Review: Flowerworks HD

During a routine space trip, Follie’s ship mysteriously malfunctions and crash lands on Elilia, losing all her precious Flowerwork seeds. Before long, her very sanity is threatened by drab surroundings and uncooperative gnomes.

Pros:

• Big bright HD cartoon graphics.
• Detailed tutorial section that explains everything you need to know.
• Two games available:
  • Adventure: Your story mode section where you play through the main game.
  • Quick Play: Just pick a level and difficulty and off you go.
• Choose a name from the list of preset choices.
• Five difficulty settings. Beginner,easy,normal,hard and mastery are available.
• Adventure mode puts you on a huge map where you are free to rroam around, collecting coins and seeds. Areas are locked off by gnomes and you use stars to unlock them. Stars are collected from playing levels. Actual levels are unlcked and show up on the map.
• Off screen play on the Wii U game pad.
•  Has offline co op play in adventure mode and quick play.
• Controls are easy once learned and you have the choice to jump between the sticks and buttons or go with a touch screen and button combo.
• Gameplay evolves around you collecting coloured pollen and shooting it at the corresponding flower to feed it to help it grow. Shooting pollen through other pieces of pollen can cause different effects. You can mix them to create new colours, or you can make fireworks or bubbles to help growth and earn bonus points.
• You can lock onto flowers from distance and switch between them with button presses.
• You can replay levels and improve your scores.
• At the end of levels you get a final score that fills up a gauge that unlocks stars at specific parts.
• Menu is all touch screen.
• Pause the game in to bring up a map,options screen, stats,diary so you know what levels you have done and what your best score and stars found is.
• Game play is fast and frantic.

Cons:

• Tutorial has a help button but in reality it needs to be on the screen at all times as it does a better job of explaining what you need to do.
• When in adventure mode, You don’t always know what is going on and what everything is for. Coins for example.  Pick these up early in game but you have no idea what they do until a lot later.
• No online leader boards.
• Difficulty spikes through out the game.
• Locking onto a flower is flaky and its really easy to unlock from a flower and mess up your run.

In Summary, A re release of a Wiiware game from back in the Wii eshop days, We get an upscaled version. The game play is simple but addictive. A few minor niggles with lock on aside, The game is a lot of fun and does give your brain a good work out. Its a perfect game for a lazy Sunday afternoon session or a good visual distraction for your kids as they dance along to the jumpy soundtrack. If flowers are your thing and you loved those dancing sun flower toys from the 90’s this is the game for you.