Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 30/Mar 01:50

Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator – Review

Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator is a cozy and relaxing game where you can run your own pet shop. You can design your store from the ground up and manage many aspects, like employees, pet breeding, and more. This game is developed by Konrul Game and published by Ultimate Publishing / Ultimate Games SA. Story Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator doesn’t feature a storyline for you or your shop. As you start the game and dive into the tutorial, you’re immediately led to the feature where you can design and build your shop. You can design the walls, floors, roof, and of course, a big sign where you can name your shop. After you’ve done that, the tutorial leads you through the process of ordering habitats for your first animals, setting the habitats up, and ordering animals and food. Eventually, you’ll learn how to help customers and to hire personnel to do some tasks around the shop. After finishing the tutorial, you’ll be let loose to manage your shop however you like, so you can fulfill your dream of being a pet shop owner and create a story for yourself! Graphics The graphics of Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator are simple but realistic, while the human models are quite generic, the animal models actually look beautiful, vibrant, and cute. The animals really are the stars of this game! Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator lets you experience running your store from a first-person view, which helps with immersion. This means you really do need to manually run around to the back of your store to see if your employees left some boxes littered around and throw them away. The realistic graphics style and the first-person view fit the immersive gameplay, and while the graphics aren’t super high-end, your shop will look great if you put in the effort to think about your interior design and placement of lights and decorations. Sound The game features relaxed background music as you manage the store. It doesn’t have any sound effects, so walking around, handling boxes, etc., doesn’t make any sounds. The UI does have some sounds, like interacting with the shop’s computer. There’s also a sound if you gain XP by making sales, or when the game autosaves. There’s no voiceover in Exotica 2, but the customers sometimes do have thoughts or comments that appear in bubbles above their heads. The sound is not that important for the gameplay, as you’d easily be able to play this game without sound or while listening to something else. Gameplay Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator is a simulator game where you’ll be able to build and manage your own pet store. As you start the game, you’ll dive right into the tutorial, which helps you step-by-step to start your store. If you try to do other things than the tutorial shows, you might not be able to complete a subsequent step, which might be a bit confusing, so it’s best just to follow the instructions since you can easily change things later. After you’ve built the base of your shop in ‘build mode’, you can order habitats, animals, food, accessories, and stands to display items in the store. This is all being done from a PC located in your shop, which will be the center of your gameplay. This PC accesses the build mode, allowing you to order animals, items, and even personnel for your shop. From the PC, you can hire employees, and you can manage and assign tasks to everyone you’ve hired. There are three kinds of employees: cashiers handling sales, clean & care employees taking care of the animals, restocking them, and cleaning the store, and warehouse workers who restock the shelves. You can’t directly control the employees; they just stand around. The only thing you can do is speed them up for a bit of money, but it’s not really clear how that would help. Sometimes it takes some time to figure out how the employees work exactly. For example, warehouse workers who handle restocking only start working when you get a restocking shelf and place it in your store. This is not immediately clear from the beginning. To figure things like this out, you’ll either need to refer back to the tutorial (which is more expansive than what you’ve experienced in the beginning), trial and error, or you’ll find your answer on the Steam community board of the game. You, as a player, can do many tasks in your shop as well, like cleaning habitats, feeding pets, or scrubbing the floor. At the habitats, you can check whether your animals need food or whether the habitat needs cleaning. These are all tasks you can do yourself, but you can also assign employees to do this for you. If you have an employee assigned to clean and care, they will take care of the animals, but you have to remember to get food from the shelves that the employee can use. You can only take a few different foods from the shelves to use in the shop, so you really need to check regularly if the food is running out. You can also fulfill the orders of customers yourself by collecting everything a customer wants from the shelves and placing it upon the cash register, accepting their cash, and giving them change in return. However, in the tutorial, you’ll learn how to get a cashier employee who handles sales for you, leaving you free to do the managing of the store. Managing stock and ordering new stock is something you need to do yourself. There’s no easy way to get an overview of what needs to be ordered, so you’ll have to go around the store and check the shelves and habitats. Not all the tools you have to do tasks are explained in the tutorial; some you’ll just need to try out or see if the tutorial on the shop’s PC says something about it. You start your store by selling freshwater fish, which you can later expand to different kinds of fish, and of course, all of these animals have habitats, food, toys, and accessories that match their needs. You’ll unlock new items and animals for your store by spending the points you’ll get when leveling up. You’ll be able to choose anything you want to unlock via the store’s PC, so you are not required to first keep selling fish if you would really like to have puppies in your store. However, some animals or items cost more points than others, so expanding into new animals might get you into trouble since you might not have enough points to unlock everything a new kind of animal needs. You’ll also be able to breed animals in your shop to get rare varieties. Every time you make a sale, you’ll earn XP, which will eventually earn you points to unlock new animals and items. Of course, making sales earns you money as well, which you’ll need to restock animals and items and to expand your store. You can manage all prices for all animals and products you sell, so you can decide for yourself how much profit you’ll make. The game warns that you shouldn’t make things too expensive, but even then, you can still drive the price up a nice amount. Customers ask for several items, which your personnel will collect for them and sell to them. The items the customer asks for are displayed at the cash register, so you can quickly see if it’s something that’s out-of-stock. If a customer wants something you do not have, you will be able to recommend a different product. This doesn’t seem to affect sales or customer satisfaction in any way, which was a bit surprising. Luckily, restocking is instant, so if you have already unlocked a product, you can quickly order it to fulfill the customer’s wishes. When it’s getting dark and the sales are slowing down, the game will suggest ending the day. Closing the store and ending the day are separate actions, so you can play further after closing. If you accidentally close the store too early by turning the sign on the door, any customers will immediately walk away and leave everything they have ordered on the counter or the floor for you to clean up. If you want to play more at the end of the day after closing time, you can easily restock or clean up while the shop is closed or empty. Surprisingly, your personnel will always be around, no matter what time it is. The only aspect that we noticed is missing from this game is marketing your store; customers just randomly walk in and buy the animals, food, habitats, and accessories. We think it might have been fun to also do things like make and place advertisements, hand out freebies, things like that and see how it affects customer numbers. The addition of a customer satisfaction feature, with satisfied customers leaving good reviews, leading to more customers coming to your store, would be nice as well. Now, there’s no real penalty if you can’t give the customer what they want, let them wait for a long time, or close the shop while they are still shopping. Conclusion Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator is a nice simulator game with pretty graphics and chill sound design. The gameplay is not too complicated but challenging enough to make you really feel like a store manager. Although the game doesn’t feature a story, it’s a relaxing game where you’ll be able to sink many hours into. This game is perfect for people who enjoy relaxing, cozy simulator games.