Plant Tycoon Review

Maybe it’s the exhilarating lifestyle of tending to plants, the way the plants almost smile at you when doing a good job or it’s the satisfaction you’re doing the world some good by helping the environment. One of those must be the reason I have fallen in love with this game. Being that none of those things are true, I need to come up with another reason this game took hours away from my sometimes-busy life.

Plant Tycoon starts slowly but soon snowballs into something great. The game tells a story of 4 magic plants that need to be discovered. Your job is to discover them. To create new types of plants you will need to plant, grow, pollinate and then sell them to get money to start over again. It sounds like a tedious process and may be at times, but it’s strangely fun.

The game is run mainly from the home screen. From here you can grow, pollinate, sell, etc. Also from the main screen you can go to your seed inventory, where your pollinated plants seeds go to and are organized, the shop, where you buy materials for making new breeds of plants are keeping your existing plants healthy, and your nursery, where you sell your plants.

Decision-making is what I believe makes this game enjoyable. The seed tray only has a limited amount of slots, so the seeds have to be micromanaged. There is only 15 pots available for planting so you can’t just plant whatever feels good, you have to grow plants that will be profitable and beneficial to your evolutionary agenda. Plants also have a suggested price automatically, but this can be changed to bring in a few extra dollars each sale, but if the price is raised too much your plant won’t sell and the price will have to be brought down in price and valuable time will have been lost.

The graphics don’t jump off the screen but they do the job intended wonderfully. There seems to be an unlimited combination of plants available to grow, and each one is displayed beautifully. Also, the nursery has some nice graphical touches, like people wandering around and a fountain in the middle. There isn’t much sound in Plant Tycoon, but the lack of sound didn’t really bother me, actually, it didn’t affect my gameplay experience in the slightest.

I’ve taken some harsh criticism over the past week or so playing Plant Tycoon, but it’s been well worth it. If a game is making me sneak away from work and reach over for my Palm the first second I wake up to check on my plants, it obviously has me hooked. Great job, LDW, I can’t wait for your next release.