Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Secrets of the Ranch is the fourth Pippa Funnell game and the second Horsez, the followup to Golden Stirrup Challenge. Overall, it's an entertaining, fun and engaging game for fans of the series or horses in general. It's hardly what you'd call 'elaborate' as far as storyline and characters go, but that's really what you want form a Horsez game. The storyline is often cliched and predictable, but the adventure part of the storyline is often challenging. Emma, a young vet student, finds herself on the stud farm being run by Flora, the main chaarcter from the previous game. We also see returns from her best friend Carole and her former boyfriend, now husband, Migeul, though he's been renamed 'Micheal' in this game - a choice I find odd not just for the sake of a name-change, but choosing to 'Americanize' the name when the setting is a small countryside town in France. Emma and Flora's slightly eccentric nephew, Oliver, are pitted against the town's Mayor as he tries to seize the stud farm for land development.
The adventure storyline, in which the player has to undertake timed quests, find and use objects, and complete objectives, is dotted in amongst horse care, training in dressage, showjumping and cross-country, and taking part in competitions.
Horse care has changed very little since the previous games.
Dressage takes a turn for the worse however - while the previous Horsez game hit an excellent format, this one is choppy, lengthy to train and participate in with slow-motion zooming aerial camera angles, and forces the player to memorize tracks and moves and then complete them instead of being able to do everything on the spot. I'm an adult player who's been playing horse games for years; I can see kids really struggling with this. Showjumping and crosscountry have also taken slight turns for the worse, though not as severe as dressage. Jumps need to be approached correctly and the right speed chosen. Getting to the right speed is difficult, and there are jumps made where it is impossible to jump without bringing down a post and getting a fault, a major design mistake in my eyes. It should always be possible to succeed, certainly a few difficult jumps, but not this format.
In exploring or riding around the countryside there is a major advantage - a full-time map, which allows the player to teleport to any previously visited location. (Except during timed quests). However, this is severely limited by a frustrating time-limited day. Anything you do, teleporting included, takes up time out of your day, which has a forced ending (at 4AM, though any useful activity such as training and horse care end at 8PM). This wouldn't prove difficult if the time used wasn't so severe - taking care of your horse can take the better part of an entire day, getting from village to stud farm can take three hours. If this frustrating system were kept it needs to be adjusted so players have more time in a day - or better yet, returned to the schedule-based Golden Stirrup setup where though each day was limited to four activities, you could take all the time you needed to, and within a week there was plenty of time to accomplish what you needed to. Not the instance here, where fitting in enough training to even enter competitions is impossible.
The breeding center is a great addition however. Foals can be bred from parents of the player's choice, giving them different characteristics. I did find the breed and colour selection very limited though, a few more options there would have been excellent. Another slight problem I experienced was that in order to be able to praticipate in competitions you had to purchase a new horse outright at least twice. It would have been nice to keep the same horse throughout, which could have been easily achievable by allowing more time in each day, so the player could train a favourite horse from scratch.
Surprisingly, the graphics are nowhere near as lovely as Golden Stirrup - I wasn't expecting complete sophistication, but they're certainly subpar when compared to the beautiful environments of China or Tuscany from the previous game. It also got a little mundane always staying in the same place, after experiences the three unique locations in Golden Stirrup.
Overall while the characters and storyline will endear; frustrations over dressage and the limited span of time in the virtual day are the big downers here. Kids and horse-nut adults will enjoy this one, but it never manages to hit the excellence of Horsez: Golden Stirrup Challenge.
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Manufacturer's DescriptionA young French-American girl is in a cab on her way to the city. She just got hired as an assistant to a veterinarian. Unfortunately her cab breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and its dark. Our young heroine searches for a place to stay and finds a small village not far away.There, she meets a young boy that provides her shelter for the night. In return he asks her to help his mare give birth. After, she learns that the landlord of the ranch has disappeared in strange circumstances.
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