Rival Stars Adds Horse Pastures
Posted on July 13, 2022 by Aywren
Somewhere in the busyness of last month, one of the most important updates dropped for my favorite horse racing game, Rival Stars, which added horse pastures. You’re probably wondering what’s the big deal about horse pastures. Well, let me tell you.
Back when I first reviewed the game in March, I gave it a mostly positive outlook with the caveat that the desktop edition didn’t quite have all the features provided in the mobile edition. However, the differences between mobile and desktop is that mobile requires in-game purchases (I think there’s something like purchasing passes for more features?) while the desktop is a one time purchase for everything.
However, since then, the desktop team has been knocking it out of the park in making good on their promises to bring the missing features to the desktop version. First, they added jumping into the Free Roam mode, then they added the Swiss Alps as a new location. Now they’ve added the biggest requested feature (aside from cross country races) – the pastures.
I first noticed pastures when I went to check on the game’s Steam page yesterday. I noticed that the community section was hopping in a way that I’d never seen before with lots of screenshots and art of horses in locations I wasn’t familiar with. Turns out that the pasture feature also has a 360 camera so you can take amazing free-shots of your horses in the pasture environment.
Pastures are just what they sound like – a place to turn out your horses once they’re done racing. Previously, I was forced to sell off favorite horses because I just didn’t have the room in the stables to keep them and they were no longer at a level to help me progress in my breeding. Now, I can just turn my favorites out to pasture as a place to keep them.
I quickly turned out a mare that I’d bred with a grey coat and blue eyes – I’d been holding on to her for her coat and eye coloration alone even though she was several ranks below my best horses. Sadly, the black–coat horses I bred months ago are already sold, but I would have kept them, too.
The team made it clear that you can pasture up to 60 horses at one time and that all pasture slots are fully unlocked (I wonder if that’s something you had to earn/buy on the mobile version). You can also move your horses from the pasture back to the stable at any time if you want to breed or race them again.
From the sounds of it, all that’s left to add is cross country races and the two versions should be identical. Well, except for the fact features are locked behind paywalls in the mobile version and open from the start in the desktop. More and more, I’m glad that I went with the desktop version – I rarely play mobile games anymore for this reason.
The team has said there are some more upcoming features to look forward to in Q3, so the desktop game keeps getting better!