Plantera

"Plantera" is an easy game that's probably meant for young kids between 5 and 8. There's no challenge to the game, no violence, no quests, and it's simple to keep up with.

You open in a blank field in front of a river with some butterflies buzzing around, and a little blue creature with a bag on his shoulder. This will be your build area. It's very flat and while you can move side to side, this is your only view.

This is the planting menu. You have only one choice to begin with. When you go to place the vegetable, you'll find you only have specific spots where it can go. Once you place it, it will being to ripen. You can occupy yourself and earn coins by catching butterflies with your net.

There are enemies early on, crows and a pesky mole. You can smack both on the head with a mallet that appears when you roll over the creature. It's very satisfying, and it earns you coins. This is about as violent as the game gets.

When your plant is ripe, your little blue buddy will waddle over and 'hug up' the vegetable. This will add coins to your account and possibly level you up.

Once you level up enough, more items are added to the menu. There are tabs as well to add bushes and trees, and animals, as well as improvements to your farm.

The bushes and trees will drop the fruit when it's ripe and your blue buddy will pick them up. You get more blue friends as the game progresses and you level up. It's quite the crowd later!

The above shows my level 10 farm. You can see it's kind of crowded, but that I'm making decent money.

There are other enemies that appear - bunnies, foxes, and raccoons. The worst any of the enemies does is steal off with a fruit or growl menacingly at your workers. You can combat them with scarecrows and dogs, who will bark and scare away the animals.

You can increase your land by rolling over the arrows, and paying to make it larger. If it's large enough, you will get a button to make you pop from one side to the other, and to the middle. This is very helpful as you increase in level, get more blue buddies, and add animals.

This is from level 36. You can see I have a pile of fruits, vegetables, and animal items all stacked up. While one of my blue friends is coming, I can click on the items to harvest them myself and add the coins to my total. You don't have to wait for them to harvest or hug up vegetables, you can click and do it yourself.

The fourth tab has some great ways to enhance your farm. You can buy dogs to scare off the animals and crows; scarecrows to frighten off the crows when there's no dog around; and you can level up the quality of your harvests by purchasing 'manure'. You can also add to the time your little friends harvest while you aren't actively playing the game. That's right! You can make money when you're not even playing!

In the shot above, I was only level 14, and I had closed the game for the night. When I returned the next day - I'd made thousands of coins! And you can increase the time the harvesters work when the game is offline by paying out for the alarm clock.

You can reset the game anytime you like, but you can only have one user playing at any time. There's no allowance for multiple people in the same household to play it. If you have two kids, only one could be playing this game. Until they were done or bored with the game, another person can't play it without wiping out all that had been built.

As a mature adult, this game is really boring really quickly. There are Steam achievements, but you have to grind through a lot of hours to reach them. I do think that this would be great for a younger child, or even a child starting out on the computer. It's pretty simple mouse-clicks and the game doesn't allow for a lot of deviation (you can't put things where you want them, only where they go.) It's not violent at all, the harvests never rot or fail, and the music is upbeat if repetitive.

Overall, it's a good little chill game with cute graphics and an easy manner about it. It's not bad, but it's not exactly exciting either.