Love Is... In Bloom (Nintendo DS) Review

It stays faithful to the theme, at least. Love Is... In Bloom is based around the premise of running a flower shop in order to generate enough money to build a happy life for the tiny nudists. Aww. An interesting concept to be sure, until you realise that it's all just a clever ploy to cover up a couple of hours of repetitive mini-games.

You start out with a flower shop but - oh no! - no produce to sell in it. Thusly, you return to your dreamy little garden and grow some plants to stock your shelves. Here's where you would expect to enter a Harvest Moon-style game, perhaps, or something akin to Gardening Mama, but no. Instead, you get the sort of retro-inspired games you'd find online for nothing, such as one where you guard your flowers from insects with a swat and spray, or the 'pull at flowers to fill a basket' game. Perhaps you'd prefer the one where you grab at pesky moles to stop them destroying your plants?

Either way, there are twelve games in total, though you only start with a few. Each gives you a different pretty flower to sell, with earlier games predictably offering the lowest gains. Once you've got some bouquets made up, you can earn some moolah. Potential customers will stroll around outside visibly thinking about the flowers they want, giving you the chance to lay out their desired produce to lure them in. You're set a monetary target at each stage of the game, and when you reach that, you get a cartoon showing you how elated the couple are with their perfect little lives. Rather than shooting straight for that all the time, though, you'll probably want to buy some different mini-games to give you some variety.

The games in themselves aren't entirely bad despite being the sort of thing freely available online - the first few times. Unfortunately, it seems that too much faith has been placed in them - they're the sort of things that might be good for a couple of goes as a distraction, not a basis for a full game, especially when you have to repeat them a ridiculous amount to keep your pollen-purchasing patrons happy. What start out as inoffensive activities swiftly become boring chores, and infuriatingly the later games - the ones that cost lots of in-game money - are the most irritating in the package. All of which leads to an empty feeling and the impression that you've been smacked in the stomach with a shovel for bothering to get the most out of the title by unlocking all the levels. It's over in a few hours, but when you consider that the time is made up of playing twelve one-minute games over and over, even that seems like an eternity. In a bad way.