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| Plantastic by Astraware |
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While it’s great to see a publisher diversify its offerings, it’s also nice when they return to their roots. Such is the case with Astraware and the release of their latest product, the Palmstorm developed puzzle game Plantastic. I had pretty high expectations from the people who created one of my favorite PDA puzzlers, Plumbin’ Frenzy, and they managed to delver in spades.
You play Plantastic as one of two characters, the first being Pete and the other a new guy that apparently doesn’t have a name. At any rate, your goal is to plant enough flowers together that you can collect them to create bouquets. On the easy level you need at least 3 flowers together to form a bouquet, medium requires four flowers, and hard forces you to place at least 5 flowers together to get that bouquet. How the flowers are arranged doesn’t matter. They can be in a straight line or clumped, just as long as all the flowers are touching each other. Each level starts out with several flowers – and eventually some mushrooms – scattered throughout the garden. On the left side of the screen is a column where new flowers appear that can be planted. You simply click in the garden where you wish to place the bottom flower from the column. Once enough flowers of the same type are together they will be removed from the garden, and the total number of flowers you need to collect will be decreased accordingly. Once your flower count reaches zero, you’ve completed a garden. On the other hand, if the column of flowers reaches the top or you plant a flower such that you no longer have any valid moves to make, your game is over.
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This gardening gig certainly isn’t as easy as it seems. The immediate hurdle is that you can’t just place flowers anywhere that you want. In the initial game mode, you can plant a new flower one spot in any direction from the last flower planted (or from the flower the computer picks to start with when you haven’t planted any yet). As you complete a certain number of levels you unlock new modes that provide different patterns of available planting spots. The more levels it takes to unlock a mode, the more difficult the mode is. There are 5 modes altogether, including the one you start out with. Eventually mushrooms will start popping up in the garden, and they are basically immovable unless you have a power-up. You’ll need to work around them to build your bouquet. There are also moles that will show up from time to time. A simple bop on the head will get rid of them, but if you let them hang out too long they will steal flowers on you. As for the flowers themselves, over time you’ll get more varieties to work with, which makes it harder to build bouquets as quickly, and also has the bad habit of filling up your garden a lot sooner than you’d like. And to top it all off, the flowers will start filling up the left hand column more quickly as the levels increase.
As with any good puzzle game, Plantastic offers a couple of power-ups to help you get through the rough spots. The storm cloud clears out a block of nine squares centered around where you “plant” it. This is the only way that you can get rid of mushrooms. The spade allows you to plant a flower in any free spot in the garden, instead of having to follow the pattern that correlates with the mode you are playing. The multi-colored flower morphs the flowers around it to help them match so you can build a bouquet more quickly. I’m still trying to figure out the exact details on how these last two work, but they are useful none the less. I really have no complaints about the gameplay. The game is quite responsive with the stylus, and there’s a nice balance of luck and strategy to keep you planting away.
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Graphically the game is pretty decent. Everything is bright and colorful, but gone are the full screen renders of your main character between every few levels. Instead, you just get a head shot every five levels. That’s too bad, because Palm Storm does a really good job of creating awesome looking cartoon characters. There also isn’t a whole lot of animation to speak of in this game. I’m not sure what they might have done, but there had to have been something to make the atmosphere seem a bit more lively.
I was also a bit disappointed in the music. Gone are the bouncy tunes that rotated every five levels. The music wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have the same infectious melody that the soundtrack to Plumbin’ Frenzy contained. The sound effects, on the other hand, were very well done. In fact, I think some of them might have come from the “Pete” franchise.
When it comes to puzzle games I’m not one to question Astraware’s judgment, and Plantastic is no exception. The game play is quite addictive, and varies greatly simply by altering the patterns in which you can plant flowers. Add to that interesting power-ups and pesky moles, and it’s time to test your green thumb. The visuals certainly enhance the experience, and the sound effects help bring things to life as well. Now if we could just have some better background music, this package would be complete. As a so often say of the Astraware line, this is one you don’t want to miss.
Overall Score: 8/10
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