From Six Flags Mascot Park to Cadbury Crunchie’s Friday Town, branded social games are starting to appear more frequently on Facebook. The latest is Playdom’s Pet Resort, a pet-themed spin on the shop management genre sponsored by pet food manufacturer Purina.
From Six Flags Mascot Park to Cadbury Crunchie’s Friday Town, branded social games are starting to appear more frequently on Facebook. The latest is Playdom’s Pet Resort, a pet-themed spin on the shop management genre sponsored by pet food manufacturer Purina.
You start by choosing a gender for your character, a pet type (dog or cat), and breed. This animal becomes your special pet that wanders around the resort as you see to the needs of your other four-legged clients.
VIPs (very important pets) arrive at the resort and must have their needs seen to. You start out with two food stations, but can purchase more stations that expand the amenities you’re able to offer to include things like water bowls, a scratching post, litter boxes, and even playpens and salon stations. Many of these are unlocked at much later levels.
Much like the original restaurant, cafe and shop games that Pet Resort seems to have been inspired by, gameplay is fairly automatic once you get the stations set up. A never-ending stream of dog and cat “customers” will continue to come to the door and visit the stations as long as they’re stocked. Your job is to keep each station stocked with food, water, or whatever else it needs (even the scratching post has a certain number of uses before it wears out), by ordering new goods as they’re consumed.
Taking care of pets in this manner earns you experience points, coins and popularity points.
You can also grab a bit of extra experience by clicking on messes that appear randomly on the floor.
The Purina branding isn’t plastered absolutely everywhere, but it does crop up here and there. Some of the foods you can buy for the food stations are Purina branded, such as the Purina Fancy Feast Gourmet Catfood and the Purina Dog Chow.
So far, the game doesn’t demonstrate any advanced social features. You can connect with Facebook friends to make them your neighbors, send and receive gifts, and take pictures of your resort and share them. Soon players will apparently be able to send their pet to friends’ resorts for some special pampering.
Purina Pet Resort is still in the very early stages of development, so expect the game to expand and change a lot in the upcoming weeks. Be sure to add a Gamezebo game alert to be notified the moment our walkthrough and review become available!
