Greatfruit Grove Review

When FarmVille was launched a few years ago, it was pretty obvious that gamers love to grow stuff. Fast forward to today and we have Greatfruit Grove, a game that challenges you to build your own… orchard! But instead of going for the regular trees and settings (if you can call FarmVille’s pink unicorns regular), it goes for a more fantasy approach, with a gloomy grove that you can keep happy.

Things are pretty straightforward: you need to plant trees, help them grow, keep them happy and harvest them. Doing this is what makes the game fun and challenging.

When you first start, your Greatfruit Grove is filled with scary plants and sad boulders who turn your normally happy trees into depressive ones. As soon as you start adding some decorations to keep your trees happy and remove some of the bad mood items, sun appears over the Grove and you’re ready for a bright future.

In order to get trees, you have two options: purchase them from the store, generally for premium currency, or use your monkey lab to mix together two seeds hoping for the best. As you can imagine, there is a ton of possible combinations and the results are quite impressive – we even have a beautiful tree called HalleBerry. But it’s not easy getting the trees: you don’t really know what seeds to mix in order to get what tree, and this is where the challenge and most of the fun comes from: from mixing all sorts of seeds, curious to see what the result is.

There is also a tiny social element in Greatfruit Grove, meaning that you can add friends and visit them and have them visit over in order to help your trees. But at the moment there’s no gift sending or trading, although the latter is a “coming soon” feature.

In my case, Greatfruit Grove started out as an amazing game, hooking me instantly with its idea of mixing seeds to get new trees, but slowly lost me on the way simply because there’s not much else to do except for that: you keep upgrading the hotel for monkeys and that’s about it. No extra characters, no extra challenges, no interactivity. And this tends to become a bit boring after a few days. But I am the type of person who tends to get bored pretty fast and still, this didn’t have me stop playing. I have an orchard to grow, after all!

iTunes Download Link: Greatfruit Grove
Final rating: 7 out of 10