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Just Because the Game Plays Itself Doesn’t Mean It’s Simple - Super Auto Pets Review

5K View2022-07-03

The initial reaction most people have when they hear about the auto battler genre for the first time can be described similarly to the initial reaction most people have when they hear about the visual novel genre for the first time: “So what, it just plays itself? What’s the point?” In most ways, these two gameplay styles exist at polar opposites of the video game spectrum, but they share that quality of being easy to misunderstand for someone who has never played one.

One of the big differences between visual novels and auto battlers, however, is their age. The former has been around in Japan since the ‘80s at least, while auto battlers really just took form in 2019. This burgeoning new type of game has expanded rapidly, however, through major mobile and PC titles like Auto Chess and Teamfight Tactics, plus new modes in existing games such as Hearthstone’s extremely popular Battlegrounds mode. But if the auto battler genre’s roots are in spin–offs of other established games and franchises—though separate now, Auto Chess started its life as a Dota 2 mod, and Teamfight Tactics is part of the League of Legends brand—then perhaps what the genre has truly needed for legitimacy is a homegrown hit, a game built from the ground up for auto battling without the weight of existing characters or worlds or art styles.

If you buy into that premise, then Super Auto Pets, launched on PC in 2021 and mobile platforms earlier this year, easily fits the role of that establishing player. It’s a totally original IP and concept that proves that auto battlers have legs (and depth) beyond being built out from something else, that they can stand on their own as engaging, fascinating experiences. It’s also just an absurdly fun and addictive game.

As the game and genre names both imply, in Super Auto Pets, you don’t actually control the action on the screen—not directly, at least. Matches in this game are split into two distinct rounds. First you go through the shopping round, where you’re given ten gold and presented with three of the titular auto pets to choose between. Each pet costs three gold, and rerolling for a new lineup costs one gold, so the most efficient first round would include picking rerolling once and purchasing the three best pets from those two offerings.

Once you’ve spent your money and set your pets up how you’d like, you can click the “End turn” button and head into the battling round. Here your group of up to five pets will be placed against an opponent’s group of up to five pets, and the two sides will battle it out in the order of their placement. The winner of the round earns a trophy, while the loser loses a heart. Getting ten trophies is considered a victory, while losing all ten hearts means starting over from the beginning of the process.

To put explain it in simpler terms, allow me to quote the rather spicy username of one of the opponents I went up against this week: "ThisGameIsJustVirtualAnimalCageFights."

The electric draw of Super Auto Pets, though, is not in seeing whether my level 3 worm could somehow defeat that guy’s level 2 giraffe. No, the joy of this game is in uncovering deep team composition strategies and overcoming the card game-esque randomness to put all the pieces together and become unstoppable.

See, each of the eighty-some animals available to pick from in Super Auto Pets has several factors that make it unique. First, each animal has a baseline attack and health stat. These are what will determine those automated battles: When two animals meet in the middle of the playing field, they clash and attack at the same time. Whatever damage stat one animal has will be subtracted from opposing animal’s health, and vice versa, and the process will repeat until one or both of those animals die and the next in line step up.

Beyond the stats, most of the animals also have some extra special passive abilities that you can learn about by selecting them but not immediately purchasing. Let’s take the humble pig as an example. This tier 1 animal only has one health, but its impressive three attack is enough to knock out most opposing animals in the early game. But even better, it carries the text “Sell: Gain an extra 1 gold.” That means when it’s time to replace the pig with a more impressive mid-game animal, you’ll earn more than the usual one gold for selling your little porker.

The best animals in the Super Auto Pets have passive abilities that buff themselves or other animals. For example, the dog—of course dogs are one of the best picks—has text reading “Friend summoned: Gain +1 Attack or +1 Health.” In other words, every time you put a new animal on your board, the dog will get a random stat upgrade, whether that happens due to you purchasing an animal in the shopping phase or an animal getting summoned off of another animal’s passive ability during the battle phase. Over the course of the game, the dog can slowly buff itself up from it’s two attack, two health origins into a beast that can remain viable into the late game.

