Pet Fair has a lot going for it. It’s a great looking game with an excellent sense of style, that offers plenty of quests to complete and a fairly generous energy system when compared to most other social games. The problem is that a nearly identical, but better, game already exists, and it’s called Ravenwood Fair.
Pet Fair has a lot going for it. It’s a great looking game with an excellent sense of style, that offers plenty of quests to complete and a fairly generous energy system when compared to most other social games. The problem is that a nearly identical, but better, game already exists, and it’s called Ravenwood Fair.
Nearly every aspect of Pet Fair is the same as in Ravenwood. The goal is to build up a fair, and the bigger and better you build it the more animals will come. Each creature is dressed smartly, as if they just stepped out of the 1930’s. The style of the game isn’t exactly like Ravenwood, which had more of a fantasy-meets-steampunk aesthetic, but it feels pretty close. Pet Fair is more like Ravenwood Fair meets Carnivale, complete with rusted old cars and discarded tires to clear away.
And that’s a large part of the game, clearing stuff away. The plot of land you’re given is a wreck. but with your handy shovel and axe you can clear away all the debris, from withered trees and grass to ancient oil drums and trailers. As with all FrontierVille-style games, each object takes multiple energy units to clear, but in this respect Pet Fair is actually quite generous. Not only does energy regularly pop out when you’re clearing debris, but it only takes a minute for one unit to be replenished. This means that it takes less than half an hour for you to be back at full energy, which really encourages checking in multiple times a day.
Since it’s a fair you’re building, you’ll also need games, food carts, and other buildings, each of which needs to be restocked regularly. Adding fun things to do and decorations will attract new animals to the fair, but they seem kind of pointless right now. Unlike in Ravenwood, where you could have brief but still interesting discussions with other characters, every animal we tried to speak to literally had nothing to say other than the fact that they had nothing to say. It’s hard for a game to generate a personality when none of the characters in it have one.
That’s the thing with Pet Fair. It’s mostly a solid clone of Ravenwood with a slightly different sense of style, but it’s missing something. The world doesn’t feel as alive and certain gameplay elements, such as regularly appearing enemies, are nowhere to be seen. It’s a competent clone, but it doesn’t quite match up to its inspiration. So unless you really want to play on your phone, you’re probably better off sticking to Ravenwood on Facebook.
