Customer Reviews

Let's Ride: Friends Forever

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

One of the best horse games ever. My daughter has had hours of fun with this game. You get to raise a horse from a foal and it grows up into a horse you can ride at 3 years of age. You must earn money, buy food, medicine, and tools to care for the horse. You can have several horses at once, but only play with one at a time. There isn't much of a story line to this game. It's strictly care and riding. We have all of the other Let's Ride games too. This one is a favorite and your horse is sure to become your best friend.

Let's ride friends forever is a fun game where you take care of your horse and ride it. This game is one of the better let's ride games because it doesn't consentrate on either riding or the stable care. I think it balances it out pretty well. The game has game days in which one minute is about a second in real life. The day starts and ends at 8:00 which about perfect because the day isn't rushed nor does it seem to stretch on forever. There are two diferent types of events which happen every three game days: show and jumping compotition which are both fun. In the manual it says you have to use w,s,d,a to steer but I found that I could just use the arrow keys. The graphics are good though not perfect but who needs perfect graphics? A glich I've found is that you can't put food or water in the trough so you just have to feed it to the horse by hand, which I don't realy mind. Over all this is a worthwhile, fun game.

It took me awhile to really get this game. I'm a big fan of the Let's Ride game series, and this one ranks as my middle of the road favorite, though it does have good points and as I progressed through the difficult beginning stages, I found it to be a little more fun to play. First you get to pick whether your player is a boy or a girl, then you get to choose the type of horse you want. The colors are limited, and they all have a blaze, and four white socks which are not customizable. For the color 'dapple' it shows a horse that is a tobiano black and white paint horse! I envision dapple more like the gray color they have in the game, which is labeled "gray". Then you get to choose a breed of horse, warm blood, thoroughbred or cold blood. The Thoroughbred looks more Arabian with a big head, and the cold blood has a disproportionate head that is huge! The only semi normal looking adult horse is the warm blood, so I generally stick with it. You get to type in certain characteristics about your horse that are completely up to you, however, these 'traits' don't show up in the game.

In the beginning it is difficult to keep the horse clean and boy is it tedious!! You can spend the entire 8am to 8pm time clock grooming your horse, and it still won't be clean! You start with a very basic set of grooming tools, and by winning 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the two competitions you unlock tools for your horse, like, tack, decorations, basic care, and better grooming tools that you can buy at the two stores. One is a feed and medicine store and the other is grooming, tack, and decoration. I found the disembodied voices of the owners of the stores to be rather entertaining. The tools you win at the competitions are random, so you never know what you're going to get. As you get better grooming tools, it becomes much easier to groom your horse, but it takes awhile to get those tools!! My horse reached 5 years old before I started seeing good stuff come through!

You can feed the horse in the trough, or by hand. I recommend if the horse is starving feeding it by hand. It is random when the horse will go to the feeding trough of it's own accord and generally only does so if you're out of the stall. You can feed it by hand anything including hay, grains and water.

The competitions are every three days and the goal is to do everything you can to care for and train your horse leading up to the competition. I didn't really find any set pattern as to what show would be coming up next. The only way I found out in-between competitions is to go to the competition grounds and see what was next. One is a show ring where you want to be sure your horse is well groomed, decorated, and exercised. Three judges judge each section on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the best. As the game progresses you get to ride in the show ring. Right now I'm finding the exercise part to be the most difficult part of the game to get a 9 or a 10 with that judge. It is hard to balance the time it takes to groom your horse and getting it enough exercise. I found myself exercising like mad on the day of the show ring competition, then having to groom like mad to make it there before the end of the day. It pays off though. The second competition is the show jumping, which isn't too bad, though through the more difficult later stages of the jumping course I found the tight corners between jumps to be rather frustrating since the horse doesn't turn very sharply or quickly.

The horse can become injured and sick if not cared for properly. You can injure the horse by running it fast before warming up (walking or trotting a good while), or by running into trees, or fences. I have been fortunate enough not to experience the horse getting sick, but I have had a few injuries. There is a medicine cabinet that you can stock pile at the store. Supposedly the horse can also get parasites if the stall is not cleaned.

