Addictive pleasure
Viva pinata is one of those rare games (no pun intended) that gets released. When this game was first announced people looked at this game and assumed that it was just gonna be a little kids with colourful creature and a farily basic gameplay experience. Boy, how wrong were we.
In Viva Pinata you take control of your own garden. At the beginning of the game your garden looks horrible - theres junk all over the place, hard concrete with lots of cracks. Its your job to rebuild this garden to the garden it once was - A pinatas paradise. The aim of the game is to attract creatures called Pinatas. How do you do this? Simple, if you want a worm, dig up that hard concrete and show some mud. Want a snake? Lay down some grass. The game is fairly realistic in the sense that the animals (pinatas) will only visit your garden if you have a suitable habitat for that pinata. Once you get pinatas into your garden, you then have to make them become residents, which is when they change colour. (When they first visit your garden they are just black & white because they are still wild) To do this you have to fill certain objectives. These objectives are what the pinatas want. So for E.G, A Worm will only become a resident if you have a certain amount of mud in your garden. After you have filled these objectives the pinata will turn into its full colour, and this is where the fun really begins.
After you have 2 of the same species and are both residents and you have fulfilled their needs, you can romance them. No this isn't the romance you and i know, but the special pinata romance way - Dancing! Yes the way pinatas mate is by dancing. Each pinata has its own style of dance and music, and they are all very unique and very creative. Once your pinatas have finished their dance, Stardos (Who is a young girl who lives in a mountain) will fly down and deliver your pinata egg that you have just made because of your dancing. Once the egg has hatched the process continues on for every pinata in the game.
Decorating your garden is the highlight of this game and Viva Pinata does not disappoint. You have so many different types of tools, plants and objects to place in your garden, and almost everyone has an effect on your garden. For E.G certain objects can be used to keep certain pinata way, certain plants can be planted to attract various pinatas. You can make your garden looking how ever you want and it is also really fun and rewarding to do, its also really predictable because you never know what will happen if you plant this type of flower in your garden. Graphics in this game are wonderful, while not very technical they are very pretty to look at. Each pinata has a distinct look and is actually made to look like paper. The background looks beautiful and all of the objects and plants look fantastic. Sound in this game is also excellent, especially the voice acting. The music plays nicely in the backgrounFd and never gets repetitive or annoying and the voices of the different characters sound clear and funny (funny in the good way).
Im sure there are some things i have missed in this review, but that is expected since there is so much to see and do in this game that it will keep you busy for weeks and months. I strongly recommend anyone picking this game up because it is one of the best titles on the xbox 360 to date.
