Thank you Treva Entertainment for sending us this game to review!

Horse Vet 3DS has no back story or end game goal to achieve.  When you start a new game, you begin at your horse veterinary clinic with minimal medical supplies.  I highly recommend heading to the town pharmacy to buy some tweezers.  They are needed to remove thorns in cases where the horse owner miscalculates the distance for the horse jumping over a thorn bush.  Other places to visit in town include the feed store, the bank to convert play coins, and a furniture store to decorate your home business.

Customers come to your practice on a regular basis and there are several on-site calls to go to as well.  Given the work load, I saw no need to visit the advertising agency in town.  The last place of interest is the university.  By getting certified you’ll get tougher cases to diagnose, and the ability to take in horses if you have stables ready to receive them.  

Once I was fully accredited I got bombarded with horses to take care of.  With both stables you can treat up to ten horses.  To care for in-patients you have to make sure they are fed, cleaned up after, given their daily medicine and groomed.   Multiply that process by ten and dealing with an onslaught of customers and your own personal horses to care for, you barely have enough time to feed and get yourself rested!   If you neglect caring for yourself your movement will slow down to a crawl.  Why doesn't this game give you the option to hire a helper?  I have yet to find a vet practice by me that has one doctor doing everything.

When diagnosing horses you have to look over them with a magnifying glass to detect trouble spots.  To isolate the problem further you can feel the targeted areas with your hand.  In more difficult cases you will have to use a thermometer, an x-ray, or do some lab work to determine the source of the ailment.  Once diagnosed, the next step is to treat the problem by following the directions given.  There will be circles representing areas needing treatment on the horse.  The circles will be color coded to the medicine needed.  It is possible to choose the wrong medicine; there will be no penalty, but you will have the item subtracted from your inventory.  Not only does this waste medicine, but the instrument used to apply it.  Throughout the game you will have to buy numerous cotton swaps and spatulas to apply disinfectant and various ointments.

The only thing you don’t have to purchase is pregnancy tests.  If you have your own horses you can breed them if you have a breeding stall built.  Once impregnated you’ll get a new foal in a couple of days.  Not only is the gestation unrealistic, but so is the notion that horses will only breed in a breeding stall and not in the open pastures with other in-patients of the opposite sex.  

With the proper equipment you can give physical therapy to horses that require it.  You cannot ride patients, but you can ride your own horses if you have the time (unrealistic) or just want to blow off customers for a while.

Horse Vet 3DS bombards you with so much work that the game is not very fun.  While it is family friendly, it lacks direction and offers the player little downtime to relax and ride horses.  After treating so many horses a day, owning your own horses just adds more work to be done.  Granted the money is good for treating horses, but why not use some of that to hire an underling to clean stables and brush horses?