Viva Pinata Returns to Form
For: IGN
Put the preconceived notions that 'Viva Piñata' is cute and bubbly aside for a moment. Rare's franchise is too good to be pigeonholed as some shallow game made for kids. We'll pretend 'Viva Piñata: Party Animals' doesn't exist now that the series is back in the hands of its creators and Rare prepares to deliver a sequel that addresses nearly every problem from the first game. If you loved 'Viva Piñata', this won't disappoint. If you're one of the many that ignored it, read on to learn why you should correct that mistake when Trouble in Paradise releases this September.
The basic gameplay structure remains intact for Trouble in Paradise. You begin with a patch of garden and from there it's up to you to mold it into the kind of place piñatas would like to live. That means planting flowers and trees, adding decorations, building houses for the piñatas to live in, and laying down various surfaces. Each piñata has its own requirements for showing up, taking residence and being comfortable enough to do the romance dance and produce little baby piñatas. The ultimate goal is to raise some happy piñatas that can be shipped off to parties. How you go about that is almost entirely up to you.
Trouble in Paradise is a true sequel and a ton of new content has been added to the mix. All of the piñatas from the first game are back, though their requirements, likes and dislikes have been changed to fit within the new ecosystem. You'll also find 30 new piñatas, ranging from the little Bispotti beetle to the massive Sarsgorilla. To attract them you'll have to make use of the new surfaces (desert sand and snow), a plethora of new flowers and trees and new toys for them to play with. Rare seemed to like the tracks and toy train that some piñatas will ride best. My favorite was the Michael Jackson inspired tiles that light up when piñatas walk across them.
As before, the game is as deep as you want it to be. New behaviors have been added, piñatas will interact with each other more, and the romancing mini-game has been expanded and improved. You can still race through the romancing mazes, made easier now by the inclusion of a second camera angle, but if you want to improve your chances of twins or variants being born you can collect bonus hearts scattered throughout the challenge. Those who do it all the fastest will find themselves at the top of the online leaderboards.
Of course, Rare isn't just looking to add a few new things to play with and call it a day. The team knows that, despite the kid friendly appearance, 'Viva Piñata' could be overwhelming to a young gamer. Or an older one if you want to be realistic. The game can be quite complicated. Steps have been taken to ease newcomers into the game while giving the entire experience more context. The game begins with Pester, a particularly evil fellow, making a move to steal info on all of the piñatas. Things don't go as planned and his idiotic sidekick winds up deleting the info out of the central factory computer. It becomes your job to restore the factory files which means that it's time to head back to the garden.
This go around your garden doesn't begin looking like a twister has just gone through -- Rare realized that didn't make for the most entertaining start to a game. It's not the prettiest place at first but it doesn't take long to attract a few Whirlms and Bispottis. From there the game begins to introduce world challenges with specific instructions on how to go about completing them. Romance a Whirlm would be an example of a typical early challenge, ensuring that new players don't have trouble figuring out the basic game mechanics.
Little changes have been made as well in the name of streamlining the experience. The bumpers can cycle through each piñata, worker or plant in the garden to quickly find what you're looking for. You can now scroll a bit outside of the garden (sorry, you're still confined to the square garden area for the entire game) to check requirements of any piñatas that haven't come within your borders just yet. Piñatas will eat anything you try to feed them, though not everything will be to their liking.
Perhaps the biggest adjustment made to help the younger fellows is the addition of a full co-op mode so that parents can play with their kids. Two people can play on a single box with the second player free to hop in or out of the game at any time. The second player doesn't have access to every menu, but they have the full suite of tools to pitch in and get their hands dirty. And there is incentive to help out. For every good thing the second player does, a magic meter fills a bit. Once it is completely full, he or she can perform a special move that the first player would normally have to pay for. Tinkering, healing sick piñatas, or filling a candiosity meter are just a few of the things magic makes possible for free.
The team wasn't willing to talk much about its online support for the game, but we did get a peek at the main menu and saw that you will be able to play a game through Xbox Live or over system link. Given the offline co-op, it's a good bet that we'll see at least that much online.
There was one online feature revealed -- a new camera mode. Gone are the days of spending hours meticulously crafting a garden with no way to show it off. Trouble in Paradise allows you to take snap shots and upload them to a special community website being made. The fun doesn't end there. Each picture you take keeps a data file attached to it when you upload it to the community site. Want to compare every Sweetle picture to see if yours is the coolest and happiest? No problem.
Rare has also added Vision Camera support to the game, but probably not in the way you're expecting. Rather than simply putting your face on the screen for others on Xbox Live to see, the camera reads codes on special cards. The cards can do everything from adding a special piñata directly into your garden to adding extra cash to scaring off nasty sours when they enter. The team isn't completely sure exactly how far it will take the concept -- be it selling decks of cards or allowing people to print out their own from the online community site -- but either way we're pretty excited to have a fun reason to brush the dust off the camera.
The extra time since the last 'Viva Piñata' game hasn't only been spent adding new features. It's also given Rare a chance to make the engine running the game a tad more robust. The limit on how many things you can have in the garden at once has gone up significantly even as the framerate has become more stable. The game looks great in motion and is still fresh and exciting despite the fact that many piñatas are recycled from the first game.
All signs point to Rare doing an admirable job addressing the big issues some found with the first game while keeping the depth and discovery aspects intact for those of us that are a bit more hardcore. Even after our brief play session with Trouble in Paradise, it's easy to see that this is the game that Rare was hoping to deliver the first go around. It's fun and charming and now the younger crowd should be able to enjoy the game just as much as us older folks. Don't let 'Viva Piñata: Party Animals' slip through the cracks again. Keep your eyes out this September.
