Horse Club Adventures (Switch)

The Horse Club line of toys and playsets from Schleich seem to be a great choice for any children with an interest in equestrian play. The figures sit at a nice spot between quality and appeal, and while I have no personal experience with them, they do seem like a great choice for kids who want realistic horse toys albeit ones with often little to no articulation. I am no reviewer of toys though, but I wanted to lead with this before discussing their tie-in video game Horse Club Adventures because it doesn’t carry on that level of quality at all. In fact, it’s more likely a child will have more fun with the unarticulated horse figure that costs about the same as this budget title from developer Wild River Games.

 

Horse Club Adventures has you create your own young lady and horse for what could be charitably called an equestrian adventure, the game initially locking out a good deal of hair and outfit options for both until you find or earn them during the game’s story. On a summer trip you find yourself at the Lakeside Riding Stable where you quickly meet a group of girls who will become your fast friends. Hannah, Sofia, Lisa, and Sarah are all big into horse riding and eager to show you around in the lead-up to a coming riding competition, the player also bumping into the slightly snobby but not all that bad Tori for a bit of a mild rivalry leading up to that event. A small plot about the colorful and idyllic rural area around the stable getting polluted does start to briefly give the plot a bit more structure than hanging out with your new pals, and there are a good deal of side characters you’ll become familiar with like a local farmer and the cafe owner. You usually spend a day or two with each of the main girls to get to know a bit about them and also be surprised when the usually text-only conversations suddenly give way to what appears to be the same woman providing voices for multiple characters in a heavy German accent, the otherwise absent voice acting starker for the odd moments they chose for the girls to speak up. Unfortunately, one reason you become familiar with the girls and people of Lakeside is the adventures of this horse club are decidedly mundane, incredibly hollow, and deeply unimaginative.

While you do have that race to look forward as a bit of a climax to the plot, the weeks leading up to that event are excruciatingly tepid in the tasks your new friends come up with for you all to do together. The game offers a fairly wide open area to ride through on horseback, the lakeside having a rock quarry, some farms, and forests to gallop through. Unfortunately, all the story can really come up with for utilizing this space is having you cross it over and over again just to talk to someone or find an object to pick up. Time and time again you’ll be sent traveling across the large map with no obstructions or pressure to your ride, the game not even giving you the option of trying to make your own paths because of how riddled with invisible walls the map is. If you try to leap off a small ledge for example, you’ll find even though your horse could conceptually even step down, you won’t be permitted to change elevation. Brush can be surprisingly solid so cutting through foliage is often just as frustrating in barring you from making your own shortcuts, and while your horse can at least jump to clear fences, they can’t leap over a small creek due to those invisible barriers. While you might be feeling adventurous, going off the beaten path leads to dead ends that looked like viable ground to travel, meaning it’s often best to stick to roads and pull up your map every now and then since the compass indicator of where to go while riding ignores obstructions and will likely send you to areas you can’t cross.

 

You would hope the riding is at least a bit interesting to make up for it, but your horse is a dutiful and responsive mount that unfortunately means there’s little texture to traveling on horseback. It’s easy to turn it and control its general movement, the only things you thus need to worry about being its stamina when running and timing your jumps to clear obstructions when that is allowed. Stamina is very straightforward; as you have your horse sprint, a fairly large meter will gradually drain, and if it runs out, the horse will briefly slow down and need a bit to recover its energy. Stamina management pretty much comes down to identifying moments to let up and let it walk instead of run for a bit to let the meter refill a bit, this mechanic almost never an actual problem during the story save for making travel across the world slower since places are so far apart you could legitimately drain the whole meter if you try to get there as quickly as possible. Jumping also rarely matters during the plot, more activities about just finding an object laying around a small area than utilizing your horse’s abilities for anything interesting. The items you are looking for at least require you to do a bit of hunting in a small space rather than being told exactly where they are, it at least breaking up the constant string of going to a place to talk to a person and then leave to talk to another across the map. An elderly woman at the stable will also give you sidequests each in-game day that unfortunately are cut from the same boring cloth, just going to a place to press a button to talk to someone or grab an item, and while she eventually has her own little story told through doing her chores, they are definitely not worth the extra effort to complete them.

There is an impressive effort to transport the elements from the toyline like the building playsets into a game world accurately, but they do feel like they were plopped into a world without much care in making them actually interesting to visit. In fact, much of the time, this might as well not be a horse-related game because the goals don’t involve your mount for much more than travel. There are two grooming minigames though, one where you brush its coat and another where you pick mud out of its hooves. Both are fairly simple and unfold the exact same way every time, dirt always packing in the same manner and dirt patches appearing on your horse’s body in the same spots, and these are effectively optional tasks too. Doing them will give your horse a bit more stamina to work with for a limited time, the player able to get a bit more stamina for their companion as well by feeding and giving them water at the end of the day in a very basic interaction. They do add some repetition to a game already rife with it, but it was at least a bit more justifiable since horse care is more an immersive element than the objectives that fail in their role of providing the actually entertaining elements of riding on horseback through the countryside. The game even almost concocts a good reason to explore too, the hair and outfit unlocks for you and your horse sometimes found in boxes on the side of the road, but these only seem to appear after set story events and are just kind of laying around in the open rather than being neat finds for going off the beaten path. Photo spots exist as well, but reaching them just gives you a picture the game already had rather than allowing you and your horse to pose with the colorful and sometimes rather pretty scenery.

