Playdom's new game Fanglies brings innovation and fun

Tonight, Playdom quietly launched their new game Fanglies to the public. Fanglies is an adorable combination of city building games, mixed with a bit of pet care and some elements of FrontierVille thrown in for good measure. It is one of the more feature-complete social game launches we have seen, and raises the quality bar for engagement, depth of gameplay, and whimsical fun. Read on for a preview of Fanglies, brought to you by Games.com - The Blog!

Like most Facebook games, Fanglies starts you out by letting you create and customize your avatar, which is a sort of unrecognizable mix-and-match animal with fangs. After you create your avatar, you step through a guided tutorial that shows you how to get started in playing the game. If you name it, this game has it. You are given your own little village and are prompted to both increase the size of your village and buy yourself another Fanglie. The number of Fanglies you can have is directly related to the size of your village. Each Fanglie has a set of desires that you can view by clicking on them, and these desires cost energy but give you XP and coins so that you can level up. Clicking on their desire will make whichever Fanglie you chose perform a little emote and animation and will earn you XP. This appears to be the most obvious way to level up in Fanglies.
On your village, you can do a number of things. Random dig spots will appear on your village occasionally and you can harvest them for collectibles. There is also a fishing hole in which you can fish for collectibles (which requires energy to do so). The collection system is robust, allowing you to trade in your collections for rewards and create wishlists to share with your friends. Villages can also hold decorations, and this is the city-building element of the game. Shops and attractions can be built on the island that can actually be used to create other items. For example, if you purchase the shop titled "Cheap n Nice", you can then create furniture for your home. Purchasing the Parks & Gardens building allows you to make items like birdbaths or park benches. These all require coin and a particular length of time to complete, but actually give you a tangible reward when they're completed.

Every village also starts with a den, which is a building on your village that allows you to enter the inside if you click on it. The inside of the building is an isometric room that can be customized with a ton of furniture. For the shopoholics, the store has everything you could ever want to buy to decorate your house with. For those who are more thrifty, they can create their own furniture through the village shops. Having an interior and an exterior to decorate is sure to satiate any creative appetite.

Fanglies also has all of the standard elements of social games, such as gifting, neighbors, inviting, purchasable avatar additions, and the ability to buy a secondary currency (gems). Everything is bright, slick, and polished. The game feels more done than almost any other game we've tried, and the fun is instantly shown to the players. The added mechanics of an interior space, finding collectibles, gaining energy, manufacturing decorations, and fishing make Fanglies stand out from the crowd. We think we're looking at the next big thing for Playdom, for sure.