Garden Clicking – Plantera Review

Continuing my journey through the theme of games that are perfect for impulse purchase on the cheap and casual in nature, this week, I’m bringing Plantera to light. Plantera is a farming clicker indie title by developer VaragtP and is available on Steam for $2.99. (On a side note, it is currently available as part of the Humble CLickteam Fusion Bundle until October 11th 2016.)

As you start the game, you are greeted with a sleeping creature surrounded by a small farm. As soon as you click, you wake it up and realize it was just a dream. How dare you wake it up from such a peaceful dream! Now, it’s your job to get the garden going again! The blue creature is going to be your helper through your trek into building up the garden again, aiding you in the gathering of all the veggies, fruits and animal products you desire to have on your plantation.

As you start, you are limited to clicking on butterflies to generate income, just enough to get going and get carrots. Once you plant and start generating income, you start leveling up. The higher you level up, the more becomes available and the more you can plant. Simple and straight forward. The variety of plants and animals is limited as you can see below but each of the trees, shrubs and animals look quite distinct and animals do have their own sound effects associated with them, making it easy to figure out which animal produced an item if you have a variety.

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The more you level up and expand, the more helpers you get to assist in managing the grounds. They are quite useful as after you get things going, you will have to deal with pesky animals trying to ruin your fun. Foxes will come and scare your livestock, rabbits will come devour your vegetables and magpies will swoop in to steal your hard earned produce. If you generate enough income to afford spending a few extra dollars on upgrades, you can get guards dogs to deal with them and scarecrows to deal specifically with the magpies. The biggest issue I’ve seen with the dogs is that they patrol and often end up all botched together on one side of the map, leaving the other side completely open.

As far as game play goes, all you have to do is set it and forget it really. You can click on veggies and fruits to gather them or just let your helpers do all of that. It surely goes quicker if you take an active hand into helping out but that’s optional. The game even plays itself for a while after you close the application, and can be extended by purchasing extra hours of gathering.

What really hooked me is the graphic and audio of this title. The graphics are simple, pleasing to the eye and I just can’t resist a cute round chicken that does the “n_n” face after laying an egg, it looks just so happy and pleased. The background music for this game is soothing and relaxing with the only down side that you can’t lower it and, in my opinion, is just way too loud to keep turned on the whole time. Even while writing this review, I found myself listening to the video I recorded of this game, just listening to the sound of money being generated, chicken laying eggs and pest getting crushed by my mighty clicks.

If you wish to see how the game plays, feel free to view the video below: