SunFlowers
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| SunFlowers

We've covered SunFlowers in quite some detail since it was announced. The bright and breezy puzzle-based flower collectathon caught our attention the moment we saw it.

Thankfully, our interest in the title was not misplaced: SunFlowers is a joyous little casual puzzler for your Vita.

While it's not the most mechanically sophisticated offering available for the platform, its unwavering cheeriness and relaxed gameplay are a great accompaniment to the platform's hardcore-focused catalogue.

Roses are red, violets are blue...

The aim of SunFlowers is simple: collect every type of flower for your garden. There are hundreds of varieties to obtain across the Classic and Tropical landscapes, each with their own charming description and rarity guide.

These become viewable once you've procured them through play, combined two species together, or received them via friends or near.

Gorgeously designed and brimming with character, your steadily filling garden really gives you reason to be proud as you flick through the products of your hard work. Navigating these menus and accessing the game's various content is simple and - more importantly - fast.

Everything snaps along, letting you enjoy short bursts of play whenever you have a few minutes to spare. And, really, it needs to, because the gameplay itself won't hold your attention for marathon sessions.

… I played this game, and so should you

Holding the Vita on its side, you use the touchscreen to move an anthropomorphised sun at the top of the play area. With a press of a shoulder button or a tap of the screen, you shoot a sun ray towards the flowers in the soil below.

To ensure they grow, you'll need to hit rain clouds with these beams, which produce droplets of water with which to bring life to your seeds.

However, should your sun beam hit the flowers directly, or bounce off a passing storm cloud, you'll set the flowers on fire, giving you a limited time to cool them off with rain before they perish and you lose a life.

And that's about it. You keep doing this as the stages get harder. Occasionally there's a slightly trickier bonus round, but for the most part SunFlowers is very basic fare.

It's not especially frantic, nor especially taxing, but you'll come back to complete your collection and watch the flowers bloom.

SunFlowers is the first high quality, laid back, mobile-esque game on the Vita and it's as refreshing as a gentle breeze in your garden on a hot summer's day.

SunFlowers

Bite-sized and beautiful, SunFlowers isn't the most complicated game you'll play, but the hook of collecting every variety of plant on offer in this relaxing action puzzler is more than enough to keep you coming back for more
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Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.