My Talking Tom 2: Pet Game

What does a follow-up to a talking cat actually contain?

A sequel that adds rooms rather than ideas

In this case, more space. Tom gets a bigger home, a set of worlds to travel out to, and a wider spread of mini-games, wrapped in art noticeably cleaner and more animated than the original. The care routine underneath is the same one, which makes this a sequel of scale rather than invention. Aimed at very young children, it gives a toddler more things to tap without asking them to understand anything new.

Taps, trips and the aeroplane test

A session is short and shapeless by design. Feed him, wash him, send him to sleep, poke him until he reacts, then drop into whichever mini-game has a badge on it. Progress arrives through levels and unlocks rather than through anything a child has to get better at. One practical detail parents will care about more than any feature list: the core pet loop keeps running with no signal at all, so a car journey does not turn into a screen full of error messages and a disappointed child.

The presentation is a step up

Animation is the strongest thing here. Tom’s reactions have weight, transitions between rooms are quick, and nothing lags on the kind of hand-me-down phone a young child usually ends up with. The worlds give the app somewhere to go, which the first game never really had, and the polish keeps a small player engaged for longer than the shallow mechanics deserve.

Prompts aimed at a player who cannot read the price

The problem sits under the cheerful surface, and it is the placement rather than the existence of the shop. A premium currency speeds up nearly everything worth doing, and the offers appear exactly where a small child’s finger already is, in the middle of the activity they were enjoying, with no understanding that money is involved. Parental controls blunt that, but the out-of-the-box experience is built to sell. Older children exhausting the loop within a fortnight and the long-standing privacy questions around this catalogue both sit behind that as smaller reasons for caution.

Install it if you need something safe to hand a small child on a journey, put a purchase password on the account first, and expect the novelty to fade sooner than the download size suggests. As a short-term distraction it works. As anything more, the design is not there.