Grow Home: Review

The regiment of charming heroes of the video game arrived. Meet, b.U.D. – Robot and real botanist. His name is deciphered – Botanical Utility Droid. Its main task is to collect plants and their seeds throughout the galaxy. It is for this purpose that a spaceship m.O.M. (that is, “m.A.M.A.”) Plants it on the surface of the green planet Star Plant. But this is not a simple robotobatic expedition: life

in the native world of our droid depends on its success.

Entertaining botany

To achieve your goal, b.U.D. must literally grow a huge flower-from the surface right to the side of the “mother”, which hung somewhere behind the clouds. To do this, you have to climb right through the stems, find the branches and, let’s say, activate them: then the branch begins to grow rapidly, wriggling in different directions, and the robot, sitting on horseback, should control it and direct it right into one of the huge life -giving lifedispute. It saturates our flower juice. Only “fertilizing” all the disputes in this way, we will eventually receive several cherished seeds that the main character and his “mother” need so much.

In addition, b.U.D. All the way collects special crystals. A certain amount of them gives him new abilities or “pumps” the old. This is primarily about jetpack and the ability to strengthen its power. When you climb somewhere very high, it is clear that you can’t do without such a device. Also, if our mechanized botanist falls, and he needs, for example, planned from a branch to a branch, you can use a parachute, which is a dandelion of …

You still have to fall. B.U.D. Even able to break. In this case, it will be revived on one of the teleports, which first also need to be found and activated.

Drunk climbing

All this funny botanical mechanics in itself looks unusual and interesting, but developers from Ivory Tower And Ubisoft Reflections We didn’t stop there. Even more unusual is that our b moves.U.D. Like a drunkard. That is, it staggers, falls, folds in different directions and at different angles. The fact is that the protagonist is absolutely “ragdiland”: all his animation is calculated in real time according to the laws of physics. And we have to point his movements pointily.

When the droid climbs through huge stems or rocks, we must control each of his metal arm, alternately throwing them out and clutching in the right direction. In addition, you can and should hold on to the surface of a nearby surface when you fall from a height. Finally, this is how, clutching and pulling, we collect dandelions, crystals and activate teleports.

It is clear that management in Grow Home, To put it mildly, not the simplest. And if you, for example, do not have a gamepad, in some places the passage resembles a real torture: the “drunk” robot constantly strives to fall off, miss, we again and again climb the same stem, and from alternate movements the hand starts to hurt.

VALL-I in the forest

Nevertheless, it is difficult to tear yourself away from the game. The main reason is the charm of our mechanized botanist and the world itself, implemented in Grow Home. He is procedurally generated, bright, somewhere even surreal, completely interactive and alive. Huge plants, mushrooms, carrots and cacti under the feet, some islands hanging in the air and just large stones with the same large and small flora-all this is created on the fly, you can touch everything and get to everything if you wish.

And everything needs to be used for their own purposes: jump on mushrooms and large leaves, pull out the same carrots to find a secret place, ride on real -time branches, as on an elevator. And even use special large stems as a catapult – you need to delay them as much as possible and then let go in order to fly up with a squeal.

Well, in general, bribes the general charm of what is happening. Butterflies fly around, frog-shaped sheep and cows roam somewhere (yes, there is a fauna here), which, to their horror, can accidentally teleport with you. And in the middle of all this b.U.D. Flies on a dandelion, watching how the petals gradually fall off from each other – when the latter disappears, our hero crashes down.

As a result, Ubisoft It turned out a sort of scalolala simulator inspired by Vall-I and Hitchhiking in the Galaxy. A mass of different epithets can be applied to the game: “charming”, “experimental”, “bright” and “complex”, but the main “delaying” will be the main. It is difficult to play this platformer, but it’s even harder to break away from it.

Pros: charismatic main character;unusual gameplay;procedurally generated, completely interactive, living world;the general charm of what is happening;Bright, juicy picture.
Cons: complex and not always convenient management;There are some technical flaws.