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Viva Piñata for Windows

Pro Gardening

To add to the complexity, it's not just about tending to the piñatas - in addition to building the necessary "homes" for each species, you also end up having to grow different plants in the garden. Many species are attracted by specific flowers, vegetables or fruits, and the local merchant is happy to sell you seeds for all kinds of things for you to grow. You can also buy special "romancing candy", that bypasses the need to fulfill the requirements for mating on a species, after you have managed to do it once - instead you just feed a candy to the two piñatas and tell them to go nuts. Poof, another egg, another happy piñata.

In addition to garden improvements, you can also buy accessories to your piñatas to improve their happiness, and to just generally have fun. There are many ways to fool around with the garden and the piñatas, and while everything is calculated into the total "value" of your garden, most of them have no "real" gameplay function - they are there just so you can have a laugh.

The local store offers numerous ways to spend your hard-earned chocolate coins.

A pair of glasses on a snake. Silly, but fun.

Sadly, Viva Piñata fails a critical "kiddie game" check - there is way too much text, and some gameplay elements are overly complex to figure out without resorting to reading the in-game help. Yet the game is probably too cutesy for a teen player who might understand all the concepts thrown at the player. New things are tossed in at such a rapid pace that it's hard to keep up at times, and there is lot of detailed information to be browsed if you want to know what you should do to your garden in order to attract and mate new species of piñatas. I guess the goal has been to provide enough gameplay to keep older gamers interested in mastering the intricate detail and graduate as a "Master Romancer" for each of the available species of Piñatas.

Sour piñatas are evil and will make a mess at your garden, unless you manage to make them happy enough to become residents.

Piñatas can get sick - usually by eating something unsuitable - and there is no medical insurance on Piñata Island. The doctor will happily rip you off to save your fluffy animals.

Cute Pinatas, Ugly UI

The user interface was already the biggest source for complaints on the Xbox 360 version - it just wasn't very intuitive to use, as the game just screamed for a pointing device, such as a mouse. Now, on the PC, there is indeed a mouse but instead of redoing the UI to make full use of the pointing rodent, the team handling the PC port has instead "adapted" the gamepad UI for the mouse - creating even more unplayable mess.

If you plug in an Xbox 360 gamepad, the game plays exactly the same as it does on the console, but with a mouse you are huddled with a strange hybrid - some elements are done as you'd expect them to be done with a mouse, yet some parts still work with the logic of a four-button gamepad. Viva Pinata is not impossible to play with a mouse, but it takes a long time to learn the unintuitive system, and even when you do, it never feels natural. When the game is squarely aimed at casual players and kids, this is a fatal flaw, so you better have an Xbox 360 controller around.

Now if you can get over the clumsy controls, the game kind of grows on you over time. I can understand why Viva Pinata has received numerous awards for being innovative, and I can even agree to that - there are many novel ideas presented here, and I can assure you that no other game is quite like this. Still, pure innovation isn't quite enough to keep me interested, and in that regard Viva Piñata is a nice toy that fails to keep the interest up in the long term. I guess it would work best when a younger player tries it out with an interested parent on hand to help and explain things.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay (cont.), User InterfacePage 4: Graphics and PerformancePage 5: Final Thoughts and Scoring

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