This is a cop-out "write-up", just here to show that I completed the game. I took five months from when I first started to getting the missable toilet achievement, so I don't remember the story well enough to comment on it anymore. If I replay the game at some point in the future, I'll talk more about it.
For now, I will say that every frame is a painting, but this would have worked so much better as a movie. Nearly all the interactivity in this game simply feels shoe-horned in.

Funny how the devs claim they reworked the free level to make it harder, considering it took me four minutes to complete. I guess their hands slipped on the keyboard.

I've never played Paw Patrol: Grand Prix (and likely never will), but I think this might be the best Paw Patrol game yet. While in the end it is still repetitive, I cannot rightfully complain about it, as it is aimed at kids and therefore meant to be played in shorter sessions (or so I would assume.)
Ryder and the team are busy preparing for Paw Patrol Day when Mayor Humdinger shows up and starts being a nuisance. The story will take you through four open worlds based on locations seen in previous games (Barkingsburg being new to me), which is an improvement over randomly getting boxed into a location and forced to complete it perfectly. I collected all the pup treats I could find in each and every location due to force of habit, but in this game, for once, there is no need to do that. Once you've gathered a set amount of treats, you'll get a new unlockable and the progress bar will reset, but between the mission rewards and all the treats that are just laying around, there's enough for about a dozen more unlocks than there actually are.
Most notably, this may be the least broken Outright Games title I'm aware of yet; it ran flawlessly. (Okay, no, it did crash on me once, but I prefer to chalk it up to a freak accident and it did save right before the next objective, so it's all good.) Maybe they found a good studio to develop this one, maybe Nickelodeon insisted that it be good or maybe there just wasn't any crunch, who knows. I'm a low-spec player, but I bet it looks great if you can run it on a more capable device, too. I was positively surprised Xbox didn't force me to play in Polish as it did with previous games, even though the option is there.
I only have a few petty nitpicks:

• The previous games have conditioned me to mash the action button when performing an action, but here, this yields a broken-sounding SFX. As it turns out, you're actually supposed to hold the action button until the bar fills up to hear the SFX properly… but who's got the time for that?
• Citizen help requests refresh almost immediately after you complete them, instead of disappearing to indicate completion. If you weren't completing them as you went, have fun backtracking!
• You can't move the camera while driving. I think the fact that you're only able to control your vehicle with the left stick is supposed to feel like playing a racing game? Maybe? I don't know, I don't play racing games. Either way, I'm not a fan. I'd like to see where I'm going and adjust accordingly instead of having to stop and turn before I can change direction.
• Some of the things they do are just ridiculous. Since when can you repair anything with a jackhammer? A few tasks were easy enough that I'm convinced Ryder could have done them himself instead of making the team do them.

And a word of advice to anyone planning to play this in the future: do yourself a favor and toggle the option to auto-select characters on. With eight characters, each having their own vehicle, it gets annoying fast.

I like subscribing to Game Pass, because it lets me play new games on release day, and Rolling Hills was one of those games. As Sushi Bot, you move into Rolling Hills and open your very own sushi place, which the locals hope will bring new life to the village… and it very quickly does! …you just don't see much of it. The tourists must just be coming over for sushi and leaving, 'cause there aren't that many of them standing around outside, not to mention there's no inn or any other place to stay in.
Randos aside, there's a cast of specific characters, such as the mayor and the local shopkeeper, but also multiple new additions as the story progresses. Some of them provide some kind of service (at the grocery store, the furniture store, the cafe), but besides that, they're all terribly forgettable (when put together, the new residents are an extremely random bunch of people, too.) Still, you can treat them to coffee or a meal to level up your friendship for bonuses, which would be a great mechanic if the characters were more than their signature traits.
As for the main part of the gameplay, it's a Diner Dash-adjacent restaurant management deal, except you don't have to worry about finding the right table for everyone. Instead, you need to match the type of the dish (vegetable, fish, meat, dessert - not actual in-game names) and its numeric value (quality, I believe?) to what each customer wants (for a perfect rating, both variables have to match - it doesn't work like UNO).
This could have been fun if Sushi Bot wasn't so dummy thicc. It's a struggle to even point at the dish you want to pick up, sometimes. This also extends to serving the dishes; I've given the dish I was holding to the customer on the wrong side of the table more times than I can count. A dash is available, but it's very limited and has a cooldown, and I couldn't explain why it's not permanent if I tried. That only meant I was using the time freeze mechanic much more often.
While in Diner Dash, customers annoyed by businessmen yapping on their phones would eventually get frustrated and leave (a punishment for poor seating choices, or just for being too slow), customers in Rolling Hills don't seem to care as much, even though they are visibly annoyed. Instead, a customer might fall asleep at the table, and if you don't wake them up in time, they'll wake up on their own and leave with a smile before ordering any more dishes. Okay? Your loss, I guess?
At the end of the day, your progress is summed up and you can watch a replay of how much XP you got throughout the day. Earning both XP and money quickly becomes a slow process, but you can speed it up somewhat by furnishing your restaurant with the right kinds of furniture. I may have liked this more if there was any kind of floor grid to help with placing decor symmetrically. As it is, you can't actually do that and not for a lack of trying; for some reason, I just couldn't put two of the same item next to or against each other and have it line up perfectly.
You'll also have to level recipes up by adding matching ingredients to them. Maybe this was just a side effect of the order in which I leveled up my recipes, but in the late game, the lack of new veggie recipes was clear as day. Being forced to serve rainbow (universal) recipes instead just feels like a cop-out. If you level up your friendship with the shopkeeper, you'll get the option to restock the store for a set price, for as long as you can afford it. I looked at negative reviews a few times while I was playing the game and one complaint was a lack of a button to buy out the store all at once. I don't know if that's hard to implement or not, but after an update, there is now an option to skip the confirmation for buying each and every product, as well as a new way to level up recipes (whereas originally you could only use ingredients one by one, now, if you mouse over a recipe and you own enough fitting ingredients, you can choose to level it up from there.) This… is an okay alternative, I guess? (Imagine me shaking my head vehemently right after saying that.)
There are also daily challenges to provide a sort of baseline for the day - spend a thousand coins, talk to three characters, wake up a sleeping customer, etc. These are rewarded with a set amount of points, which you can then redeem for recipes and hats. Yes, hats. There's an absolutely crazy amount of hats Sushi Bot can wear, if only you so please. That being said, the further you progress, the easier these are to complete without even keeping track, and so you'll rack up the points, but have nothing to spend them on (I must have had a little over a thousand by the end; if I'm not mistaken, the sole most expensive item costs 250 points), which is just unfortunate. Besides buying recipes with challenge points and getting them as the restaurant levels up, you can also buy a few from the traveling sushi chef, who only shows up on Sundays (Animal Crossing, anyone?), which feels off, considering there is no other measure of time besides that.
After you finish the story, there are still five more recipes to unlock, so you have to get your restaurant up to level 20. I'm really glad I stopped there until the game was updated: now, you can play special challenge services, and if you do well, these yield a lot more XP in a much shorter time than the usual slog at the regular restaurant. I can't deny that these are creative, but some of the ideas - huge Sushi Bot vs tiny customers, underwater level, an impossible maze - make me feel like the devs genuinely don't know what's a bug and what's a feature. But hey, besides the XP, you can also get a different skin or a new horn sound for Sushi Bot! That's something, right?
All in all, I'm glad to finally be done with this game. The art style is to die for and I've been craving a time management game similar to Diner Dash, but everything else about this one falls so flat, it's insane. Maybe the devs should take writing and/or game design classes next time, I don't know. And make your next game shorter, while you're at it.