Capcom's Snoopy Street Fair Serves Up a Nostalgic Free-to-Play Treat on iOS
Beeline Interactive, the mobile gaming unit of Capcom that’s behind runaway hit Smurfs’ Village, has launched its second free-to-play iOS title based on a beloved children’s entertainment property. Snoopy’s Street Fair applies many of the same game mechanics to Charles Schulz’s classic Peanuts franchise, while remaining faithful to the source material’s characters and unique visual style.
A universal app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, Snoopy’s Street Fair begins with Charlie Brown learning that his baseball team is going to a championship and needs new jerseys. In order to afford them, he decides to start his own street fair to raise funds. Players take on the role of Charlie Brown, with his faithful dog Snoopy lending his help.
As Charlie Brown, players must place various booths and attractions on the block in order to raise funds. These include lemonade stands, snack carts, and a number of different games. Players can also place photos booths, which can be used by players to take photos using their iOS device that integrate Peanuts characters. These photos can be saved to their device and even shared with friends. Friends can be added from Facebook and Game Center, and visited at any time to see what they’ve done with their block. The game also allows players to visit random blocks, or blocks that have been selected for display by the developers.
Back on the player’s block, they’re able to build new booths using coins they’ve earned from their existing attractions when computer-controlled children visiting the street fair use them. They’re also able to find cash, which acts as a premium currency and can be used to purchase certain attractions, and items that can’t be bought using coins. Cash can also be used to speed up elements of the game, such as immediately causing attractions to pay out coins. Various Peanuts characters appear in the game as helper characters that run special booths and attractions. They pay out the most coins and experience, but they also cost the most coins and cash to “hire.”
Players can also gain experience by completing items from a to-do list, to which new tasks are constantly being added. Some of these include cleaning up piles of leaves, which Snoopy helps with when they’re tapped. Players can purchase new outfits for Snoopy which let him perform different tasks, such as beautifying the block as an artist or picking up marshmallows as a troop leader. Snoopy also enables players to take part in three mini-games for extra coins and experience, all of which make good use of the device’s touch screen. The first that players get to interact with is a lemon squeezing game where they rotate lemons on a juicer and swat away hornets.
Like Smurfs’ Village, Snoopy’s Street Fair is monetized through in-app purchases of the premium currency called cash. Beeline Interactive has gone to some lengths to make it very clear for children and their parents that these purchases cost real money, so as to avoid concerns like those that arose around younger players unknowingly spending real money on Smurfberries in Smurfs’ Village.
Snoopy’s Street Fair launched two days ago and is already at No. 18 on the App Stores’s list of top downloaded free iPhone and iPod touch games. It is also ranked on the list of top-grossing gaming apps, coming in at No. 128. It’s at No. 12 on the iPad’s free game chart and No. 88 in terms of top-grossing iPad games.
You can follow Snoopy’s Street Fair’s progress using AppData, our tracking service for mobile games and developers.
