Mr.Farmville

BitRhymes has a new game out that’s a cross between your typical animal husbandry sort of app and zoo keeping (aka tycoon games), called Wild Paradise.

Players create a range of habitats ranging from forested landscapes to artic tundras, populating them with a rather sizable variety of animals and decorations. In order to earn a digital living, players must care for their animals until they are fully grown, then release them into the wild. However, unlike other husbandry titles of its kind, the larger variety and quantity of animals is what determines your primary income.

This is the whole tycoon aspect of the game. Evidentially, players will passively earn periodic income from visitors that come to visit. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of visible visitors walking about (and by that, we mean none), and they are merely represented by a number on the screen. Nonetheless, they still pay the same coin, so we forgive them for hiding.

Perhaps the reasoning is to give a greater focus on the aesthetic, decorative element of the game that the player controls. With the vast number of animals and decorations, there is actually a tremendous amount of options for virtually every decorative palette. Furthermore, Wild Paradise doesn’t force the user to have X amount of neighbors to expand the virtual space, nor does it charge virtual currency for expansion. The reasoning behind it is because right from the start you can build up to five different habitats, and each one has the maximum, and extremely generous, amount of space.

This scale, coupled with the relatively small amount of space most animals (even elephants) and decorum take up, is perfect for users that just want to create something. Moreover, they begin play with a rather sizable amount of starting money too, giving them the ability to buy just about anything. Of course, what you can buy is limited by level, and if there was any one complaint, it is that some of the items just don’t have the same artistic feel as the others. As an example, the animals all have this cute, saturated look to them, while most of the trees feel like they’re a photograph cut out in Photoshop and posterized. Animals have simple shading and few colors, while much of the decorations are multi-hued and shaded. The items seem like they’re not from the same team of artists.

Unfortunately, while all the aesthetic design for Wild Ones is still pretty good, the concept is something that most users have done before. This isn’t helped much by many of the supporting features that have also been done before. Many of the title’s nuances have come from other games. To name a few, users get a daily match three type of game in order to earn extra money based on your score; something that we see in CrowdStar’s Zoo Paradise. Your Facebook friends will wander onto your habitats as rangers and you can “say hi” (a post to their wall from the game); something we saw in Digital Chocolate’s Safari Kingdom. And you can even play with your animals to keep them happy and earn extra coin and experience; something we saw in Gameforge’s Funfari. Of course, in the last example, the animals had to want to play first and doing so made them more hungry. Here, you can play whenever (only once for reward) and it doesn’t affect when you can feed them again.

On the social side of things, the most basic feature is inviting more friends to become your “Rangers.” Doing so allows you to adopt more animals for your various habitats, but thus far we have yet to reach that threshold. However, even though we haven’t reached that point, it could prove to be an obnoxious hindrance for users that can’t get friends to play with them.

If you don’t have that issue, then you can also work with your friends to breed your fully grown animals. It’s actually a very cool way to work together, as you cannot breed on your own. Doing so allows you to put your animals that can breed on your Facebook feed as a request and should your friends accept you can get yourself some free baby critters.

Overall, Wild Paradise doesn’t really offer anything new and interesting. Its social features are decent, and it does a lot for the decorative virtual space concept (even if all the art styles don’t quite synch up), but it just doesn’t feel especially fresh. Though the core of the game is strong, it’s still the same husbandry/tycoon game you’ve played before, and even most of the supporting, more minor, features stem from other prior titles of the same relative genre. As it stands, the game already has around 84,000 monthly active users, but only time will tell whether or not the new improvements outweigh the old standards.

Source: Inside Social Games