Pet Shop Story Review

Pet Shop Story is a freemium simulation game app developed by TeamLava Games and is available both in iTunes and Google Play. In this game, you own a pet store. You'll be able to purchase various pets (dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, reptiles, and aquatic) for your store and take care of them. Collect from pets to earn money so that you can buy more pets or decorations from your store. You can even add neighbors and go visit their stores and play with their pets.

Pets: Since this game revolves around pets, I'll start with them first. The assortment of pets available for purchase focuses mainly on dogs and cats. There's only about two or three fish and birds available and only one bunny available for purchase. Then half the other pets aren't even really unique because they're just the same common dogs and cats only in some sort of costume (mainly bunny costume). If you're looking for any exotic pets such as pandas you're out of luck. Also, most of the pets you are able to purchase require you to pay Gems, which you can only get by paying real money.

If any of you have played The Sims Social on Facebook, the system that the game uses is very similar to theirs. You have goals that you need to accomplish. Some can be easily done while others require multiple steps. Most of the time you'll be rewarded with coins but there are times when you can earn pets. The tasks are usually simple, such as collecting from your pets a certain number of times, breeding a certain number of pets, buying a certain number of decorations, or visiting your neighbors. At other times, the tasks will be somewhat more complicated because you will be required to ask for things from your neighbors. These types of tasks have always seriously annoyed me, because I hate having to rely on other people to help you finish your tasks. It can help if you added some good neighbors, but most of the time my neighbors either ignore my requests or give me something completely different. Unfortunately, a good number of tasks and pets require you to do such things. Of course, you could always skip the task using Gems, but the option is very costly. Thankfully, Pet Shop Story encourages you to post your Storm8 IDs on their Facebook page so that others will be able to add you.


Earning Money: The only main way to earn money is to collect from your pets. Each pet has a different duration of time before you'll be able to collect again. After you collect, you must feed them and they'll give you EXP to upgrade your level in return. Other ways of earning money, as mentioned above, are to complete tasks or to visit your neighbors and play with their pets. There is an option for you to convert your Gems into coins but I wish the option was the opposite. While it's not impossible to earn Gems from playing the game, the opportunities are rare and the amount earned minimal. 

Breeding: Before you can begin to breed, you must have two pets of the same type. When you first purchase a pet, you're only given one, so you must buy another mate for the same price. After that, you'll be able to start breeding babies. Breeding each type requires you to wait different amounts of times. For example, breeding a Fuzzy Lop Rabbit will require 12 hours while breeding a Shorthair Cat will only take a couple of minutes. Don't wait too long to place your new baby pet after it is finished breeding though. Wait too long and your baby will become sick. Curing it will require 10 Gems and, if you don't have that much, you'll be forced to abandon it, thus making you feel heartless and cruel. You can only breed two babies of the same type as four pets (two adults and two babies) will create a complete family. Once you have a complete family, you'll be able to upgrade your pets' playpens. Doing so will allow you to earn more money each time you collect. Unfortunately, it won't shorten the duration of collecting time.


Crossbreeding: You'll also have the option of Crossbreeding your pets, so you'll need two pets of different types. Crossbreeding will usually take several hours but it's fun to experiment what new pets you will get. For example, crossbreeding a Labrador and a Poodle will give you a Labradoodle.

Decorations: All of the rest of the items that you can purchase are merely for decoration purposes only. However, there are a number of items whose purpose I don't understand. For example, you can buy a barrel of doggie treats or a stack of cat pillows, but these items serve absolutely no function. In that case, what's the point of buying them? It would have made a lot more sense if I could interact with these items, such as grabbing a treat and giving it to one of the dogs. You can run the game without buying any decorations, except if you want to complete tasks.

Customers: When I first started this game, I thought this would be more like a time-management game where I would have to serve customers. However, the actual gameplay was completely different. Sure, there will be customers roaming around your shop, but they're just background animation. You'll see customers playing with your pets or buying them, but these actions don't influence gameplay at all. You won't earn money from them and your pets' happiness will not increase as a result (though the animals never had a happiness meter in the first place. Unless they become sick, they'll remain forever happy.). So really what's the whole point?

Technical Issues: While playing, I've noticed that the game can be rather buggy. For example, the game keeps disconnecting on me and having to refresh, forcing me to collect everything twice. Also, the graphics will often "freeze" in certain areas. For example, even though you had just collected from your pets, the Collect bubble still hovers over the pet. If you tap the pet again, it will show that you had already collected from it, but the bubble still remains.

Gifting: As mentioned above, you can either send your neighbors gifts or ask your neighbors for help in accomplishing tasks. You can only send gifts to neighbors once a day and you can only ask for their help once a day. When sending gifts, it can easily be seen which neighbors you have already gifted. However, this is not the case when asking. The window does not show which neighbors you have already asked and unless you remember which, you might end up having to select all of them only to later realize you can't send.

Conclusion: This is a great game for kids to play. It doesn't require a lot of attention so your kids won't have to go into tapping-frenzy mode in order to keep up with the gameplay. It's also a very nice and relaxing game for adults to, though it can become very addicting. The animals are all very adorable, even if the selection can be somewhat limited. However, the game is still updating so it's constantly churning out new pets every now and then. The tasks list also gives you something to do while you're looking after your pet store. I would say that my main complaint is the number of things that require you to ask your neighbors or spend Gems in order to complete. As a result, the freemium status of the game can make gameplay very limited if you aren't willing to shell out money from your pockets to buy Gems. Thus, I will give this app a rating of four out of five stars.