Planted! Review – Grow Fast or Go Home

Farming games, as far as I know, usually serve to calm our nerves and help us relax. You plant some seeds, water them, wait for them to grow and enjoy a quiet evening on your farm. Planted! has other plans. Instead of soothing you after a stressful day at work or at school, it takes the farming formula and turns it into a sport, where every carrot counts, no matter how small or insignificant it might look, and where you work against the clock all the time.

I played Planted! on PlayStation 5, and while the idea seemed promising, two things kept getting in the way of the fun the whole time: the constant time pressure and the poor performance.

AltChar

This is the calm farming life Planted! promises at first, and it lasts about as long as the opening cutscene.

Competitive Gardening Is Serious Business

Planted! is first and foremost a party game, but it also has a separate story mode for those who prefer to play alone. I was never one for multiplayer games, so if a game has any sort of single-player mode, I always play that first. Planted! drops you into the tense world of competitive gardening, where growing the biggest vegetables is a matter of pride, and your rivals will do anything to beat you.

The campaign takes you through nine locations, each with its own set of challenges and a boss fight to wrap everything up. There is no spoken language in the game. All dialogue is written, so the story is told through text between the levels.

Do not expect a deep plot here. The story is there mostly to give you a reason to move from one arena to the next and to teach you the skills you will later use in multiplayer. For a game about throwing vegetables, I cannot say I was looking for anything more.

AltChar

With no spoken lines, the story is told through text bubbles, and sometimes, a nervous “...” says it all.

Sow, Grow, Throw

The gameplay loop is very simple. You move around isometric arenas, pick things up by pressing the cross button and throw them with the circle button. That is pretty much it when it comes to controls, and anyone can learn them in a minute. You can also jump over obstacles, but jumping is so unreliable and imprecise that I had to repeat jumps over and over, and I was slowly starting to lose it. It is so clumsy that you often cannot land on a simple crate. Jumping matters because some items are placed on higher ground, so you will have to master it.

Imprecise controls can easily ruin your experience, because the game depends a lot on precise movement and fast reactions. In essence, the gameplay loop goes like this: first, you use different tools, like spades that are conveniently lying around, to prepare the soil patches. Then you plant the seeds, grab a water bucket and water the plants until the vegetables grow. If you run out of water, you have to throw the bucket into the river to refill it. Once the veggies are fully grown, you pick them up and throw them onto the truck to earn money. The faster and more stylishly you do it, the more you earn.

Throwing is also badly designed. To throw items farther, you have to hold the circle button longer, but there is no indicator showing how strong the throw will be, and the isometric view does not give you a clear aiming path. Expect to miss your targets by a wide margin all the time.

AltChar

Landing on a crate like this sounds simple, but imprecise jumping turns it into a test of patience.

When it comes to growing veggies, there is also some strategy involved. You can use fertiliser to grow giant crops that are worth more points, steal produce from your opponents or grab power-ups to get ahead. The arenas also throw hazards your way, from spud turrets to weed bombs, so you are always on the move.

My biggest problem with Planted! is the time pressure. Every round is a race against the clock, and there is never a moment to breathe. I understand that this is the whole point of a competitive party game, but I would have liked an option to play at a slower pace, at least in the story mode. For me, farming and stress just do not belong in the same sentence, and I definitely expected something completely different from Planted!

Where Planted! makes the most sense is multiplayer (provided you like it, of course). Up to four players can join locally or online, with cross-play between PC and consoles, and you can pick from a cast of 12 quirky characters. This is where the game finally clicks. I tried several matches with random players online, and even though I was obliterated every time, it was kind of fun.

AltChar

The clock is always ticking, and even a good harvest rarely feels relaxed.

Bright Gardens, Quiet Sounds

The game is played from an isometric view, and the eight multiplayer arenas make it visually interesting and quite varied. You will plant crops on a regular allotment but also on top of a volcano, on crumbling mountainsides and on farmyards that are not quite as normal as they look. Each arena has its own twists, so you have to adjust your tactics.

Cloth Cat Games is also an animation studio, and that shows in the character design, as each gardener has their own personality and style. The characters are well designed and very detailed. The art style leans towards a cartoonish look, which gives the game a light-hearted tone that suits the genre perfectly.

AltChar

From quiet allotments to a lava-filled volcano, the arenas bring plenty of variety.

Sounds are nothing spectacular. The music and effects do their job without standing out, and since there is no spoken dialogue, everything you need to know comes from text on the screen.

Performance, on the other hand, is where Planted! has a serious problem, and one that has to be addressed as soon as possible. On the standard PlayStation 5, where I played the game, it performed quite badly, and the frame rate was inconsistent the whole time, often dropping below 30 FPS. For a game that is all about speed and quick reactions, this is a big problem.

I went looking for a performance or fidelity mode to check whether the game was set to maximum detail by default, but there is none. The harsh truth is that Planted! is simply a very badly optimised game. For an isometric party game like this, I expected it to run much better.

AltChar

Bright, cartoonish and full of character, Planted! looks the part, even when the frame rate struggles to keep up.

Conclusion

Planted! has a fun idea at its core. Turning farming into a competitive sport is fresh, and the simple controls mean anyone can join in within minutes. The arenas are varied, and the power-ups and hazards keep each round lively.

However, the constant time pressure will not suit everyone, and the poor performance on PS5 is hard to ignore. Until a patch fixes the frame rate, Planted! is a game I can only recommend to those who plan to play it with friends and can live with its technical problems.