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OFFICIAL Grow Home (Review)

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Introduction


Grow Home, is what I can only describe as a platformer/explorer game. It’s been created rather quietly by a studio called Reflections, which apparently operate under Ubisoft, and has been published under Ubisoft. The game is another of Ubi’s indie titles that’s been developed in Unity, and has very quickly gained critical acclaim. I’ve always been particularly confused about how Ubi can do so well with small Indie titles, and yet fail catastrophically with the much larger titles with near infinite budgets. On first glance, I wrote Grow Home off as a game that “wasn’t for me”, entirely based upon the title and initial art style in the screen shots. I decided that since Ubi’s previous Indie titles have tickled me in the past, I’d put on my big boy pants and power through this, and see just what all the fuss was about.

Storyline

You play B.U.D., a small (somewhat dense) robot that has been travelling through space to find a planet with a particular space plant. This space plant creates space seeds when grown, which you are then tasked to grow and eventually collect all the seeds. Along the way, M.O.M., the person tasking you with this mission of great importance, will set you various other tasks of collecting crystals, and scanning the living organisms on the planet you’ve landed on, while you’re not busy flying around, skydiving, and growing space plants. The premise is simple, but it’s certainly enough to set you on your way.



Gameplay

The game starts off with a cutscene of B.U.D. arriving in the upper atmosphere of the planet, and getting teleported down to the surface. After a tutorial that essentially spans the entire ground level of the map and a few bits above, you’re already equipped to complete the game. The first thing you do is collect crystals, as at this point you don’t have a jetpack. You learn the essentials of climbing and how to collect crystals almost immediately. You aren’t necessarily told to do anything specific other than head over to the plant, but this ground area is where you start to learn the main objectives of the game. You’ll first mostly likely notice the deactivated red teleporter in the sand, so you wander on over and pull down the landing pads. These red router’s are where you teleport around the map, but they’re also used to scan in the life on the planet. You can’t teleport to any particular router without having activated it first, but they’re essentially waypoints if you find yourself falling off a rather high section, so they come in handy if you don’t want to climb all the way back up again.

Scanning in the life fills up your rather small databank with more detailed information on the life. You generally grab anything that moves with both hands and drag it onto the teleporter for scanning. Sheep have a tendency to run in the opposite direction, so be prepared for a sheep chase. Plants are less stubborn, so all you have to do is drag it to the nearest of 8 total teleporters. You can’t scan in anything that’s been destroyed, either by fall damage or drowning however. This means if you accidentally-on-purpose dropped a poor innocent dodo from the stratosphere, only to find its parts washed up on the beach, you won’t be able to fill in that entry on the databank by dragging two of its eyeballs to the teleporter. Trust me, I’ve tried. Usually the animals accidentally fall off the map once you’ve grabbed them once and put them into a blind panic, so be prepared to find others or reload the map. Once you’ve scanned in all the living things on the planet, you unlock yourself a nice new skin for B.U.D.



The main objective in the game is to grow the starplant to the very top of the map, directly next to your space ship. This is done by climbing the main “neck”, and latching yourself onto one of the offshoots. Once you’re there, you kick it into growing action, and aim it towards a floating piece of rock with space plant-juice in it (these are signified with giant glowing green textures). Not all shoots will grow far enough to reach the rocks at the higher levels, but each shoot grows two or three additional shoots, as well as some leaves which can be used to bounce incredibly high off of. Once you’ve ridden the shoot to the rock, the main space plant grows further into the air, allowing you to explore a new level of the planet seamlessly. Obviously this task gets progressively more difficult the further up you get, but not too much of a gargantuan task. This general objective can be made easier with a couple of additional things in game, which for me, made it as fun as it is.

Collecting crystals at first won’t do much other than fill a percentage meter at the top of your screen. As you collect more and more crystals, you will first unlock a very simple jetpack, which will then upgrade in 3 stages to a much more useful and powerful item. Collecting more crystals makes the jetpack more powerful over time, although its energy consumption is extremely quick, and refuels much slower. There are a total of 101 crystals to collect across the map, and collecting them all doesn’t do much besides ensure your jetpack is as good as it can be, and awarding you with a Steam achievement. Besides the jetpack, you also have two other items available that you pick up across the map. The first that you’ll come by is the daisy, which is essentially a parachute. The daisy doesn’t last forever though, and once all the petals fall off, the daisy is consumed. It allows you to fall extremely slowly, and move in any direction horizontally quite briskly. The other item, the leaf, is a huge part of the experience of Grow Home. The leaf is not consumed at any stage, but hitting any surface without putting away the leaf first will make you drop it. The leaf acts as a massively overpowered paraglider, and allows you to pretty much cross the entire breadth of the map without losing too much height. Obviously it follows a loose sense of aerodynamics, in that you have to swoop to gain speed, and ascending will cause you to lose speed. It got to the point where the daisy became irrelevant to me, and I spent most of my time exploring by gliding from point to point with the leaf.

It’s a beautiful experience.



Once you’ve grow the space plant to the stratosphere, it produces space seeds, which you scan in. Once scanned, the credits roll, but that’s not the end of the game. After the credits finish, you must collect all eight of the space seeds and teleport them back home. Beyond this, the rest of your gameplay options are to finish collecting and scanning in everything, grab all your steam achievements if you’re desperate for them, and maybe just have a little fun sky diving. It’s a wonderfully quaint and simplistic game, and it gets an otherwise serious adult to play around as if they were a childlike robot on a new planet.

