A code was provided, and many thanks to Adria Martinez Exposito.
I got an early look at Pet Lands: First Steps, a free-to-play game on Steam. So here’s a breakdown of what it was like.
The Gameplay of Pet Lands: First Steps
Pet Lands: First Steps is a semi-idle, cookie-clicker-type game. You collect pets that have several different possible rarities, and the higher the rarity, the faster your little pets will help you click. You begin with just your avatar, and you have to click on all the treasure chests and piles of money yourself. After you have a hundred coins, you can start to get your little pet friends.
They basically all look like flying mouths with little wings and emoji faces. I found them to be pretty cute; they come in a variety of colors and facial expressions, so I was happy to open up new ones.
Once you get enough coins, you can move onto a new area which will have hatchable eggs with a better rarity curve. Hatching eggs and opening new locations both cost coins, but there is also another currency called diamonds. You can use diamonds to unlock special bonus powers starting at level 5.
And that’s about it; as Pet Lands is an idle type of game, there isn’t a whole lot else to do. But you will spend the whole time clicking around. You don’t idle as much as you would in a normal cookie clicker type game. It’s colorful, and you actually have an avatar you run around as.
The Cons of Pet Lands: First Steps
Pet Lands doesn’t run very well. I usually start new games on lower settings, just in case, but it still took whole minutes for all the geography to load properly. I spent a lot of time just waiting to see what I was looking at.
Also, if you head into the settings, make sure not to change to full screen until after you change the resolution on the menu. It messed up where the hitboxes were for the menu buttons, and I had a hard time getting anything to work properly.
I also noticed a couple of other odd things that Pet Lands did that I wasn’t a fan of. There is no tutorial or anything to explain what you are supposed to be doing, so I stumbled around for the first couple of moments. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be clicking on anything because I couldn’t see my mouse icon on the screen. There is so much going on that I regularly lose it in the chaos.
It was so easy to lose it that I ended up missing popping a bunch of balloons (which your pets don’t see to try to grab for you), just trying to figure out where I was pointing.
One time, the Pet Lands reminded me to open up the presents in my inventory, but it didn’t tell me what key was in my inventory. So I tried to click the bag at the bottom of the screen and couldn’t find my cursor. I think this could be fixed by replacing the usual cursor with something much bigger to help you know where you are actually clicking.
The Pros of Pet Lands: First Steps
If you like idle games, Pet Lands is fine. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had playing an idle game, and I think it needs a lot of work before it can be called done. But it was interesting to have an avatar and to collect pets of different rarities. It’s a little bit Pokemon, which was a fun twist on the genre.
In the chaos, it can be hard to remember to keep your team optimized, so it’s nice that Pet Lands does it for you. At the same time, though, it’s a management kind of game that has removed all of the things you actually need to manage for yourself and made it automated. I wish there was a little more to do that wasn’t click the screen, but if you like that sort of thing, Pet Lands might be a lot of fun for you.
Final Thoughts
Pet Lands is fine. There’s a lot good about it, but there is also a lot that needs work. I think this could be a fun time-waster idle game, especially for Roblox-aged kids. But it is definitely not quite ready to be released as it stands now. You can find the Steam page for Pet Lands: First Steps here; the game is free.
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