Flowerworks HD: Follie's Adventure review

The 1990s called, they want their game back

Review written by
Mark Labbe

May 28th, 2014

Looking at the screenshots for the Wii U eShop game Flowerworks HD: Follie's Adventure, you can probably tell that it might not be the greatest game. Whether it is because of the cheesy graphics or the silly way it presents itself, you can tell something is off about this game. And you might be right in thinking that.

Flowerworks HD: Follie's Adventure is a game that plays as if it was slapped together in the course of a day. When the game loads, it gives you two options of play: Adventure or Quick Play. To be honest, they both are about the same, only Quick Play doesn't try to give the illusion that there will be an "adventure" involved.

Of course, I did not know this when I started the game, and I assumed Adventure would be... well... an adventure! The Adventure mode starts you out with a video, explaining that Follie, your character, is visiting her aunt in a spaceship because her planet is too overcrowded to make a garden, and presumably her aunt's house has some room to garden. Anyway, similar to the Wii U game Pikmin 3, the spaceship crashes on some unknown planet.

The gameplay starts directly after this, and you find yourself on a somewhat large over-world with extremely cheesy graphics. Your first thought may be that you crashed landed your ship back into the 1990s, but this is actually not the case. Instead, you are on some type of gardening world in which you must plant seeds in order to go on to the next area. I don't know how that works, or why it works like that, but apparently by planting seeds you build up "star power," which can be used to get past a goofy looking gardening gnome that blocks your way to the rest of the planet.

In order to plant the seed, Follie must enter a glowing ring of light, which will start a mini-game. It is important to note that moving around the over-world is a huge pain, as the game only features eight-directional movement. For those of you who don't know what the means, basically it is an extremely limited and outdated form of movement that has no place being in any console game.

But, back to the mini-game! It starts when Follie enters the glowing ring, and it is here the game actually starts to get interesting. The basic goal of all the mini-games is to deliver seeds to a flower. This is done by flying around the screen (this thankfully does not use the eight-directional movement) and collecting the seeds as they float around the screen. Then, you target the little flower on the ground and shoot the seeds into it. After collecting a sufficient amount, the level is over, and the new area can be unlocked.

However, during the course of the "adventure," this gets harder and harder. The seeds will move more quickly and there will be multicolored ones. You'll need to snatch the correct colors and match them with their floral counterparts. It gets to be pretty fast paced, and is fairly entertaining for a while.

Beyond these mini-games, however, the over-world offers almost nothing. It does tell the story of why the spaceship crashed, but the movement is clunky and the graphics are extremely poor, making it an eyesore to explore the planet. That being said, the Adventure mode is almost completely useless. The Quick Play mode, though, is pretty fun. It only features the seed collecting, and it can be played with another player via local co-op. The mini-game is fun and challenging, and makes the game playable for a while.

All of that being said - Flowerworks HD: Follie's Adventure is not a game that should be purchased. There are far better games out there on the Wii U eShop for about same price, like Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails or Swords and Soldiers. In fact, free browser games are even more creative, fun and better looking than Flowerworks HD.