Controls

The controls are wonderfully simplistic, and surprisingly well chosen to make you feel the action your little robot is doing. Movement is your usual ‘W’A’S’D’, and climbing (an activity you’re liable to get very much used to) is done with Left and Right Click. Left click grabs things with the Left hand, and Right Click grabs things with the right. You have to have small highlights over a flat surface showing the hand symbol; otherwise clicking isn’t going to grab anything at all. Space is jump, but holding Space after a jump will initiate the jetpack (once unlocked). ‘C’ zooms out the camera a fair amount, although there’s quite a lack of camera controls. It’s either very close third person, or extremely zoomed out, there’s very little middle ground. ‘F’ deploys whichever utility you have collected, either a daisy, or the gliding leaf. ‘E’ will activate the shoots off of the space plant, which you then control (extremely badly) with ‘W’A’S’D’ again. That’s pretty much it. For your first thirty minutes there will be a huge amount of climbing, but for the final six or so hours, you’ll be flying a great deal.



Video Settings

We’re a bit limited in this department, although in this case it’s understandable. Grow home is a hugely plain game graphically, and quality settings only really affect jaggies and shadows, as well as the finer textured objects. Thankfully we do have a VSync option, and no nasty frame caps either. Beyond that, all we have is basic quality levels and resolution control. High settings aren’t particularly taxing, so I imagine most users will have that set automatically, and because of the nature of the game, the polygon count on models doesn’t matter a huge deal. It does very well with what it has available to it.



System Performance

CPU: i5 4670 (Stock)
GPU: MSI GTX 970 (Stock)
RAM: 16GB 2133mhz
Storage: WD 1TB 7200RPM
Display: 2560 x 1440

The game runs well to the extreme. While I understand it’s not the most visually taxing game in all existence, I was surprised at how well it deals with the immense physics-y nature of many of the in game assets. Another great thing was that there was zero tearing with VSync off, because no matter how sudden physics was brought on, the FPS was largely solid. Overall, the game ran so well that I seriously did not pay attention to system performance, I was too side tracked dragging dodo’s to their untimely death 1KM below in a sea of prior animal burials. All in all it performed exceptionally well, is delightfully optimised, and it would surprise me to find anyone that couldn’t run it. Unless they were running a Pentium4 system…

1440p

1080p

Recommended Hardware

Neither resolution particularly taxed the GPU to within an inch of its life, and both resolutions kept to a menial 35% CPU usage. Grow Home is one of those games that’s largely ideal for low end steam machines. It has the controller mapped keys, and a super low performance requirement for high resolutions. The VRAM doesn’t come close to 1GB usage, so for this game you’re looking at the lower level GPU’s, or even just a modern Haswel iGPU. I imagine Intel’s new HD 6000 would run this game happily all by itself given 512/768MB of system memory. Processor usage again requires no more than a midrange dual core, the Haswell Pentium’s, or the newer G3258 would be an ideal ground to work from. Even one of AMD’s midrange APU’s, like the 6600k/6800K would probably be an ideal candidate for this kind of game at 1080@60p. You get so many frames from such little hardware, most modern domestic PC’s would run this without a hitch.



Conclusion

It always puzzles me at how badly Ubisoft AAA games turn out, when they’re clearly capable of supporting a much smaller studio with huge successes. Child of Light is one example along with Grow Home, and I can only assume that with a decent timescale, correct funding, a sensibly sized team, coupled with a reasonably hands off approach to publishing this game is the reason why these games turn out so successful. Not just successful from a sales standpoint either, because the games are actually good, and priced extremely competitively. For the cost, the gameplay hours are more certainly at an excellent $/hour. I don’t think they could have gotten away with charging a cent more, as you’re essentially stuck on a single map, and that’s my major gripe with this game.

The movement, performance, art style and just about everything about the game is truly a mile above par. There’s no combat, but it doesn’t matter. The life on the map is entertaining and interesting, and has struck quite a following (particularly the manhandling of sheep). There’s nothing quite as refreshing as getting to the top of the map after a couple of hours, and then spending your evening skydiving and gliding around to take in the sights. Or even doing the exact same thing, but with an innocent sheep clasped between your claws that’s been forced to join the ride. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not so much for you, or the sheep, or both. But it’s one of those things that every player just seems to end up doing. While the map is truly beautiful, and the content on said map is there, the thing the game really needs is some sort of additional maps or map generation.



The one and only map has plenty of things to do. Grow the star plant, scan all living organisms, and collect all the crystals. That alone, with some sightseeing mixed in, is a good eight hours of gameplay depending on how much time you waste on slingshotting across the map. I feel like the devs missed an opportunity to add some extra alternative maps, with the same objectives, just to provide some kind of variation and replay-ability. Alternatively, a random map generation each new game would provide ample reason for players to come back to the game any time for a blast of entertainment. For its cost, the content that is already there makes this game one of the best priced indie titles out there. I simply cannot complain about the hours of entertainment I had for the price. It’s a brilliant game, developed extremely well, and ideal for just about everyone that is curious at the sight of some actual gameplay footage.

Grow Home is available on Steam for £5.99/$7.99

 
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I like this game :)

should note this game does not support UPlay.
 
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