During the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Ubisoft announced Grow Up, a new acrobatic adventure game, and a follow-up of the 2015’s critically acclaimed Grow Home, a title that is a community favourite and was a fan-voted winner of the first ever PlayStation Plus Vote to Play program last year. In Grow Up, players must guide little robot BUD around an entire alien world as he embarks on a dizzying mission that will see him leaping, rolling, bouncing and flying his waythrough a stunning and virtually boundless new open world. Grow Up will be available digitally worldwide on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows PC in August 2016.

This new adventure comes from a small team at Reflections, a Ubisoft studio, who experimented with procedural animation in Grow Home and ended up creating a cute creature named BUD. In Grow Up, while out exploring the galaxy, BUD’s parental spaceship MOM falls to pieces as an unfortunate lunar accident sends her all over the place. Now her ship parts are scattered far and wide across an alien planet so rich in flora and fauna, it would make even the most jaded galactic gardener’s head spin. It’s up to BUD to collect all the parts and get them back to the moon, so he can rebuild MOM and reunite with her once again.

“We wanted to give fans of Grow Home the chance to explore a world where there is no edge, no invisible wall to hit,” said Pete Young, Producer at Reflections, a Ubisoft studio. “We can’t wait for them to join BUD in Grow Up on a fantastical new adventure to the moon.”

Working with new best friend POD, an adorable flying robot who likes planets perhaps a little too much, BUD must use his veritable tool belt of abilities to traverse the planet. Using BUD’s shiny new Floradex, players can put their own stamp on the world by cloning any of the 24 weird and wonderful plant types to catapult, shoot or float through the lush landscape filled with surprise discoveries. With all-new timed challenges, collectibles and abilities, players can tackle their mission head-on or spend time navigating the limitless landscape at their own pace.

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Grow Home’s influences are clearly visible from the get go, with a very Pixar-esque lead character on a heart warming adventure to bring back nature to his world.

You are in control of B.U.D, (Botanical Utility Droid), and your mission is to grow the enormous “Star Plant” to reach floating islands in the sky, collecting the seeds which will allow you to re-oxygenate the world and presumably herald the return of human life. This is done by riding the shoots of this massive plant as they explosively grow outward, B.U.D clinging on and guiding them to his destination.

Graphically the game is gorgeous, its Cel-shaded design palette combined with minimalistic polygons evoke nostalgia for earlier eras of gaming while at the same time it remains polished enough to not feel dated.

The lighting is a standout. It brings the richness of the colours to life.

The graphical style matches perfectly to the child like tone of the game, even your guide through the world is another machine named “M.O.M”. B.U.D emotes through charming blips and bloops, (think some kind of wonderful blend of Wall-e and R2D2) and also through his very motion.

The movement of B.U.D is procedural as opposed to a single fluid animation, the first time you attempt to move will almost certainly result in a hilarious flailing of limbs, like a toned down version of Octodad.

However the difference with this game is that instead of deliberately making moving around nearly impossible, they simply make the motion of B.U.D more meaningful as you must learn to control his quirks to progress.

This is a game where you literally must learn to walk before you can run. The mechanic of climbing is particularly interesting and is handled by individually moving each of B.U.Ds arms, something which sounds incredibly simple but after years of assisted climbing, genuinely takes time to adjust to.

Carefully moving left, right, left, right while dangling from the side of a vine at 2000ft is a great experience as you genuinely may fall, a feeling of jeopardy many platforming games have lost.

While many may start the game with perhaps not much more than a vague sense of interest they will find the bright colours and shapes endearing.

As you progress through the story and your star plant begins to become truly towering, the game showcases an amazing sense of verticality. There is a childish joy evoked in leaping from the branches off your star plant thousands of feet in the air, only to glide safely between islands with your leaf parachute.

Unlockable items give you various ways to navigate the world, giving you incentives to gather all the collectables you can. The collectables in this case take the form of power crystals, which upgrade you with bonus movement options, such a as a jetpack. Yes. There is a jetpack. (Spoiler Alert: It’s amazing).

The game world of Grow Home may not be as huge as the larger open world of high budget projects such as Dragon Age Inquisition, but what I love about this game is what it does with the space that it has.

The sense of scale in all directions is impressive, particularly since you get to experience the game world literally growing around you as you ride the star plant ever higher. Islands floating in the distance challenge you to reach them through inventive leaping and gliding, and even when you make a miscalculation and fall, the game is forgiving enough to avoid frustration.

There are many hidden crystals just out of reach to pull you away from the main story (which is itself perhaps a little on the brief side).  While it has secondary things to achieve, the game is never cluttered with side quests or a huge number of meaningless collectable items, (ala Assassins Creed) and this is a refreshing change.

So much side content in video games is forced down your throat to the point where the joy of discovery is lost, and this is what Grow Home manages to recapture.

While there may not be a huge amount to do in this world, every single thing you can do is enjoyable.   Grow Home is a small but perfectly formed gem of a game, which may not have the greatest replayability in the world but is worth every cent of its asking price and more.

The post Grow Home – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

In Grow Home, players are free to explore the strange open world full of floating islands, majestic caves and waterfalls, all set in a beautiful and minimalist artistic style. Players take on the role of BUD (Botanical Utility Droid), an excitable, child-like robot sent on a mission to search the galaxy for a new species of plant that can oxygenate his home world.

By growing and directing the giant Star Plant into a towering organic sculpture, players reshape the planet and create a magnificent landscape that lets them climb to new heights.

The game’s unique climbing controls and abilities challenge players to continually reach for higher ground – but one wrong move and it’s a long way down!

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