My Dog Coach: Understand Your Dog With Cesar Millan

It's easy to forget in the current climate, but pets have problems too. Currently, we're all running around like headless chickens, queuing outside banks demanding our money and hauling in the cheque book when out shopping, but who's looking after our faithful friends during this dry period? Who feels their pain and takes care of their stresses and strains while we're busy fussing after ourselves?

Cesar Millan, that's who! Star of hit U.S. show The Dog Whisperer, Millan spends his days rehabilitating dogs back from the brink to a state of normality, dealing with problems the owners might be having with disobedience in the process. Millan's golden rules - to which all dogs apparently comply -are applied here in a title where it's your job to prescribe just what is wrong with problem pups, as well as partaking in activities to bring them back in line.

Yes, this is less a game and more a bit of schooling with some interactive elements. The question is whether mediating mundane tasks in order to learn more about how to care for man's best friend is entertaining enough for you, and also whether the advice on offer here is good enough to call on in real life situations.

Basically, you take on the kind of activities Cesar Millan undertakes in his real life. Various dog owners come to you with a synopsis of the problems they are suffering with their pets, and your initial job is to diagnose what's wrong from a list of options provided by Cesar himself. Once it's been established just what the issue is, Cesar then recommends a number of activities that should alleviate the owner's concerns and retrain the dogs into better ways.

Naturally, it's you and not the owner that then has to partake in these activities, which fall into three categories: exercise, discipline and affection. Initially, most of the problems revolve around exercise, so you'll repeatedly find yourself either walking the dog or going rollerblading with it - an activity that highlights more than any other a clear targeting of the American, rather than the European, market. Worse than this, however, is the feeling that most of these 'games' are a trifle tedious.

Walking, for instance, is all a question of keeping the dog at a reasonable pace and making sure he or she doesn't get distracted. At your disposal is the ability to gently pull the dog back with the lead should the animal pick up too much speed, and vocal commands to let the dog know when it needs to fall back in line. However, it's never really clear whether you're on the right track, and you can repeatedly be told that you've failed the task without much of a clue as to why.

Similarly, another activity that came up fairly early on in my play-through saw me repeatedly entering and leaving a house (achieved by simply panning the camera forwards and backwards) so that the dog in question could get used to its owner leaving for and returning from work. While this might be an important lesson for those playing - the long established idea that you shouldn't make a fuss of your dog when leaving the house or returning home - in play, it's a fairly pointless activity.

So, if My Dog Coach is less of a game and more of a guide for how to care for your dog, then its advice naturally has to be called into question. In between diagnosis and the activities themselves, Cesar throws questions at you, with the correct answers presented as fact. To be told that all dogs -whatever breed - should be walked for 90 minutes a time, twice a day, and that putting your pet on a treadmill is an acceptable form of exercise when the weather outside is too extreme for a walk, is rather worrying.

It's not a grand leap to imagine kids taking Cesar's word as gospel, knackering their greyhounds on walks far too long for their temperament, or having a nasty accident when trying to get Fido to take to Dad's rusty treadmill in the garage. In either form, My Dog Coach is questionable. It's not entertaining, and the way it presents its views as fact shows contempt and a general misunderstanding of its audience. As a result, it's quite hard to see who should fork out for Cesar Millan's offering. This is one license that could do with a slightly harder tug on the lead to drag it out of the dog house.