This game, like a brightly colored pinata, waits for you to break it open and feast on the yummy candy within.
One look at the box and you may be put off by Viva Pinata's family friendly exterior, but dig a little deeper and you'll find an engrossing experience, worthy of anyone's time.
In Viva Pinata, your ultimate goal is to turn the crowded, junk filled garden given to you at the beginning of the game into a paradise for the sixty or so varieties of Pinata that will come to inhabit your garden in time. This may sound easy at first, but it's a bit more complex than it would appear at the outset.
You'll first need to terraform your garden, removing junk and putting down soil and grass, so it's a more hospitable place for Pinata to live. You can also plant various flowers and crops, and dig ponds, filling your garden with as much, or as little, water as you like. At its most basic level, you can think of it as a mix of Harvest Moon and Zoo Tycoon, with a little bit of Pokemon thrown in for good measure. Once you get under the hood, however, you'll find its much more than the sum of its parts.
Attracting piñata is easy at first, as low level piñata will flock to your newly created garden, but soon you'll find that you'll have to work harder to attract those tier 2 and tier 3 and beyond wild piñata. Each piñata has different requirements for visiting and ultimately becoming a resident In your garden. While some may be attracted to certain flowers, or foods, others may only pop up if your garden is forty percent water, or thirty percent grass, etc. Your garden also has a finite amount of room, as well, so you'll have to decide what stays and what goes when trying to get new species to move in.
Once you've got piñata in your garden, now what? This is where the fun starts. Breeding piñata is another important aspect of the game as well. As humans, we love to breed. (Its true, don't look at me like that!) Pinatas love to breed as well, and each species has different requirements for breeding, some need to eat a certain food, others need to be wearing a certain accessory, like a diamond necklace, to get in the mood. Once two of the same species of piñata are ready to breed, you'll enter a little minigame, which is essentially a maze, and you must lead one piñata to the other, and if successful, you'll have a baby piñata on the way.
You'll get experience for everything you do, attracting new piñata, breeding new piñata, planting trees, etc, and this experience translates into garden levels. The higher level garden you have, the more rewards come your way. You may get more garden space, a stronger shovel, and new piñata may become interested in your garden. This rapid reward system works fairly well and if you're consistent about attracting and breeding new piñata, rewards come at a pretty good pace.
There is also a village, of course, where you can buy seeds and other garden items, and eventually other shopkeepers will move in that'll let you hire helpers to water and weed your garden, sell accessories for your piñata, or even sell piñata themselves.
This all may sound rather daunting, but controlling all this in game is fairly simple, as simple as moving the cursor on screen to and from your piñata, or pressing a button to bring up your shovel and hitting another button to dig, its seamless, for the most part. Accessing the various shops requires you to go into the menu and while it works fine, each shopkeeper has to say something when you arrive and when you leave. Its cute at first, but after awhile it does get a bit grating.
Graphically, everything looks quite nice. From the glistening pools you can dig, to the colorful, stylized piñata themselves, it's a pleasure to look at. The piñata themselves are pretty expressive; they'll jump when scared and prance about when happy. The music is pretty relaxing and I've had relatives fall asleep while I've played it, so be warned, if you like to doze off while playing games. The sound effects are nice as well and most of the piñata chirp or squeak or oink as well, which is fun to hear.
There is no multiplayer, however, you can send piñata from your garden to a friends' garden and it seems to work well enough.
With its colorful graphics and lush atmosphere, combined with its open ended, addictive gameplay, Viva Pinata is as much fun for kids as it is for everyone else. You wont regret when you smash open these piñata and treat yourself to the rewards within.