Giga Pets AR

Giga Pets AR! Similar to the Tamagotchi P1/P2 rerelease from a few years back, this is a rerelease of the Giga Pet with some newly added features.

The Giga Pet AR comes in three flavors- a standard puppy, a T-Rex, and a unicorn (my personal favorite is the T-Rex). They all function basically the same way. Each starts out as a baby that grows to its full size after a few days. Their lifespans are around two weeks, though they can stick around longer with good care. There’s no kind of branching evolution here; what you see is what you get. The upside to this is that the pets are really well-animated. They’re always doing cute little animations- running around, coming up to the screen… They’re really fun to watch. In addition to the attention light, they also play different animations depending on what they need at the time. If you don’t interact with your pet for a while, they’ll go to sleep to act as a battery saver.

Under the stat menu, you can see your pet’s health, hunger, discipline, and overall score. Everything but the score is pretty typical for a virtual pet. It’s not a score in the traditional sense, but more of an overall marker of how well you’re taking care of your pet. If you get all of its stats like hunger to 100, your score will also be at 100. But when its stats start to fall, your score will also fall. Keeping this high is the key to extending your pet’s lifespan.

For food, you have the regular food and snack options. Each one has three games to play. They aren’t super-intensive, but having variety is always nice. You can give your pet a bath or send it to the doctor to make sure it stays healthy. You also have the option of disciplining your pet or teaching it tricks. It’s a decently hardy pet and not too difficult to keep happy and healthy. 

A new function included with this release is AR functionality with an app. Using this app, you can scan your device and get a pet on your phone to play with as well. When you do different things for the first time on your physical pet like putting it to sleep or teaching it a trick or game, you’ll unlock little ‘trophies’ that carry over to the app. When you select them in the app, you can unlock new animations on the app that correspond to the different trophies. It’s not incredibly deep, but it does add in a little more interactivity, and it’s cool getting to decorate and change the colors of your pet in the app.

All in all, this is a pretty fun pet. It lacks some of the the replayability of something like a Tamagotchi because of the single growth path, but it’s extremely cute, well-animated, and not too difficult to take care of.