Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise

By Erin Bell

I was a big fan of the original Viva Piñata, a family-friendly yet richly complex game where players raise cute and colourful animal-shaped piñatas in a realistic ecosystem.

Developed by Rare and published by Microsoft Game Studios, the sequel — Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise — delivers more of the same with some cool new twists.

Viva Piñata basics

The key to attracting and raising healthy piñatas is to maintain a diverse garden. Plant vegetables, fruit trees and flowers, build fences and houses, and lay down surfaces that piñatas might appreciate such as water, grass, sand and even snow.

If the conditions are just right, piñatas will appear. If the conditions suit their specific needs, they’ll stay. You never know: you might even be able to persuade two piñatas to “romance” and have a baby!

Players use the Xbox 360 controller to move around the garden and click on objects and piñatas to interact with them.

What’s new?

Thirty-two new piñata species have been added to the 70 existing ones, a Fun mode lets you build a garden stress-free at your own pace, and at any time a second player can grab a controller and join in to help you out.

There’s also a new way to get piñatas to your garden. Print off cards with special barcodes and scan them with the Xbox LIVE Vision camera to make the piñata on the card appear in your game.

Players who enjoy challenging simulations with a high cuteness factor should get a kick out of Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise.