Review: Viva Pinata (X360)

Is Rare back to its charming best? You bet!

I have grown up with Rare from the Spectrum beginnings as "Ultimate Play The Game" (Alien8 gamer pic) through to the '360 launch title "Kameo". In my opinion, Viva Pinata restores Rare's credentials for creating quality, simple, challenging but fun games that they pioneered in the Spectrum and Nintendo days. Viva Pinata is the "Blast Corps" of the '360 era.

The basic premise of Viva Pinata is to construct and manage a garden in order to attract and breed wild Pinata. The overall objective is to continually expand and attract bigger and more valuable Pinata to your Pinata Farm.

The core gameplay couldn't be simpler. Find out what the Pinata you want needs and provide it: from fruit and flowers, to other Pinata lower in the food chain. Along the way you encounter "Sour" Pinata, who drop toxic sweats, weeds, and other annoying Visitors. The easiest way to describe Viva Pinata is Theme Park meets the Sims; the sandbox nature of the garden means you spend many enjoyable hours tweaking and designing, whilst trying to get your Pinata to breed or new Pinata to become established. It is great fun.

Each Pinata is a paper-and-sweet version of a real animal, so you have Flutterscotches (butterflies), Raisants (Ants), Lickatoad (Toads) and so on. The game presentation is slick, cute and distinctive and you'd have to be very cold hearted not to love it. Some people have commented that it looks childish, but really the visual style is very appropriate for a game based on Mexican Toys full of sweets.

Young children will enjoy the early game and are unlikely to progress much further, which is quite good as the game can actually get quite violent at higher levels: spade bashing, and Pinatas eating each other. The learning curve is spot on and the game will begin to really challenge you from level 10 onwards.

The graphics are excellent. Everything has a paper texture and looks wonderful, with vibrant colours and some great Pinata animations. If there is a small criticism: the mini-games look a bit naff. The Mexican styling is spot on and the human characters, complete with masks (very Majora) and well drawn and animated.

The game sounds are good, and the voice acting is excellent although a little patronising to begin with. As it is a Rare game there are some good British regional accents in there too and some funny "British-style" names.

I can easily see this game taking up many hours of the Christmas holidays and offers good fun that you can dip in and out off. The ability to send Pinata or other items via Xbox Live is a nice touch although the ability to view other people's gardens would have been nice.

In summary, Viva Pinata is a compelling, addictive and charming game that really demonstrates Rare's pedigree for great games on the '360. Play Viva Pinata and you wont be disappointed.

9/10