DS Review: My Horse & Me 2: Riding For Gold

As the rainy winter months continue to drag on, I find myself trying out more and more of these silly equestrian games...mostly because I wish like anything I could be out riding in real life. But, as that is not an option, I go for what, logically, seems more or less like the next best idea. This time, it was with My Horse & Me 2: Riding For Gold.

The storyline is fairly predictable and typical. You're playing a girl who's visiting her uncle's ranch (why is it always a grandfather or an uncle? Just wondering...) and, of course, things can never just be. There's all this drama that the ranch's horses are all getting sick, and the ranch itself is in danger of being shut down and your character is its only hope, blah blah blah... you can see where it's going. You have to start riding so you can enter competitions to try and save the ranch. (Who didn't see that coming from a mile away?) And, of course, more in the style of any TV drama involving a ranch rather than most games, there has to be the one token hunky guy who's interested in your character from the get-go. (I'm sure my own sexuality has something to do with this, but every time the guy showed up, I just rolled my eyes and groaned. Can't STAND that skeeve. You know as well as I do he's only interested in one thing. :p)

So, what's a girl to do? Well, you train your horse and compete all around the world, of course! Each competition has a dressage, jumping, and a cross-country obstacle course. You get to train for each of these at your own ranch before traveling to remote locations all around the globe (many of which I wouldn't associate with horse showmanship, but whatever) to compete in each competition. I do like the fact that it's only very rare that you end up doing anything at a galloping pace. More typically, you use either a trot or a canter...which is far more true to real life than most horse games assume things work, where everything is all, 'THIS IS YOUR HORSE ON STEROIDS. NEED FOR SPEEEEEEEEEEED!' No. Just, no. And this game respects that, so I'll give it a bonus point for that.

In between competitions and training sessions, you must care for your horse. Sounds typical, I'm sure, but so far this is the only games I've ever seen thus far in the genre who've gone to the lengths of detail that this one has. Even the more common practices, they put their own spin on, which makes this game a one of a kind in the field. First, you must bathe your horse. You take a round brush and break up all the clumps of dirt in the horse's fur (which, unfortunately due to the animation style used, results in the dirt looking like flanks of meat hanging off the poor animal), then lather it up with soap, rinse it off with a hose, and try is with a towel. Funny thing about rinsing the horse....after you do so, there's streaks of neon blue left behind on the horse that make it look like a zebra. (They don't entirely disappear when you dry it, either. They just fade a bit.) Then, you must clean the horse's hooves. (Ah, caught you off-guard, didn't it? This is something new to horse games!) You get a hoof pick, and just like in real life, you have to pick all the clods of dirt out from the hooves. But then they take it a step further by requiring you to fill the cracks left behind in the hooves with grease. (They could have only topped this by requiring you to change the horses' shoes from time eto time as well. Maybe in a future game someday.) Then you have to take care of the horse's legs by massaging and wrapping them (another feature I've never seen used in another game), and, although I felt they may have been reaching a little bit on this part, give the horse massages patented to their moods. This only proves to be educational in the fact that it forces you to pay attention to your horse's body language, which exhibits subtle signs of different moods that real horses display as well. (Growing up around horses my entire life, this wasn't even a challenge for me.) Then you get to clean their stall, which is about as tedious (but luckily not as backbreaking) as it is in real life. Collect up all the dirty straw, get rid of it, wash away the poop with a hose (although they say it's dirt....c'mon. You wouldn't be cleaning it up if there weren't poop everywhere. I'm guessing they just didn't want to disgust the kids by calling it what it really is), and then scattering new, fresh straw all over the floor. And then, of course, you have to feed your horse. This part, they took some creative liberties on, because you have to combine 6 different pieces of food (of your choice) with a supplement, add water, mix it, and see if your horse likes it. (I was only able to come up with one combination that my horse didn't hate.) It's not nearly so complicated in real life.....nor even vaguely similar to this process.

Now, with all that said, I do have some complaints. (Then again, when don't I?) If the 3-D animations weren't so horribly grainy, they might actually be decent to look at, but in the shape they're in, they're just hideous. (What a waste.) Yet, in the actual dialogue scenes, they're horribly cartoony by comparison. There's no real set style throughout, which annoys me. Also annoying is all the in-game advertising for Atari, especially during competitions. It makes it VERY distracting while you're trying to concentrate on what's going on, and then suddenly there's a huge Atari logo dragging your attention towards it. They should've made these more subtle. The controls themselves are iffy.... When they want to work correctly, they're fantastic. But, they're very finicky and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when they will and won't work, and then you're about a mile off from where you need the controls to be picking up at. This makes trying to get gold in any competition almost impossible. You'll be lucky to see silver. But, the absolute #1 biggest gripe I have about this game is that there is NO way to speed up the dialogue. It scrolls past irritatingly slowly, and it doesn't even stop between messages for you to have to tap the screen, signaling that you've finished reading this part. It just keeps going. So you can't even try to multitask while playing this to have something to do during the aggravatingly long waits for the dialogue to finish popping up. If it weren't for this, I'd be liable to give this game a considerably higher rating than I'm about to. Potential improvement for if you ever make a sequel to this, Atari. Heed your players' suggestions!

Overall, the game length isn't that long. In one sitting, I'd venture to say that one could easily complete the game in about 4 or 5 hours, tops. But, because of how aggravatingly slowly things go, I couldn't play it all in one sitting, I had to keep taking breaks between each competition and coming back to it later; playing it in only small spurts. (I'm sure I can't be the only one to have felt this way about it.) So it ended up taking me about a week or so to complete it, playing through a couple of competitions per day. I think this speaks volumes both about its lasting and replay appeal. I'm going to rate this title a 6.5 out of 10, and I feel that I'm still being generous with that. The negative points should've forced it lower, but with so much uniqueness in the horse care department, I did have to take that into consideration when rating this.