Dr. Dolittle

Dr. Dolittle (video game)
Game: "Oh no, Spa Town is in trouble! All its animals are sicker than parrots – now that's really sick! Luckily, the famous Doctor Dolittle has just opened his new animal hospital – and he wants YOU to help him run it. Will you accept the challenge of curing Spa Town's poorly pets?" Players: No!
Protagonist(s): Dr. Dolittle Genre(s): Simulation Rating(s): PEGI: 3+ Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Release: EU: November 29, 2006 DE: December 6, 2006 Developer(s): Aqua Pacific Publisher(s): Blast! Entertainment Country: United Kingdom Series: Dr. Dolittle

Dr. Dolittle is a simulation game developed by Aqua Pacific and published by Blast! Entertainment. It was released in 2006 for the PlayStation 2 only in Europe.

Gameplay

The player takes on the role of Dr. Dolittle, tasked with meeting animals around the city Spa Town. In one mission, the protagonist takes ingredients from different buildings to create heals that cure animals. For most of the game, the player goes through the entire city waiting for a phone call for help, and going to the animals walking around the city.

Why It Can't Be Cured

1. A game that is technically based on the movie, as suggested by the heavily inspired 1998 film cover, containing the same actor and font, in fact sticks to the page of the book more, specifically The Story of Doctor Dolittle, as exemplified by the main character inconsistent with the cover, differing in body structure and wearing completely different clothes. The only difference is that the actor's face is not visible, due to the probably prevailing racism or hatred towards Eddie Murphy in the company, and there are other animals. All this makes the cover art a bait and a lousy attempt by publishers to make money, not actually showing what it is like in the game.
2. It is the most lazily distributed game in Poland. Due to the work done by Licomp Empirical Multimedia without any effort, unlike the usual foreign distributions, it suffers from several things.
   • In the language selection, unlike other selected languages like "English", "Suomi" (Finnish) and others, the Polish language selection is labeled as "Jezyk polski" (Polish language). Not only the "Jezyk" word is redundant, as in other distributions they only sign "Polski" (Polish), it is not spelled correctly yet. In Polish, there are also letters like "ą" or "ę" and others, and the latter is needed when writing the "język" (language/tongue) word. Certainly the genesis of this was due to the fact that distributors were afraid of children who may be confused in case of what means "Polski" without the word "język".
   • Since the language selection did not cause cancer yet, the game, despite being distributed in this country, the publishers did not even try to introduce Polish letters, which are extremely important to find out what is written in the game. The fact is especially important that the game is aimed at children learning to read, but because of the publisher's bungling, it will be hard for them to recognize what the words are actually written. Instead of Polish letters, various symbols are replaced that are not suitable for writing any words.
3. This game is nothing but a lazily-done cash-grab begging for money from naive parents or grandparents that aren't aware of the game quality. Mainly due to the fact that the game uses ready-made assets from their previous games, especially taken from the game called Chemist Tycoon created by the same developers, including the city, similarly-looking character models, buldings, animations, and a similar-looking menu.
4. This is a game alongside Elf Bowling 1 & 2 and World War III: The Fight Against Terrorism that features one of the worst main menus in the history of the gaming industry. After starting the game and pressing the "X" button, the game has no options except for selecting eight levels. Every normal game has options, including settings to set the sound, graphics and more, while this game does not even feature options like "continue game", game scores, and even credits.
5. Even though this is a game aimed at young kids, they may have a hard time playing the first time because the game has no tutorial whatsoever, only throwing the player to the first level right away. Instead, the young player is forced to read text from a miserable screen from the main menu after selecting a given level, explaining what to do, instead of showing how it is done in practice.
6. Due to the widespread laziness in companies cooperating with Blast!, the graphics are made on the lowest resistance line, making them look like digital vomit.
   • The models of characters, buildings, natural elements, and every other object in this game are so horrible that they will surely blow the eyes of players to pieces due to how unimaginably cheap they look, as if they came from unfinished amateurish 3D animation in Blender or another software.
   • In some sections, especially when you encounter animals, the characters look like they've been cheaply pasted in Photoshop or GIMP, plus the same hideous renders appear unchanged, unless you will cure animals, then animals only once change their mood, while Dr. Dolittle features only one render.
7. The game does not contain any music while playing, which makes it incredibly silent. Due to the silence, the game may disquiet the player to some extent. The game only contains one music that will appear in the main menu, which is a faint imitation of Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired music with no relevance to the movie. The composition itself is quite forgettable and not catchy.
8. Lest the game be overwhelmingly silent during gameplay, there are sound effects that are extremely annoying, being a very short loop, so listening to them for at least two seconds cause ear-bleeding. The most noticeable is the walking sound effect, which sounds as if someone was walking with slippers on the pavement, no matter what you walk on. However, the remaining sounds during the game may be too loud, especially the hum of the fountain. The last thing to mention is that the game does not contain any animal sounds, let alone Dr. Dolittle says absolutely nothing.
9. The game has no plot, which in the case of movie-based games is a complete embarrassment. The game doesn't even contain a fraction of a word about what happened in the movie. Instead, Aqua Pacific framed the entire movie through levels to directly explain what the average vet does.
10. This game is so excruciatingly boring and repetitive that kids who played it in a moment would quickly get bored of it, due to the almost lack of innovation, rendering the game almost devoid of content. The game only features eight missions, and all of them can be completed very quickly, meaning less than an hour in total, except for the third level which will be discussed in a moment. Most of the levels look identical with only minor changes.
