog for a quick game tip and that's it. It just lays there and you can't play, feed, bathe, walk, or do anything with it. I think it'd be cool to expand the game to include some time at home, to be able to foster like a max of 3 dogs or something yourself, and to be able to buy decorations and unlock minigames at home for your dog(s) so you have a little anchor point of vacation away from the fast-paced shelter and also get to interact and make close connections with some dogs.
TL/DR: If you get this game, get it on sale, cause it has too many issues currently to be a game you can spend a lot of hours on and feel like you got the most for your money.