I personally love the riding portion of the game and think it is very relaxing and enjoyable, though it does take some game play to get to a three year old where you can start riding. The virtual movements as you walk, trot, canter, or gallop are realistic. I also like that you can take the horse for a walk without riding it. I find myself making a virtual arena where I practice transitions, and make up my own patterns. The one frustrating part where I'm at in the game right now, is there are portions of the game that I keep expecting to open up as it suggests so in the very beginning, such as the broken bridge at the end of the forest, the gates behind the barn leading to what looks like more trails, and finally the gate to the park. I keep asking myself how long before I get to go see those parts of the game! My horse is already 8 years old and those parts haven't opened yet. It certainly keeps me motivated to keep playing though to see if I will get there eventually!

This game will make you work, no doubt about it, and it can teach one patience. I recommend it for those that are horse lovers and don't mind a little work!

Enjoy!

This game is all over all the best horse game out there. I was surprised at how well Let's Ride did this! You can ride on lots of beautiful trails or going riding through meadows, you must take care of your horse correctly, and you can't gallop off right as you mount or your horse will pull a muscle. Very realistic. If you can't play this game without getting frustrated or because your horse is always getting hurt or sick, then you should NOT own a real horse! The only thing I didn't like was that you can't go in the water. The controls are a little odd and hard in the stable, but its a fun game for anyone! Especially if you want the real feel of owning a horse. Thats horse care. Other games leave younger kids with the thought that horse care is nothing, but this game doesn't leave out a thing.
I was worried this was going to be like some other Let's Ride games, being a copy of another with just a description and cover of something else. But it wasn't. This game is not boring, its not easy(which is good, it isn't annoyingly hard, but its not so easy that its boring and stupid) I'm 12, I own a real horse, and this game is my #1 choice to anyone who wants that feeling.

This game is very slow moving. You need to put in at least 3 hours of play until you can start riding. There are only really two things you can do in the game when it is not a "competition day", and you can be done exploring after one day of walking around with your horse. It is terribly boring. The only thing that kept me playing it was to see if anything interesting ever did happen...it didn't. I gave up when my horse turned 6 1/2, so maybe when they are older stuff starts happening. I would not recommend this game.

This game will not run on Vista and runs poorly on an old XP computer.

I bought this game and raising the foal is TREACHEROUS; very, very boring. Every .10 seconds you have to groom this or groom that, and out riding, the grooming goes away in a matter of seconds. There are very few horse/color choices in this game. Overall, this game is ONLY fun when there is a show. I have Vista, and in the jumping tournaments, the game will freeze, close out, and I have to start from where I last saved it. So, I would definitely no recommend this to anyone, unless you have a dire need to buy it, it's not worth it.

This game isnt one of the better Lets Ride games. The controls are glitchy and time goes by to slow. The horse also gets hurt way to easily. It was okay for the deal that I bought it at, but its not worth full price. A younger person who doesnt know horses may like it more but its easier to brush my horse than the horse in the game

The person who said it would take less time to groom a real horse isn't kidding, and at least you know when you're done.

The graphics are okay, but the gameplay is choppy and you can't move around. You keep dropping things by accident and then you have to go pick them up again, and the horse stands there starving when you've put hay or whatever into the trough, and it won't go to drink from its water trough. It doesn't make any sense. There's no sound effects when there should be, like when it's eating, and the grooming bar goes down faster than you can get it back up again.

But the absolutely WORST thing, by far, about this game is the fact that there is almost NO tutorial. The thing barely gives the player any direction, and I couldn't figure out how to do the different grooming actions. I didn't know if I needed a mane comb or a tail comb to specifically groom anything, and it wouldn't tell me what needed to be cleaned until it was already awful. I couldn't maneuver around the horse well enough to see what I was doing, and the action while trying to walk to the store (very dull when you're first starting out because the scenery isn't attractive enough to hold my attention) was ridiculous.

Rarely have I been so frustrated by a game. It was so frustrating, in fact, that I can't believe they let little kids play this game, given the amount of vicious swearing I was doing.

There's a kid up there that says that if this game frustrates you badly that you should never own your own horse. Well, kid, I've taken care of horses before, and never did it make me want to stab myself in the eye.

I bought this with my hard-earned money that I had earned at a garage sale while it was 100 degrees out (where I was working). I was really disappointed. It's too hard to play, but the graphics are cool and the setting is beautiful.

Well, there are some really crazy glitches. For example, your horse is really starving, and you put some food in the trough. He just sits there while you worry. Then, the horse's mane is impossible to keep clean. And on top of that, he's always sick!

Those two stars are for the graphics. Nothing else. Please don't waste your money; buy My Horse and Me which is a LOT better! Or get Equestrian Challenge, which is totally cool.