Chibi-Robo is back for a new adventure, but is it really enough to save a whole park?
Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol is the sequel to a Nintendo game called Chibi-Robo!, which was released for the Gamecube and for the Wii.
The game consists of reconstructing a park. In order to do that, you play as Chibi-Robo, a robot whose main goal is to grow flowers and bring more people into the park.
Story:
The world is ending due to contamination. Parks have grown horrible and no one hangs out at them anymore. That's when Citrusoft, the company who created Chibi-Robo, decides to take part and try to help the world. With that purpose, they send Chibi-Robos for free to every single park. Chibi-Robo is a smart, 3-inches robot who was created to help. You play as one of the Chibi-Robos, who gets to a park and finds it all destroyed, and in order to fix it, starts growing many flowers in it.
5/10
Gameplay:
The gameplay in Chibi-Robo is a little hard to learn at first. To grow flowers, you have to play some music and dance for a white flower, which will then produce some buds taht you can water with a squirter. A flower will then grow up. It can be white or colored, but only white flowers give buds, and after giving buds, they turn colored. What you may find hard at first is the dancing minigame. You have to spin a wheel with the stylus, keeping the rythm of the music. If you don't do it right and rythmically, buds won't grow.
But the game isn't just about growing flowers. There's lots of stuff to do. You can go to town and helo toys, which you can later recruit in order for them to work for you at the park. You can also sell flowers, you can dig in spots marked with an x, and you can play minigames like bowling or a wac-a-mole type of game called Somgling Bash. Which brings us to what smoglings are.
Smogling are the main villans in the game and they'll try to destroy your park by turning its flowers black. Black flowers wither at dusk, so you don't want that, but you can kill smoglings by squirting them, feeding them with candy, or running over them with a vehicle.
So overall, there's a lot to do in the game, but at the end, you'll find yourself growing flowers most of the time. All controls work fine except the driving a car controls, in which you spin the wheel with the stylus. It's a little hard at first, but you get used to it.
Another problem is Chibi-Robo's need to use a battery, but it adds strategy to the gameplay, because you have to return to recharge your battery once it's almost finished.
To recharge your battery you can either do it with your watts, which is the game's currency and can be obtained in many ways, or go to the city, where you can recharge for free.
8/10
Graphics:
The graphics in Chibi-Robo are cute. They are very colorful and little realistic, and even though they aren't high-tech, they are pretty well done and suit the game.
9/10
Sound:
The sound in Chibi-Robo is pretty variated. There are many songs that change depending on the activity you do or the time of the day in game. There are also about 6 or 7 tunes you hear when you dance for the flowers. The sound effects are okay, there's nothing to complain about, except the characters' voices, which can get pretty annoying, even though you'll get used to them.
7/10
Difficuty:
Some people find this game too easy, but is it really that easy? The answer is yes and no. It is easy to beat, even thoguht it takes some time, but what isn't that easy is getting all the stickers, which are obtained by achieving something, for example getting a highscore in one of the games or helping a toy. But if you aren't going for 100% completion, yes it is very easy.
4/10
So if you're looking for a challenge, this game isn't for you, but if you like slow paced, lighthearted games, and you dont' mind it being repetitive and having no multiplayer, I recommend it for you.