Playdom’s latest Facebook game, Fanglies, is a playful, cartoonish city-building sim where everyone has fangs — even the sheep. Besides the usual goals of adding buildings, shops and decorations to earn coins and experience points (which allows you to add even more buildings, shops and decorations), Fanglies resembles EA’s MySims in that each Fanglie that comes to live in the town has its own distinct personality with likes and dislikes.
Playdom’s latest Facebook game, Fanglies, is a playful, cartoonish city-building sim where everyone has fangs — even the sheep. Besides the usual goals of adding buildings, shops and decorations to earn coins and experience points (which allows you to add even more buildings, shops and decorations), Fanglies resembles EA’s My Sims in that each Fanglie that comes to live in the town has its own distinct personality with likes and dislikes.
You start the game out with one Fanglie that you can customize by choosing its appearance and whether it likes or dislikes certain traits like sporty, girly, geeky, rich, mechanical and thrifty. You can purchase more Fanglies as you level up, but the town will only hold so many before you have to expand your land as well. Doing both costs coins, which you earn in a variety of ways.
The charm of the game lies in the way the Fanglies interact with the environment and each other. Investigate a ripple in the water, for example, and your Fanglie will sink in a fishing rod – and most likely come out with a fish that goes towards completing one of the game’s many collections. There are quite a few of these little points of interest so far, from mounds of sand to cracks in the ground.
Each Fanglie will react to objects, buildings and other Fanglies in different ways depending on their personality. They will also have distinct needs that you can have them perform to keep them happy, and earn rewards of coins and XP. Mr. Coppercoal, who resembles a vampire industrial tycoon, can be satisfied by reading the financials in the newspaper, planning a Ponzi scheme, or shaking his fist at the world. Watching the Fanglies act out each need, or react with happiness or dismay at their surroundings via thought bubbles, is quite entertaining.
Another feature of Fanglies is your den, which serves as a domestic home base inside the town that you can customize with “indoor” items like couches, tables, kitchen appliances, and so on. The dens are not as interactive as the dwellings in games like Pet Society (where characters can actually sit on the chairs, watch the TV, and so on), but given that personality traits are built into the game, let’s hope the developers plan to roll out more ways for the Fanglies to interact with their environment.
The art style of Fanglies is adorable, and one of the things we noticed and liked off the bat was that you aren’t tied down to a particular style. You can build everything from farm-style country fences to asphalt roads, high hedgerows, and even red carpets, plus produce themed items that are produced by the building that ties into that theme. (For example, the Parks and Gardens shop – which resembles a tiki hut – allows you to make park-themed items like water fountains, park benches and potted plants). In other words, the tools are there to make a unique city suited to your personal tastes (and those of your Fanglies, of course).
Fanglies takes a page from games like Zynga’s FrontierVille when it comes to its social features. Your neighbors are more than just people you drop by to visit every so often to pick up a few extra coins (although you can do that as well). Neighbors become especially important in their ability to gift items back and forth, which is required to complete certain buildings and finish collections.
Fanglies 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!