 

If you do deviate from the story of Horse Club Adventures a bit though, you can find something the game actually does a fairly decent job with: the races. On the side of the road you’ll often find large signs, these actually being what you can use to initiate one of the game’s 90 races with. The number sounds pretty impressive, but it’s actually 3 difficulty variations on a still hefty set of 30, all of them putting the large map to good use for once to make impromptu race courses. The 1 star difficulty is almost more of a learning run, the par time for outranking the other horse club girls and Tori pretty much a given to beat as long as you stick to the course. 2 and 3 star rank versions of those races start to get a bit tight and actually implement obstacle jumping as a vital element to your success. The previously clear roads will now have objects and hurdles to leap over, and while you would think simply lining up your horse well and pressing the jump button would be how you clear them, it’s a bit more involved than that. As you approach, a meter appears on screen, an indicator quickly moving from bottom to top. Leap too early or late and hit those red regions on the meter and you get a time penalty, but hit it closer to the center and you’ll either clear it with no issue or even get time removed from your run for a perfect jump. At first this seems like needless complication, what’s wrong with just lining the jump up well yourself? However, the approach is still important, a bad angle causing the indicator to move much more quickly and give you little time to earn that time shaving perfect jump. While there are a few deliberately long races like one that sends you all around the available world, most of these races are just a few minutes in length and the jump system can make some of them decent tests of your abilities. These give their own unlockable outfit pieces for clearing them, these actually being proper activities that your horse truly feels involved in, putting them well above the often insubstantial tasks the game stitches together into a story that drags precisely because of how much time you spend doing nothing but traveling on horseback.

THE VERDICT: The fairly nice environments of Horse Club Adventures are sadly your greatest enemy as the story can think of very little to do besides have you ride across them again and again just to complete a chain of empty errands. It’s a world that denies your itch to explore by placing invisible walls in your way and there’s very little to do beyond completing the meandering plot, although the somewhat decent races thankfully provided some direction and more involved activities if you break away from the story to do them. A laborious adventure that sometimes doesn’t even justify the presence of its horses because they are often just the way you cross the unexciting map, Horse Club Adventures ends up less exciting than the stationary toy figures it’s based on.

 

And so, I give Horse Club Adventures for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. In my research on the Horse Club brand, many toy reviewers I found praised their use in imaginative play. Unfortunately, imagination is in short supply in Horse Club Adventures, the player often just going from place to place while they just so happen to sit atop a horse. The races were well handled and offer simpler challenges for less skilled players and ones that actually challenge your ability to get your timing and approach right regardless of your age, and it’s a bit of a shame they were all crammed to the side. Even if all the easy 1 star races were integrated in the plot while the tougher ones were optional then you would have a more interactive and less tedious story, and while your time with the horse club girls does involve a few “races”, these usually require you to follow the girl you’re racing because you might not even know where the finish line is otherwise. Normal races make decent use of checkpoints and the compass to guide you, and while they aren’t a reason to buy a game on their own, they are a life preserver in a game otherwise filled with tiresome busywork. Tearing down some of those invisible walls and scattering around some interesting collectibles could make the traveling periods more interesting, but really the game needed to apply some actual creativity to what tasks you can be involved in. Have players need to get somewhere fast, or tail someone on horseback. There is precisely one time where you herd a few sheep back to their pen and it’s not that interesting on its own, but it could have become more involved if it cropped up again. It just needed to anything more than constant long rides just to see a character say three text boxes of dialogue and send you on your way to read three more text boxes from somebody on the other side of the map.

 

The sad part is, I was hoping Horse Club Adventures could be the horse game that other poor quality horse games made me wish for. The Unicorn Princess was abysmal although it at least understood to integrate hurdle jumping more than this game and the horse racing in Mario Sports Superstars only offered simple elements of horse care to add to its flawed racing system. I had hoped Horse Club Adventures would be the horse game I could recommend, but instead it only escapes being just as atrocious as The Unicorn Princess because of its almost decent racing that it shoved to the side. I don’t know where the horse game that offers good riding and horse care elements might be, but Horse Club Adventures has its priorities all wrong, the game not just feeling like it wants to avoid the horse elements much of the time, but it doesn’t even make the human parts interesting to compensate.