Animal Shelter - Vet Clinic DLC Review

Animal Shelter is no stranger to a slew of DLC, with three now released that add a variety of items and more gameplay time to your pet shelter. This time, the Vet Clinic DLC has been released, and I had the opportunity to try it out!

This DLC adds a new building that will replace an older one that wasn't nearly as enjoyable, alongside a slew of new minigames, illnesses, and medicine for you to play around with. In new save files, this will affect your beginning section by making you feel a bit more helpless once you unlock the Clinic, a building you need to buy to finish the tutorial. Once you do, pets can start getting sick with various illnesses and it'll be your job to start taking the necessary steps to help treat them, though you can't do it alone — at least, not at first.

When you start your game and finally buy a Clinic, your first limitation will be that you don't have the tools to do everything in-house. So, in order to heal the ill pets, you'll need to follow the procedures given to you by external vets, as you need to get blood, saliva, or other types of samples to send to an outside veterinary clinic to provide you with the information. This process could be a bit frustrating (in a good way!), as the anticipation to be able to heal the pets in my facility was ever-present, and it gave the base game more to do than just get, clean, make happy, adopt, repeat.

This also did highlight the most frustrating part of the DLC, however — actually knowing how to follow the procedure. Learning is as easy as pie, and healing the pets is as simple as applying some medicine and coming back in a few minutes to do it again, but the game neglects to tell you how to see te procedure, which is by clicking M whilst hovering over the sick animal. Animal Shelter refused to give me this information, so I opted to try to heal my cat — Boo — by giving her all of the tests and trying to send them to clinics, which only accept one sample at a time.

Despite my early frustrations and struggles with Vet Clinic, I thoroughly enjoyed it once I got a dedicated building all for myself. Here, you get a couple of extra minigames and more interaction options with the pets of the shelter, where you can do X-rays, test samples, clip their nails... no need to send anything to external vets anymore, which was a massive plus.

Costing a little over 8,500 currency, the Vet Clinic isn't an inexpensive undertaking, but entirely replaces your Clinic once you have it, allowing you to do all of the tests yourself. There are three levels, as with most buildings in the game, and each one adds new items for you to test with. My personal favourite was checking the animals’ breathing and heart rate with a stethoscope, but many of the minigames were simple yet fun.

Though I do sing praises about it (even though the beginning was frustrating), it isn't all upsides. The illnesses can be stressful to deal with when you don't have a Vet Clinic to test, as when I was asked to use a stethoscope, I was still a few thousand currency away from being able to buy it, and I had the pet ultimately taken away. It was frustrating to have spent so long trying to cure that one cat but not being able to because I was asked to do a test I was still unable to do at all, and it felt like a design flaw to encounter issues I could do nothing about.

When it was good, however, I really enjoyed it — it gives more interactability: taking in sick pets and curing them became cathartic and enjoyable in a way that was more rewarding than taking in those who could be adopted easily. More interactions and things to do is never an addition I'll complain about.

Priced at £6.69, I feel like Vet Clinic is a great addition to Animal Shelter, but only if you already love the base game to begin with. This doesn't add so much new content that those who felt the original was a bit lacking will change their mind, but anyone who already loved the game will find much more to adore here, and that's good enough in my book.