Thank you Ultimate Publishing for sending us a code to review!

Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator is exactly what it says on the tin: a pet shot simulator where you can sell all manner of pets. You start off with just enough resources to run a very small store with a single employee selling just some basic fish. However, your store is on a large plot of land that you can freely build on (for a fee, of course). If your store gets big enough, there's even an adjacent plot of land for sale for you to buy and expand onto. Just about every animal that is legal to own as a pet in the United States (and a few that probably aren't) are available for you to sell in your store, so long as you've unlocked them. Pets include all manner of fish, small and large birds, several species of cats, many species of dogs, rodents, reptiles, arthropods, and even otters.

Coming hot off the heels of writing the review for Pawnbroker Simulator, and seeing another shop simulator to try out, I couldn't help but give it a shot right away. Besides, running my own pet shop sounded a lot more fun than running a small pawn shop. And it was! The level of customization for the store and the different methods of automating parts of the store running process by hiring helpers were a stark contrast to the very manual store management of my most recent shop simulator game.

The game can be broken up into two main portions: shop-running and store-management. To actually run the shop, you need to stock shelves with products, price them, clean the floors and animal habitats, feed them, and check out customers. Stocking and pricing is fairly easy, as is cleaning. Feeding the animals is a tad more complicated, as you have to take product from your own shelf, store it in your inventory, then pull it out of your inventory and feed a single animal enclosure at a time. Likewise, checking out customers involves running all around your own store to take the items off shelves and animals out of the habitat and bringing them back one at a time to the checkout counter. This part gets real tedious, because as I will get to in my views on the controls, the amount of clicking and misclicking to do this part of the job makes it feel like the game is actively fighting against you. I'd be much happier if customers brought their products to the counter and all a clerk was required to get were the animals, much like a real pet store.

One other thing to note here is that you can also breed animals. By placing some male and female animals of the same species together in a habitat, then allowing them to mature and ensuring the option for "Allow animals to breed" is checked on the habitat, they will no longer be sold by your employees and will, eventually, have offspring. This does mean you have to keep them fed and potentially give them supplements to speed up their maturity and reproduction rates, but it gives you the ability to produce your own animals to sell besides just buying yours from...wherever it is you're buying your animals from at wholesale, immediate-delivery prices.

The other part of Exotica 2 is store management. This takes place almost exclusively through the PC terminal set up in the store. From there, you can build on your plot of land, renovate the store, unlock new items and animals to sell, buy products and shelves, and manage your employees. Building your store is not too dissimilar from The Sims, with each change costing money. (As a side complaint, you can't use special characters on you shop sign. Why can't I put an apostrophe in my shop name, Konrul Game? I wanted the shop to be called "Maestro's Catalier", not "Maestros Catalier"!) You also need to choose a place to put the delivery area (where products are delivered after you buy them) and where the dumpster goes (where you put empty boxes). Purchasing items causes them to immediately appear in the delivery area.

Each sale you make increases your experience, and with enough experience, you will level up. Each level up gives you some points to spend to unlock more items and pets to sell. It's important to make sure that, if you aim to unlock an animal or product to sell, that you also unlock the shelves and habitats necessary to house those animals. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with animals in crates or products in boxes you can't sell to customers until you level up and gain some more points. This part is a bit frustrating, since it will likely be several in-game days before you get enough experience points to correct your mistake. Only when you highlight an item to unlock it does it tell you what kind of shelf or habitat you will need to display that product. The number of experience points you get seems to increase with each level, but so does the amount of experience needed to reach the next.

Graphically, Exotica 2 is nothing to write home about. There is a pretty wide variety of people that come through the store, so it doesn't feel like the same few people are just compulsively buying all your animals. I think there may even be some randomness in putting together different features and clothes on NPCs. On the other hand, NPCs walk right through each other like they don't even exist, with the one time they seem to care about each others' presence being when they are queuing up at the checkout counter. Other than that, nothing stands out as being "beautiful" or having a unique graphical identity. It does it's job, it just doesn't stand out.

The music and sound, on the other hand, stand out, but for the wrong reason. The best way I can think to describe the music is "mobile game slop". It's a handful of semi-orchestral, overly-peppy tracks that sound like they'd be right at home on a free-to-play Ad-riddled mess on your average Android. Sound-wise, at least in the small store I ran, there wasn't too much noise being made by the animals, and next to no noise being made by the NPCs. There is no spoke dialog, and the customers don't do so much as say "Thanks" when you complete their orders. The best I got was a small chirp or meow from one of the many birds or cats I brought into the store. What's worse about the music is that it abruptly stops when you enter the pause menu. When you exit the pause menu, a new track starts up from the beginning.

