Create your own tropical aviary with Bird Oasis on Facebook

If you like the gameplay found in Facebook games like FishVille or Happy Aquarium, but want to raise and sell something other than fish, King.com and Playhopper hope that you'll choose their game Bird Oasis. Bird Oasis allows you to purchase, feed, train, and otherwise raise a wide variety of tropical birds in your own jungle aviary. Once your birds have grown to maturity, you'll be able to sell them, earning coins and experience points, and starting the cycle all over again.

The gameplay here also includes the ability to mate your birds, to produce offspring which can also be sold, among other timed features. Meet us behind the break for a full look at the gameplay of Bird Oasis.
Bird Oasis is one of the more simplistic titles on Facebook, from a pure gameplay standpoint. The graphics are quite cute, and there aren't very many birds to choose from yet (the game is still rather new, after all), but the gameplay is very simple to pick-up-and-play when you have a few minutes of spare time.

The basic gameplay method is as such: Use a small amount of coins to purchase a bird from the store. Birds come in varieties like Macaws, Whistlings, Herons, Tukans, and so on, and birds have different prices and different experience point rewards, based on their price or how long they take to grow. As your birds are growing to maturity, a food icon will appear above their head at routine intervals, and you'll to click on this icon whenever it appears to keep your birds well fed. Also while your birds are growing, you can "teach" them skills, or tricks, like ruffling their feathers. Once the bird is mature, a $ will appear above its head. Simply click on this button and you can sell your birds for a profit. Take this profit and purchase new birds, and you can begin the cycle all over again.

Of course, there's a bit more to gameplay than just those simple steps. Birds must be fed regularly, or else they'll become sick. Sick birds won't grow, and will need to be healed using First Aid. Also, you have a few choices for how you'd like to feed your birds. You can stick with the basic bird feed that is chosen automatically when clicking on a bird - this feed is free, but tends to last only a very short amount of time - or you can buy actual bird feed from the store (called Super Bird Seed) that will fill birds up for four times as long as the traditional food. You can also increase your birds' growth rate by purchasing Vitamins for the store, which make a bird grow up twice as fast. Luckily, all of these items (including First Aid kits) cost nothing but coins (150-250 coins), and not the game's premium currency (Bird Oasis Cash), so you'll be able to more freely use these items whenever you like.

You'll also be able to breed adult birds, by placing a Love Nest, and then moving a male and female of a particular species into the nest to mate. This results in a hatchling that can be raised and subsequently sold in the same way as those birds purchased from the store. In fact, the only real worthwhile aspect of breeding seems to be the fact that you'll receive a new bird to sell without having to pay for it first.

As you earn excess funds, you can customize your aviary, by not only purchasing size expansions (expansions simply allow you to keep more birds at once, but require neighbors to unlock, as well as coins), but also by purchasing a variety of decorative items - bushes, flowers, trees, torches, small buildings like huts, standing bird feeders, and so on. Most of these items will be unlocked as you level up, giving you more incentive to do so.

As we said above, as of this writing, there really isn't much to do in Bird Oasis other than the gameplay mentioned above. There are some slight social elements, like being able to send your friends free gifts, or visit their aviaries, but as of right now, the gameplay is mostly just about buying and raising birds only to sell them and start again. Still, this gameplay isn't new to the Facebook gaming scene - just look at our previous examples of FishVille and Happy Aquarium - so if you're looking for a different animal raising experience on Facebook, this wouldn't be a horrible place to start.