I have to start this out saying that I want to love Planted! I am a big fan of multiplayer madness, and when I had previously played the demo at events, I had a lot of fun stealing people’s vegetables and cashing them in for prizes. But, there was a bit of a different vibe when the game released and could be played at home.
You see, I had been looking forward to playing Planted! with Robin – our 10 year old who loves multiplayer party gaming with her mates. When it came out, I downloaded it as soon as possible, however, something was different.
Planted! has two modes; a story-based mode with a tutorial and a multiplayer verses mode. When we went to play the multiplayer mode, we realized that while you can play with up to four players, each one of them needs their own user account to play. You can’t just log in players as guests, as you can with a lot of other games. This means that we just cannot play multiplayer together. We thought that’s fine, we will play the main game instead then, taking turns.
Unlike the versions of Planted! that I had previously played at events, this was more of a big mini-game version of the game, where you aren’t always planting anything. There are some levels where you are platforming around things that are shooting at you, others where you are doing a Frogger-style jumping across a river of moving logs, and some where you are actually planting and growing for money – but it’s far and few between.
These individual mini-games are actually extremely unforgiving. It’s not a game that a 10 year old can easily play, especially in the amount of time needed to score a medal at the end. There was one platforming level with a golden carrot that took me trying (and giving up), Robin trying (and giving up) and then Dann trying (and beating it, after half-a-dozen tries) before we moved onto another, equally as difficult game. There’s something about the jump button being Y and the weird screen jerking that just feels off. Going through so many of the other mini games does make it hard to remember the keys for the actual planting style battles, and often the enemies are so difficult – stealing all the time, growing so fast – and you are just left fumbling.
Which is a real shame as Planted! has a lot of the polish that you’d love in a fun game. The bits of story in the story mode – your character accidentally entering a sort of Olympics of growing while looking for their lost carrot – is a lot of fun. I feel like this could be such a good game if they didn’t try to bulk it out, and had instead had the game playtested for balance and approachability by humans who had not worked on it, to explain these issues. There is plenty of content in Planted!, and maybe in the future local multiplayer will be able to be played with fewer than four logged-in people, which would really add to the game.
Planted! is out now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC.