    • The first level has no action, except for wandering around the city, hoping to find animals to meet, while using a minimap to find them. This level does not include a table for counting the animals encountered, so you don't know how many you will meet in total, until you realize you want to calculate yourself how many are left.
    • The second level is similar to the first one, except that you don't meet animals, you only come to the hive, supermarket, farm, and chemist to collect ingredients for medicines. What makes the game even more boring is that you don't have to come inside these places and search the ingredients around them, instead the ingredients are automatically loaded onto your inventory when you come near the entrance of these places.
    • The third level is that you create medicines from the ingredients that the game has assigned you. Additionally, this is the only level where character control is not required, instead you are forced to run the menu and select the "mixing machine" option. Due to how boring the explanation of levels is, to the point that you won't care, you won't be aware that it requires you to enter the menu.
    • In the fourth level you do the same as in the first one, except that this time you are healing the animals by looking for them around the city. In this level, you have to handle nine animals.
    • The fifth level is similar to the fourth level, except that there is a heatwave and you are already serving 20 animals.
    • The sixth level is basically the fourth level, except that you not only serve the animals that roam around the city, but also in this case the phone rings randomly asking for help. The level requires you to handle four animals and additionally another four by answering the phone to find an animal.
    • The seventh level is technically the fifth level, also requiring 20 animals to heal, except that there is a winter wave. Worst of all, since the developers were so lazy that they forgot to implement snow, and the animals still mention anything related to the heatwave, making this level duplicated and causes false advertising.
    • The eighth level is a total waste of time. It's exactly the same as the sixth one, but instead of eight animals, you serve as many as 40 animals, including 10 by phone and 30 walking around the city.
11. The controls, which in the case of isometric games, are surprisingly awful, which makes gamers think that how could it be to mess up the controls in isometric games, when it is the easiest to operate in these types of games. In order to control the main character, you have to turn the analog stick to the perfect 45 degrees, because if it's a bit too crooked, i.e. 44 or 46 degrees, then the "proverbial fat man" is not moving. The second method is controlling with the D-pad, but it's not very convenient.
12. Even for a game for kids, it is so illogical to the point that it has the potential to destroy the intelligence of young players, especially those who have either not yet entered school and those who attend kindergarten. The world of this game depicts the sick imaginations of drunk developers who did not even care about the film at all.
    • For an undefined reason, instead of being at the veterinary or in the zoo, the main character wanders around the city, meeting wild animals that definitely should not be released into the city, due to the potential danger that could happen in the city, especially pedestrians, who could walk on the street at the same time as the animals. However, the logic in Blast! games is not a thing you should expect, so animals randomly walk in the game, which also stand still most of the time, and show no emotions, even when a car passes by.
    • At the level where you mix ingredients to make a drug out of it, there is one very illogical thing. These medicines are produced in a mixer that magically make up the medicine, for example when you mix the white powder with the pills, then it will produce a flea powder, but in the form of a bottle, even though it didn't require any bottle when mixing, or the game doesn't show you process, when Dolittle actually poured it into the bottle, which this entire thing makes players confused.
    • In the level that mentions winter wave, the game not only still presents summer or spring, but animals also ask for a medicine to stop, for example, overheated organisms, instead of, for example, medicine for fever, which can have a severe effect in winter.
13. As is the case with some Aqua Pacific games, due to the lack of graphic designers to create a proprietary font or some decent downloaded font from various websites, instead the game uses the most shameful font ever, which is Comic Sans, which perfectly shows that the developers could add it out of their hatred for creating the game, and shows how low effort was put in by them, which makes the game feel extremely cheap.
    • For some unspecified reason, the game logo appears in the top right corner during the game, which was likely only placed for those who quickly forget what game they are playing, especially people who watched the 1998 movie and would not be aware that they are playing this game, which is based on that movie, until they saw the logo.
14. The city that is warmly showed by Blast!, is one of the poorest in history. Even though the city itself is not small as you only walk, it has absolutely no content except for bland buildings, parks and occasionaly cars. Certainly, the game also does not allow you to enter any of the buildings, let alone get on a car. Even worse, there aren't any people in the city other than Dr. Dolittle.
15. The game does not have collision detection between a passing car and a player. Instead of having an effect showing that the car has actually crashed Dolittle, the car penetrates through the player like a ghost.
16. After completing all eight levels, the game does not contain any cutscenes, or even a slideshow, just an extremely poor congratulations card saying "Congratulations everybody is fit and well" for completing the level and mentioning the good health of the animals. What even more makes more embarrassing, does not contain any credits, so no one has any idea who exactly made the game or how many people participated in this project, as if they were well aware that they are making a game of the quality of rotten potato dipped in petroleum jelly. After that, the game quickly returns to the main menu with a choice of levels.

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