Already you can start to see the complexity of trying to pick which animals work best together and carefully choosing the best moments to spend your gold on rerolling the store. It’s not enough to just purchase the animal you want once, though. By purchasing copies of whatever beastie you’re running with, you can feed them into each other. Every time you do this, it will boost the creature’s stats, but they’ll also level up on the third and sixth copies, which generally provides big buffs to the passive abilities as well. To use our previous examples, a level three pig will sell for six total gold, as compared to a level one pig selling for two. A level three dog will gain three more attack or health for each friend summoned rather than one more. Picking the right pets to focus on trying to level up is perhaps the most challenging part of the game, and even as someone who’s played dozens of hours on and off for many months now, I’m still not very good at figuring it out.

Oh, and on top of everything else, you also have to decide if or when you should spend your money on food, another item available in the shopping phase that provides extra buffs to your animals. These can range from straight increases to attack or health to more interesting improvements, like garlic which reduces all incoming damage to a pet who’s consumed it by two points. Food is just another wrinkle in the brain-busting tapestry of this game.

Part of how Super Auto Pets developer Team Wood Games has kept the game fresh since its launch has been a regular release of expansion sets that add news batches of pets and food. So far two sets are available, with a smaller first set costing $5 and the larger second set costing $10. What’s especially cool about these sets is that if you select an expansion set, you will only play against other players also using that expansion set, so you know the playing field is even. As a free-to-play player with just the base set, you’re never going to get stuck against someone running animals you don’t even have access to.

Moreover, Team Wood Games has done an incredible job of making the expansion packs feel incredibly distinct in the strategies available. The base game still feels like its purest form and the best way for newcomers to experience it, while Expansion Pack #2 strikes me as one built for the real hardcore players. It has all sorts of strange temporary buffs, as well as pets who only provide bonuses to friendly animals that have eaten the new strawberry food type. It feels like playing a completely different (and somehow even more baffling) meta.

If you want a taste of what the expansions have to offer without spending money, Super Auto Pets also includes a rotating Weekly Pack that free players can choose. This puts together a unique set of animals from across all the base set and both expansions (plus some Weekly Pack-exclusive friends), providing a mode that helps keep the game fresh by constantly remixing what’s available.

I really cannot overstate how absurdly free-to-play friendly this game is, though. Even if you decide never to spend the combined $15 for both of the current expansions, you can easily get dozens or even hundreds of hours out of the base set without feeling like you’ve mastered it. And this isn’t one of those games where free-to-play means “free but you have limited energy that refills super slowly unless you spend money” or “free but you have to watch an ad between every match.” There’s no gimmicks. Until or unless you want to pick up the new sets and try them out, it is truly, completely free.

The biggest praise that I can give for Super Auto Pets is that it turned me from someone with a casual but skeptical interest in auto battlers into a true believer. I’m certain there are new pinnacles of the genre waiting to be achieved, but this is the game that really sold me on it. This is the game that opened my eyes to just how much strategy and cautious thinking can go into deciding if I should spend my money on a cow or a hippo. And more than anything, it’s a game that I’ve continued returning to regularly for the better part of a year, and I don’t see any signs of that stopping any time soon.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Overthinking, especially re: pet purchases. If you’ve wasted hours of your life looking at cute animal pics from the local shelter and thinking to yourself, “You know what? I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna get that kitten!” then this game is for you. Even better if you regularly follow up the next day with some thought like, “I could raise a snake. I could do it!”

• Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds mode. Super Auto Pets is worth checking out if you’ve enjoyed any of the crop of major auto battlers that arrived before it, but I’ll pick my personal favorite of the bunch. Yes, this technically isn’t a card game, but the way it uses simplified stats, text-conferred passive abilities, and randomized animal picks feels like it has more in common with Hearthstone generally (and Battlegrounds specifically) than with something like Teamfight Tactics.

💬 Have you tried Super Auto Pets for yourself? Share your thoughts in the comments! And even if you haven’t, stop by and let us know which animal you’d pick to be the biggest overall winner in a virtual cage fight.

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