Written by Bernard Julius Paje and Mika Sora Paje
Title: Plantera Deluxe
Developer: VaragtP Studios
Publisher: Ratalaika Games
Price: $4.99
Genre: Simulation, Strategy
Also Available On: 3DS, PSVita, WiiU
Plantera DX is an “idle clicker” game that originally came out for mobile devices. For the uninitiated, idle clicker games (also known as incremental or clicker games) are games where the main gameplay objective is for the player to perform simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly to progress or earn experience/currency. The objective of Plantera DX is pretty simple: Grow a garden by filling if up with fruit trees, vegetable bushes and livestock while making sure to keep pests and critters away. You start out with a small garden, with just a handful of fruit, vegetable and animal types available for purchase. Your main goal is to slowly expand your garden and build the garden of your dreams. When items are ready for harvesting, you do so by simply tapping it via the Switch’s touchscreen. Traditional controls are also available but feels very clunky and unnatural, so it is highly recommended to just play this game with the Switch undocked but with both Joy-con still attached—we will explain why later.
As you expand your garden and level up, it will be a lot harder to just play the game by clicking ad infinitum—the game will get old real fast and you will get sore fingers. Thankfully, that’s where blue garden helpers and the game’s idle clicker mechanics come into play. Everytime you expand your garden and sometimes when you level up, the game awards you with helpers that assist with harvesting items. These guys will walk back and forth and pick up any items they (come across). Of course, manual clicking is still the fastest way to harvest items because these blue guys can be kind of slow at times. You start with just a handful of helpers, but as you progress though the game you will eventually have dozens of them.
Blue garden helpers will also work overtime for you whenever you are idle and exit the game. Initially, they will harvest items for you for an hour while you are away from the game, but you can upgrade this time cap by increments of one hour as you progress. This is one of the most important things to level up because you will essentially get double the profits after every upgrade. Additionally, you can also level up your profit multiplier, and hand-in-hand with the previously mentioned upgrade this one will make your profits skyrocket while you play other games on your Switch or do other stuff.
While you personally tend to your garden and do not leave your garden in an idle state, wild animals like rabbits, wolves and crows can take your fruits and vegetables. They will also scare your animals and get your crops, making the gardening experience of Plantera DX kind of close to realistic in a sense—you have to actually manage and take care of your garden too. You can get the aid of guard dogs to protect against foxes and wolves as well as scarecrows to, uh, scare crows, so you do not always really have to micromanage everything in your garden all the time. The amount of upgrading anything or getting another one of something always increases in cost substantially though, so the idle clicker mechanics will definitely come into play if you want to get more money to upgrade your garden.
The game is available on the Nintendo Switch for a flat $4.99 price tag, which is well worth the price in our opinion. Compared to getting this for free on mobile devices and then paying nickel and dime for in-app purchases to speed things up, we definitely think that the Switch version is the best way to go if you want to fully enjoy this game. The additional controls that the Switch offers is pretty clunky though, because while you can use the analog sticks and buttons of the Joy-Con to tend to your garden you will most likely still prefer to interact with your garden via the Switch's touchscreen in handheld mode. Having the Joy-Con handy will kind of help a little bit though, because it will make going to the menu and scrolling the screen a little bit easier. Some Joy-Con buttons are also set to map to a certain area of your garden, enabling you to go to 'hot spots' of your garden with the press of a button.
Plantera DX's cartoony graphics are also very bright and cutely animated. Some things may be hard to differentiate in the heat of action at times though, like eggs from chickens and wool from sheep—why they made the eggs shaped into circles, we have no idea! When the screen is super packed with fruit, vegetables, eggs, horseshoes and critters it can be tough to distinguish them at times, so you have to be very careful when you want to get rid of a lower level item to make room for better ones—most of the time you end up selecting (and deleting) something else.
Overall, Plantera DX is a fun, little time waster that is designed primarily to be played in between your other games. It is super perfect for bite-sized gaming sessions because you can just play it for 5-10 minutes, switch to another game and then return after a few hours to collect your garden's earnings. We think that it is an excellent game that you can play at the end of a busy day to relax and relieve stress. The game's super cheap price tag also makes getting this a no-brainer, and it is a perfect game for kids and casual gamers to pass the time.
As kids today say—my nine year old daughter included—this game is lit!
YAY!
- Great game to play in between your other game sessions.
- Getting a lot of earnings after leaving your already upgraded garden idle feels so satisfying.
- Tending to a virtual garden is pretty fun, and is a great stress reliever.
NAY!
- The Switch's extra control options are pretty clunky.
- Once you have a lot of things going on in your garden, micromanagement can be a bit rough.
- Gamers or kids with short attention spans might lose interest in this game pretty quickly.
REVIEW SCORE: 8/10
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