My Pet Protector is an off-shoot series of the tower defence games Protector.
I will probably write something more detailed about the Protector series at a later date but most people who are into their flash games will know it. They follow the basic genre and people either like them or don’t.
Some people can’t get enough of them, others say they have no innovation and simply re-hash the same ideas over and over.
I haven’t actually played them to any great degree because tower defence games aren’t my thing so… yeah. I can’t say which camp I fall into.
What I do know is the Pet Protector series is totally different.
See this guy? This is you.
Pet Protector 2 takes everything the original did and doubles it. You can play this and skip the first, and you won’t be missing out on anything.
Your game starts out by telling the story of how your character grew up. This decides what your starting stats will be.
Everything from who your mum and dad were to events that happened in your childhood will affect your strengths and weaknesses – but fortunately you get details on what each choice you make will do.
You also get a chance to decide what your guy will look like. And it’ll be a guy – you can’t choose to be a girl and it’s set in ancient times so sex change operations don’t exist yet.
The first thing you’ll notice is there are a hell of a lot of stats to play with. Get used to it. The entire game is built around improving your stats either through grinding or by going on quests.
You have six main stats to worry about:
Strength: this decides how much damage you can do.
Dexterity: this decides how quickly you can attack, and your accuracy.
Constitution: your health.
Wisdom and intelligence: this decides your magic strength (but in my opinion, magic sucks. Be a man and fight properly!)
Charisma: improves your personality – not that important.
There’s also a load more stats to worry about. If this screen confuses you, you’re in trouble.
The character screen has a huge amount of stats to raise, such as combat attack, fame, bravery, even refinement and compassion. It’s unlikely you’ll get many of these to their full level – firstly due to the amount of time it takes and secondly because some counterbalance each other.
The game follows your character as he goes from age 12 to adulthood. Every action you make takes up time and once you complete 364 weeks, you get a rating on how well you did.
The point of the game (sorry to have taken so long in getting to it) is to find resources and cash to build up your town while going into dungeons to collect treasures.
Creating new buildings opens up various new dungeons, jobs and better training opportunities.
Two last things to go through before I go into the fighting: you can earn cash by doing jobs. The older you get, the better wage you can earn, and the more you do a job the better you get at it.
You can also go to school to improve your stats.
All of the stuff I’ve gone through so far concerns the grinding elements of the game. Grinding kinda sucks.
Added to this, every action you take makes your character tired, so you then have to spend time resting to be able to do anything. More grinding.
Now for the action part of the game.
You have to do this grinding to make your character strong enough to survive the dungeons. Let me repeat that – you HAVE to. If you go out as the little wuss your character starts off as you’ll get your ass kicked.
The dungeons are the most fun part of the game. You start with only a small part of the dungeon visible and you have to move about to explore it.
You can find new resources and cash, as well as monsters. Fighting is very basic – click a button to attack physically or magically, and occasionally use a potion to keep yourself alive. Every fight is a battle of attrition, and when you start out your miss rate is infuriatingly high.
Fight!
So you explore the dungeon until you find the rare treasure in a blue chest, get knocked out by a monster or get tired and have to go home.
Then you start building up your stats again so you can go out and conquer more dungeons, and so on and so on.
Some dungeons have monsters that are crazy strong – you’re able to continue playing after your character reaches adulthood and you will probably need to do so to beat these guys.
So the whole thing is about grinding. Grinding all the way through. I have to admit, I don’t really like this game.
But I played it through to the end.
I have to ask myself why I did this and I think I know the answer. It’s the same reason a climber takes on a mountain.
Because it’s there.
You can see the stats rising and you know you’ll be able to take on new dungeons.
You can see the time ticking down and you want to achieve certain things before you get your rating.
I don’t really like this game but it is pretty addictive.
Grind away: My Pet Protector 2
Written by: Richard Wilson
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