Viva Piñata invites you to join the garden paradise on Piñata island where a colourful world of peace, tranquillity and style awaits. Viva Piñata is quite a unique sandbox game. Your given the garden of the old piñata master Jardinero, its your task to help the garden back to its glory days when it was the pride of piñata central.
Viva Piñata is all about discovery and finding things about this wonderful world, but don’t worry leafos is always on hand to give you advice and help. To help you in this endeavour you have the journal a record of everything you can see and do in your garden, it tracks piñata progress gives you help with the next step, and any info you want.
The game is very open ended, you can tackle it any way you want, weather you want to farm the land, tame as many piñatas as you can and become a master of romancing them, or just create a beautiful space to chill out in anything is possible in on piñata island.
Whatever you want to do you’ll need to transform the garden. This is done very well as you only ever need 3 tools and they are all the tools are assigned to a d-pad button so you just press and your away. All the actions the various tools can do are shown on the screen as petals around the flower clock, each one has a button map so anyone can pick up and play.
The garden its self is very dynamic and it can change dramatically within minutes with a little work. The ground and terrain are easy to manipulate, the trees and plants need a little more care. You get seeds from Seedos and have to plant them anywhere you like. The watering takes quite a bit of your time up as with most of Viva Piñata you have to strike a balance, in this case between wilting and over watered. Your plants will need extra attention but its worth it in the end as they attract the piñatas to your garden.
Of the total 60 piñatas available only eight can be bought, the rest have to be enticed into your garden. For example the Whirlm favours soil where as a lick toad would prefer a pond to swim in. With the shovel you can accomplish both goals.
Once the piñatas have appeared its time to take it to the next level. Resident piñatas will live in your garden and call it there home but before they do they come for look around, when they do its your job to help make them feel comfortable enough to stay. This is where the first challenge lies. The smaller piñatas will happily arrive in your garden and stay, while the bigger piñatas take a few visits and a lot of encouragement to stay.
The piñata food chain brings a little more consideration. As your piñatas become prey for the larger ones you have to choose weather to unleash the shovels business end on the predator, or let it have dinner. The predator will usually become a resident once it has eaten so its always a tough decision weather to get more piñatas or to protect your own this adds a more strategic thought to the game.
Once you have a couple of piñatas of a species no more wild ones will be interested in visiting your garden anymore. That is where the romancing comes in, once the piñatas are very happy with your garden, once you’ve met the requirements for them to romance, they’ll gain a heart above their heads. If you bring two happy piñatas together you get a go at the romancing mini game.
Your piñata must make it through a maze like trial to bring the two piñatas together. If you touch the walls of enemies then you lose a life. With every successful romance you have one less life to complete the mini game, this gives a tremendous sense of satisfaction when you do the mini game in one go and become a master romancer.
Once you’ve brought the two piñatas together then they will go back to their homes and perform a romance dance, each species has its own unique dance, from the tango to black magic rituals, each one is tailored to that species. The cut scenes that show them are mostly quite funny. The result of the dance is a piñata egg brought by Storkos. It really feels satisfying and rewarding when the piñatas you helped create sports your designer label.
The most amazing thing about Viva Piñata is the ability to customise any thing from the garden, to the piñatas themselves. The village, has many ways to customise your garden, Cost-a-lots store has lots of ornaments, seeds and other bits and bobs. Willy builder can give homes to your piñatas., Gretchen can retrieve any piñata so you can customise your menagerie if you’ve had to make room. The best shop of all for customising is paper pets.
In paper pets you can kit your piñatas out with a whole host of accessories, from back packs to utility belts, shoes to hats if you want it you can have it. Mixing and matching the accessories can lead to some wonderful looking piñatas. The most important part about customising your piñatas is that they feel like yours, it gives a real sense of ownership when you’ve made your piñata wonder around like a superhero.
Life on piñata island isn’t all relaxation and calm. There are some piñatas that are wild and uncontrollable. These sours will come into ruin your garden and generally create mayhem. They add another level of strategic thought to the game as you have to defend your garden against the pests. The Sours aren’t the only threat as professor pester sends out his ruffians to cause bother as well.
The micro managing is where Viva piñatas true depth lies. As you level up through making piñatas residents and romancing them, the more happens in your garden. At the midpoint in the game your faced with a whole lot of trouble of attracting, romancing, growing, and securing your garden. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, but its always fun and challenging.
The games levelling system ensures that younger players won’t reach the complex bits until they’ve played the game for a while, like wise a skilled gardener will meet the higher level problems and piñatas much sooner. So it really does allow you to move at your own pace.
The magic of the family friendly game play is the use of the second controller, two or more players can co-operate to command the cursor together with each controller being allowed to manipulate the cursor. This is a really great feature as it means that a parent can step in and actively guide a frustrated child through with a more hands on approach rarely seen in games.
Visually Viva Piñata is one of the most stunning games on the Xbox 360. Everything is very colourful and chunky and really feels like it has weight. Most of the game world has a cartoon like polish to it and the tiki visual style is really spot on. The water by contrast looks very nice and realistic with mirror like reflections on the surface a ripples as the piñatas move through it.
The piñatas themselves are works of art. Each piece of paper is visible even when you zoom in, the n when the piñatas run you can see them blowing in the wind. It really is one of those wow moments in video games when you see it in action.
The piñatas animation really give them a lifelike quality, from the way the Pretztail gazes up at the moon to the way the cocoadile moves up and down, breathing as he sleeps and gets really jumpy when its disturbed all the way up to the majestic Eaglaire swooping around your garden after its prey. They really have soul and that us really hard to find in games. It helps generate a feeling attachment to them.
The real feather in Viva piñatas cap is the weather effects and lighting. it’s the little touches that do it, like when it rains if you look up the camera gets hit by more splash marks from the rain than if you were looking straight ahead. The shadows and night time lighting is superb seeing your garden bathed in moon light instead of just darkness is beautiful and as it casts shadows from the piñatas behind you on to a house wall it just gives another dimension to the believability of the world.
The sounds in the game give the garden its serenity, you can hear the wild animals all around you. Then the noises of the resident piñatas over the top make it more lifelike. All the ambient sounds are in surround sound so you really feel like you are there. The village shop keepers and visitors voices are a refreshing change, in the way they are all british accents. The rural quality the voice talent brings really makes the game feel more personal.
Music is another high point, the almost orchestral scores that accompany the night time with its harp and strings is very soothing and calming, which does really help when you have every ruffian descending on your garden. In contrast the simple pause music is really quite awesome, you know when a piece of music is good when your humming it hours after the games been switched off. If that isn’t to your tastes then the Xbox 360’s multimedia functionality can help you. Either stream or up load your own music and play it off the guide.
Once you are in the piñata world and a master gardener the fun doesn’t stop there. Xbox Live provides a lot of new content to further customise your experience, there’s always more accessories added all the time. On top of that the animated series has been added to the market place for free download so you can watch the adventures of Hudson Franklin and the gang as much as you want.
Viva Piñata is a return to grace for Rare and then some. It just works on so many levels it’s a great experience never before has a game expressed the wildness of nature in this way. It puts back what games are all about, fun. It takes a bit of patience but that’s all part of the challenge.
+ The audio and visuals are amazing
+ Very accessible but with hidden depth
+ Extra content keeps the Viva piñata going
- Special edition isn’t really that much better than the standard one.
- May be to complex for some gamers