Review: Finoa's Flowers: Money Does Grow On Trees!
by Allan Curtis
November 29, 2010
Overview
There's a lot to be said for the charm of gardening. The sun on your back, life springing from the ground. Seas of roses dancing in the breeze, their resplendent blooms adorned with sparkling dewdrops. As whimsical as gardening is, like most things it can be improved with the addition of both trophies and money. Luckily, Fiona's Flowers takes care of this, giving you the chance to cultivate pretty flowers in a competition and sell them for fun and profit!Features
Fiona's Flowers features a long story mode with an actual story, told though voice acted cutscenes and fun gameplay. It features Crystal support for achievements.The Good
In Fiona's Flowers you take control of Fiona, a keen gardener with a mysterious past. Her goal is to win the annual flower show and its your job to help her. To do this you must grow your flowers, care for them and create new genus to gain access to new flower types.
Fiona's Flowers starts off very simple. You just dig a plot for your flowers, plant your seeds, and a few seconds later you can harvest a armload of blooms to sell from your storage shed. As you advance though the game however, new gameplay elements are constantly introduced to keep you on your toes.
First you have to care for your flowers. When you plant them you can prune them so they are worth more, add topsoil to further enhance their value and certain ones also need to be watered to grow or be sprayed with pesticide if they come under attack by pests. You must also constantly harvest flowers to sell them to make money and customers also order certain flowers, pruned or unpruned, so you need to grow a varied crop and expand your garden to cater for them.
As you fulfill customer orders you may also receive formulas to use with your cross pollination machine. Putting the right plants in this unlocks more species of plants to grow in your garden. It doesn't stop with flowers either. You can also place beehives, grapevines, ovens and fruit dryers among other objects to make food to sell for extra cash and for customers.
A neat addition to the game is that Fiona moves faster the more tasks she completes in a row. This encourages you to queue up huge queues of tasks and plan ahead for what might need to be done and the time frame in which you need to do it. Like say you might queue of 6 planting jobs, two pruning jobs and 2 watering jobs, but you need to make sure you can complete the planting jobs before its too late to prune something or you'll lose all your momentum. Speed is a huge part of playing the game well so this sort of reward for planning well really adds to the game's feel.
As you move on in the game you'll eventually find yourself managing a venerable factory load of items, cranking out food and flowers by the truckload. This complex, but fluid gameplay is helped greatly by excellent touch controls. You simply touch to interact with anything without unnecessary interface buttons and the game is smart enough to know what tool you need without having to tap the associated tool first. The controls never slip up, which is good, as you'll need to make every movement count later in the game.
Fiona's Flowers is very addictive. The game is dead simple to play and yet constantly introduces new wrinkles into the gameplay for you to get your head around, making it a compelling experience that encourages you to play more to see what new element will be added next. The game's narrative also helps to push you though the game and gives it a structured feeling.
FF looks great. The gardens look lush and vibrant,bursting with colors and its very easy to tell flowers apart at a glance. It also features some nice effects for the plants, and item use. Soudnwise FF is excellent. Full of birdsong, wind and other sounds you'd expect to hear in the garden, interspersed with sounds of water, cooking and other suitably earthy sounds, making for an immersive experience. The game's music is also excellent, the soft piano tunes perfectly suiting the calm atmosphere of a flower garden.
