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Preview: Pocket Frogs

News by Ben Briggs, September 13, 2010

We’re delighted to report that NimbleBit’s latest game, Pocket Frogs will be released this Wednesday; but we’re even more excited that we got to try it out early.

At its most simplistic level, the game is basically the Dizzypad game engine complemented by the ability to buy additional frogs and sell more mature frogs for a profit. You can also encounter new breeds of the amphibious creatures in the pond and breed your frog with that one to result in a different combination. Initially, you’ll only be able to breed common varieties together but as you level up you’ll be able to combine rarer breeds.

You can also kit out the frog habitats by purchasing new scenery which boosts frog happiness, but the best way to keep them happy is usually just to take them out into the pond and go hunting for flies. Once you’ve swallowed a certain number of flies you’ve ‘tamed’ the frog; it can now be catalogued. Habitats hold only 8 frogs and so it becomes essential to start completing awards so that you can gain experience points, thereby unlocking new habitats and expanding your frog collection.

You’ll get a pleasurable experience whether you invest a lot of time in the game or merely a little.

Once tamed, you can gift your frogs to your Plus+ friends; if you’ve signed up for that service you can also go over and view your friends frogs and how they’re doing. But even without this, Pocket Frogs offers a rich experience offline and we found it very meditative, as you can tell from the embedded trailer. This is helped by the absence of music; the game just uses natural ambiance instead.

Like many games that implement the freemium model, Pocket Frogs can be played entirely without paying; instead you use your money to buy stamps and growth potions. Potions fatten up your frogs quickly so you can sell them on for more coins; this allows you to buy more amenities for your habitats or simply more frogs. Stamps, however, allow you speed up transactions that you make either for new scenery or simply speeding up the time it takes to breed a new species of amphibian. Both of these enhancements cut the waiting time but if you don’t want to spend a load of money in the game you can simply wait.

It’s only with the rarer breeds that this may be a problem; some are listed as taking over a day to breed together, and so you’ll most likely want to buy a few stamps. Happily, you start off with ten stamps and ten potions, with more being cleverly hidden away in gift boxes that are scattered around the pond; chances are you won’t always find them here (you will mostly find gold) but it’s nice to see that NimbleBit are targeting the game at budgets both big and small.

And so, it’s easy to recommend that you pick up Pocket Frogs come Wednesday; if nothing else you will receive a bonus gift frog named Black Floris Tribus that is only available in the game’s launch week. The game is inviting, relaxing and can be surprisingly low maintenance; but also comes with 60 challenging awards, and different items to be found every day in the game. So in fact, you’ll get a pleasurable experience whether you invest a lot of time in the game or merely a little. It’s certainly another superb little game from a superb studio.

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