Horsez Review

In Ubisoft’s Horsez for the Nintendo DS, you play the role of Ginger, a young blond who joins a horse riding school in France. You join Ginger on her first day as she meets the riding school officials. Once you’ve gotten the basic rundown on all the rules and activities from the head of the riding school, you set off to train the top horse and win over your fellow classmates by dying your hair, buying new clothes, and oh yeah, riding your horse.

Besides the horse riding, you visit the library at the school, where you actually get to learn real techniques and terms, albeit via a drab text interface. You also get to change your appearance by buying hair dye, shirts, and other clothing and accessories. The purpose of all this is to impress your fellow riding school students. You can also impress them by taking time out to chat with them. Chatting isn’t interactive at all, and simply consists of listening to your classmates talk about their lives, which are for the most part very boring and predictable. For this part of the game to work or be entertaining at all, you’d need much better writing and interactive branching storylines that made chatting with your classmates a rewarding experience. As it stands, you’ll chat only because it raises your popularity level, not because you want to. At times, you find items that you return to a specific classmates that help drive the story along. And maybe the wardrobe changing is more appealing to the young female demographic, but I found it tedious, mostly because it had no real bearing on gameplay and was of no consequence anywhere but within the confines of the riding school.

Another activity involves cleaning out your horse and its stable. Here, you’ll scrub your horse using the DS stylus, looking for dark areas where clumps of dirt fall out. You also clean out the horse’s hooves by picking at clumps of debris with the stylus, one foot at a time. Next, you pick up all the horse’s droppings and loose hay with the stylus and place it in a box. Finally, you’ll take your horse outside and hose him down. If all of this sounds tedious, rest assured that it IS tedious. It may seem novel the first time you perform these actions, but when you realize that they have to be performed several times a day, you’ll have a hard time having any fun. Raising your own foal and teaching him tricks is another gameplay option. This one actually has a little more depth to it, and you can trade your foal wirelessly with other Horsez owners, which is nice.

Once you get outside with the horse, though, things don’t get much better. While taking a stroll with the horse is easily the most fun activity in the game, it is hampered by the game’s rudimentary 3d graphics. Aside from the horse models, which are actually quite nice, the outside areas are a mess of bad textures, blocky characters, pixelated trees, etc. If that isn’t bad enough, the actual areas where you go strolling through are extremely limited, to the point that you’re really steering your horse through a predetermined path, or rail. Actually controlling the horse is also sketchy. Steering with the stylus is imprecise, and using the dpad feels too loose. The horses control like tanks, and doing simple tricks like jumping over a hurdle can be frustrating when you can’t line up your horse because the controls won’t let you. Of course, guiding your horse through competitions with these controls isn’t much fun, and half the time you’re pressing the jump button and hoping for the best, since the response time is so slow.

Overall, there’s isn’t much reason to keep playing past the opening week. Buying new gear for your horses and learning new tricks do very little to help the controls, and the outside areas are so bland and uninspiring that riding and competing with the horse isn’t enough motivation to grind through the boring interactions with the schoolmates or cleaning up the stable. Horse aficionados or gamers who like to upgrade their character’s wardrobe and hair color may find enough redeeming qualities to keep playing through the game’s cycles. Younger gamers may also find some novelty in riding the horse and even going through the cleaning routine, but most gamers will want to steer clear of this pony.