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Rating: 
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I'm the mom of 2 girls, 5 and 9 who got this game for Christmas.
To start with, basic reading skills are required. Important information is highlighted, and its possible to get the gist of what to do from the highlighted text, but having a reader helps a lot. Characters prompt you to go to specific areas to achieve various tasks. The storyline and gameplay are almost exactly the same as Petz Catz 2, so owning both is a bit repetitive unless you need to play as both a cat and a dog.
There are multiple layers of gameplay. You can change your dogz clothes, you can buy wardrobes for the town's inhabitants, you can unlock new patterns and colors by catching insects and digging up vegetables or flowers. There are mini games to unlock (which can then be played 2 player) But, mostly you need to follow the storyline, and work to save the magic hat from Ivlet.
As the previous poster mentioned, the slow dialogues get tiresome and there is no way to skip them. However, not too far into the game a magic creature appears who teaches you "how" to save. There are then save blocks (and later warp blocks) which can be used whenever you wish. They don't move, or disappear, or become unusable.
My girls feel that this game is excellent, great for any kid and expect long term enjoyment. However, as an adult, they have both nearly met the main objective in a little over a week of rainy vacation day playing. It's cute, its worth playing. You don't need both Catz and Dogz, and I wouldn't pay $50 for it. Amazon's price was great.
Rating: 
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I don't know what this game is like on other consoles, and I don't know whether there would eventually be a payoff in pleasure if you invested enough hours in skill-building, but after an hour of what felt like hard work, my wife and I are ready to dump this thing.
To begin with, the game is full of what I can only call bugs. Not crashes, but frustrating and poorly designed UI elements.
For example, when your character gets close to another dog, a screen prompt tells you to "talk to" that character by pressing controller button A. When you do, you get a linear, preprogrammed, slow exchange of dialog in the form of talk balloons. You have no option except to press button A repeatedly. So far, so good, but when the dialog is complete, you are still in the vicinity of the other dog... and the game again prompts you to talk to the character by pressing button A. If you do so, you are subjected to the identical dialog... with no apparent means of escape... slow talk balloon after slow talk balloon. And when you are finished, it prompts you again.
The game begins with a seemingly endless video preview, with nothing to tell you that you can stop it and begin the game by pressing button A.
The game begins with a very lengthy indigestible bolus of exposition about a magic hat, presented one slow line of text at a time. Your character then accompanies a companion to a police station, where you are subjected to another lengthy chunk of exposition about an evil wolf named Ivlet. At that point, just when you are anxious to begin discovering things about the hat and the wolf, your companion says "Well, let's go back and see Ivlet tonight. For now, let's just go play around Dolphin Point." Meaning: you are diverted from the main thread of the plot and forced to spend number episode in what seem to be training exercises.
Each of them sets you a task, and you have relatively little in the way of options except to get your butt in gear and go off and do what you are told. Even here, things are frustrating. You are told, for example, that you can fish "off a pier." In fact, there are several piers on Dolphin Point, but it is not explained that you can only fish off one of them. If you go to the wrong one you can spend a lot of time pressing buttons and shaking controls trying to figure out how to start fishing, with no help offered. (If you go to the right one, you get an on-screen prompted telling you to press button A to start fishing).
Obviously, some of these exercises are oriented toward acquiring skills and resources that you may need later in the game. Puzzlingly, the resources the puppy is holding are invisible. You do not see the puppy carrying them. You do not even see a graphic onscreen "inventory" of what resources the puppy is holding. Holding and carrying things is a strictly left-brained exercise.
Opportunities to stop and save the game are few and far between, and there seems to be no way to quit except to go on playing until you get to a "save" opportunity. Even so, either the save mechanism is buggy or confusingly presented, as we have had trouble restarting a game from where we left off instead of starting all over from the beginning.
The puppy characters are cute, and cutely animated. They are genuine charming. They are, however, coupled with a completely discordant adventure plot reminiscent of Zork or the Scott Adams games... in an environment with beautiful 3D rendering, but extremely clumsy adventure-game implementation.
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