PAW Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls

I cover shooters for a living, so dropping into a children's 3D platformer is a bit like swapping a 144hz monitor for a flip phone, but here we are. Adventure City Calls is a movie tie-in from Drakhar Studio built squarely for the under-seven crowd, and the honest framing for any parent reading this is: does it do its job without actively making your afternoon miserable? Mostly, yes. With some asterisks the size of Marshall's fire truck. The structure is eight linear missions set across Adventure City, each pairing two pups whose gadget sets are fixed to that level. You get Chase, Marshall, Skye, and the movie newcomer Liberty, rotating through scenarios like traffic control, electrical shutdown, and firefighting. Within each mission there is a light platforming section, a lane-based vehicle segment where you dodge obstacles across three lanes, and occasional quick-time gadget interactions. Single-player lets you hot-swap between the two pups on the fly; drop in a second controller and you get local co-op where each player owns one pup. The lane sections occasionally show up in standalone minigame form, and Pup Pup Boogie, basically a rhythm button-masher, rounds out the side content. None of it is mechanically demanding. The controls are run, jump, and interact, and a four-year-old can figure it out without the manual. The problems are real and not trivial. The co-op camera is the worst offender: if one player moves too fast, the trailing pup falls off-screen, clips into geometry, and sometimes sinks through the floor entirely. Steam community posts report co-op spawning bugs that hard-block progress and force level restarts, losing all collected pup treats. The voice acting covers only Ryder; the pups are silent, which robs the whole thing of personality that the show and film have in abundance. Textures in some areas are rough in a way that stands out even on a monitor running at normal resolution. The title was clearly shipped to coincide with the theatrical release date, and the seams show. For what it is, the game does clear a low bar reasonably well on most platforms. The visual palette is loud and recognizable, missions communicate objectives clearly enough that kids do not need to read, and the collectible pup treats and badge system give completionist-minded youngsters something to chase after the story wraps. A basic run clocks in around three hours, and the minigames add a bit of replay for the Pup Pup Boogie fans in your household. Compared to its predecessor, Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay, the general consensus among reviewers who covered both is that this one feels like a step sideways at best, with buggier execution undermining what should have been a straightforward sequel. If your household has a functioning PAW Patrol obsessive under the age of seven, they will not care about the texture pop-in. Everyone else in the room will notice it every single time.

Fred · Scout Team

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