As I alluded to earlier, the controls and UI leave a lot to be desired as well. There is a LOT of clicking in Exotica 2. As an example, let's go through the process of buying, displaying, and selling some fish. When you purchase an animal, you have to choose how many of each sex you want: click the male or female sign, the plus sign, "Add to checkout", the other sex sign, "Add to checkout", "Go to cart", "Purchase". Then you go to your delivery area, press E on the crate, go to your fish habitat, "E" to drop the item, "F" to take the lid off, "E" to start taking out the animals. This pops up another screen asking how many of each gender of the fish you want to remove from the container. 99% of the time, you're just going to click "Max" under the male fish, "Max" under the female fish, "Take". Then you click on the habitat, get the same popup, click the same buttons. When it's time to remove the fish for a buyer, you have to manually select each individual fish you want to take out from a list of fish in the tank (so you can potentially leave more mature ones to turn into breeding fish later). Finally click "Carry", go back to the counter, and click on the counter to put the fish down. (If you misclick during this last step, you'll yeet the pets in your hand halfway across the room and have to go pick them up and try again. I once completely lost a bunch of fish this way, with the lost item simply disappearing.) Not a single one of the click options mentioned has an alternative control tied to a keyboard key to speed up the process: just a ton of clicking.

As if all the clicking wasn't bad enough, the UI is tiny. A lot of text is condensed into each screen, and a lot of it is clarifying details about the buttons you're clicking as opposed to just having little context menus or buttons you can click to get more details. In some cases, the windows themselves are small, much more so than is necessary. This game is not at all couch player friendly. Considering that console editions of it are in the works, presumably there is some effort being put into making the game controller-friendly, but until then, it's mouse and keyboard only.

Further, it's entirely too easy, when trying to take products off shelves to sell to customers, to press "E" while looking at the shelf space next to the one you actually meant to click. Depending on how off you were, this either means you start picking up the wrong product or start picking up the whole shelf itself. Far too much in this game is spent trying to navigate out of menus you accidentally entered.

Aside from the controls and UI, the game never crashed, but there were a number of things that just made the experience feel...less than polished. For instance, when doing the tutorial, both my daughter and I managed to mess up by trying to build more than the tutorial asked you to or not building enough. In my daughter's case, she misclicked and didn't build enough roof to put the sign on the shop, making it fully impossible for her to finish the tutorial and requiring her to completely restart.

Another oddity is that, when people come into the shop, if you have even 1 of a single animal in stock, they may ask for multiple of that animal, to the point of sometimes asking for more than you have in stock. This applies to any item, really, and you have two options: quickly use your restocking tool to buy the number the customer wants and get it from the delivery zone, or manually cancel the item on the customer's order. If a customer came in to buy a pet, and you cancel the pet part of the order, they'll still buy everything else from you, which I get why that happens mechanically, but it does feel weird.

I've had issues with employee behavior, where they had issues grabbing items from shelves if they were placed around chest-height. You can also get an employee to work faster by clicking them (for a small cost), but it is not immediately clear how much faster they work, or if they'll work faster for a small amount of time or for the rest of the day. You can click on them infinitely, but it's not clear if there are any returns on your investments after more than just a few clicks. I've seen online that other people had issues with stocking employees not being able to stock items on the upper shelves, though I didn't experience that personally.

Finally, when you purchase an item to sell, it isn't obvious how many items will fit on the shelf. For example, a single space on the habitat shelf can hold 12 fish bowls (which come in packs of 12), 4 small fish tanks (which come in packs of 2), or 12 cat beds (which come in packs of 4). Neither looking at the sales page on the computer, the restocking tool, nor at the shelf with the box of items in your hand will tell you how much of a product you can put on it. It can make it difficult to know how much of a product to buy to keep your shelves stocked.

As far as moral concerns, I actually didn't see any (though the tentative ESRB rating for the upcoming Xbox release says "E for Mild Fantasy Violence"). So far as I can tell, there's nothing of any moral concern for any age group in the game.

Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator, from a gameplay standpoint, is just about everything I could want in running my own pet store. It's unfortunate that the experience is brought down by blank graphics, worse music, and even worse UI and controls, but I did still have fun. Seeing the trailer on the Steam page and seeing some of the crazy creations people had in making their perfect pet utopia, I may even continue playing this past the review. If you like cozy store simulators and you've always wanted to experience running your own little pet shop, $15 seems like a decent price for the current experience.

-maestro_dana