Reviews
In 2006, Rare released Viva Piñata to critical acclaim. It was a game very much geared to younger gamers and virtual gardeners, but it had a real Sims type hook that gamers of all ages fell in love with. Now some years later, Rare have released a sequel, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. It’s a difficult premise to improve on to warrant a new release without over complicating the concept, so have Rare succeeded in achieving that balance?
Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise plays a lot like its predecessor. Leafos is back providing useful tutorial type information to get you familiar with the various elements of the game. This aspect has been significantly improved since the last version and the game is a lot easier to get to grips with as a result. There is another key addition to this version of Viva Pinata, namely a plot. The despicable Professor Pester and his band of trouble makers accidentally wiped all information relating to piñatas in his botched attempt to steal the data, and it’s your job to breed piñatas with a view toward learning about them and repopulating the piñata database. The plot doesn’t really feature much as you play but it does provide a nice background for you to play in.
The gardening aspect to Viva Pinata TIP is very similar to the previous version in that you must cultivate and work an area of land that you have been given to attract Pinatas. Initially you have limited resources available to you to do this but it is fortunately a straight forward affair at the start with a requirement for soil, grass a bit of sand and the odd flower. You can scrounge some free seeds from your resident gardener Seedos, and you can also buy seeds from the local store once it becomes available to you using the currency of the land, the gold chocolate coin. You make money by selling stuff and you can sell literally anything and everything, but piñatas will net you the most chocolate coinage. Once a piñata becomes a resident in your garden, you can then sell it if you wish. This might not be ideal as if you get them to procreate and produce baby piñatas, then you have a golden goose, so to speak. Some piñatas are attracted to other piñatas as food sources, and that’s where the intricacies of the game come into play. If you want to keep certain piñatas in your garden that don’t get along then you may have to build enclosures to keep them apart from each other because when piñatas fight, one usually comes off worse and the doctor needs to be called for the ill piñata which can be expensive. You can pour water on them or whack them with your shovel to try to separate them, but this doesn’t always work. You also have piñatas that are afraid of predators as they often get hunted. So keeping the peace in your garden is a challenge in itself as you want to protect your cute and valuable residents.
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