Grow Up Review

Sometimes your parents try to push you out of the nest early and force you to handle your own problems. Sometimes they crash into a moon and force you to put them back together. You wouldn’t believe how often the moon thing happens.

In Grow Up, the sequel to Ubisoft Reflection’s hit game Grow Home, you play as B.U.D. He is forced to grow Starplants – giant beanstalk style plants that feed off of energy rocks that you have to plug them into – as he tries to gather the pieces of M.O.M. The reason for M.O.M being in pieces is from the inconsiderate positioning of the moon.

That’s it really. The story is as simple as the gameplay, and that isn’t a put down. This game has gone down by many as the perfect sequel, and that isn’t far from the truth. The story is just as simple as the first, but hasn’t got the same objective. The mechanics are relatively the same, the only thing different is the introduction of the Stardex and new upgraded abilities that will allow you to grow your way to the moon.

Yes you read that correctly, you have to Jack-and-the-Giant-Beanstalk your way to the moon, a distance of about 10,000 meters. This game is definitely not for those who get dizzy from looking down and realizing that all the giant mushrooms look like little ants on the surface of the moon. For those whom get a nice amount of thrill from this idea will definitely like to know that you can jump, with a little bit of boosting, off of the moon and fall all the way to the surface of the planet.

You may be wondering if you’ll survive the trip, and it is certainly a possibility. If you don’t reduce your speed, you will collide into rocks, trees, and bugs and come apart like a little magnetic robot. This can be negated by using the Glider, Air Brakes, or even the Jetpack. These choices are entirely up to you, but they also aren’t your final choice. You could use one of B.U.D’s new suits, particularly a cat suit that prevents all fall damage.

That’s one of the best parts of this game: everything has a use and will definitely come in handy for some shenanigans as you explore the world beneath your little mechanical feet. Whether you get all the crystals to upgrade your abilities, or wear new suits given for the completion of time trails throughout the world, you will always be given something for whatever you do. If you design an intricate web using the vines on the Starplants, that design will remain until the game is completely removed, and so nothing is squandered with this game.

Another rewarding part of Grow Up is the main mechanic: climbing. The climbing isn’t some rigid, pre-designed animation that only works in specific spots. The climbing is all player input, starting with the trigger controls on the Xbox One controller. You grip surfaces by holding down the buttons, and release one when you want to climb. You control the loose hand with the left stick and can do anything from climbing up, down, left, right, upside down, or even crawl along the ground using the mechanic. The whole world is designed around the gameplay, and that’s a huge thing to say in today’s gaming. Every surface can be utilized as your next rock wall, and every plant has some function that might present itself when you climb on top of it.

That moves me onto the next part of the game – the Floraforms. These plants with silly names are absolutely useful in this game. They aren’t just some mechanic that is shoehorned into the game to beef up the content; they actually serve a major purpose in the game. You can scan and spawn a seemingly limitless amount of that flower, with the only constraint being the small cooldown whilst your batteries recharge. That means you can spawn Splockets which are very fast and useful launching flowers to make your transition across the planet an easier affair. The plants don’t stop at just flinging you; some actually act as trampolines, trampolines that can grow on each other, whereas some act as giant pillars that allow for easier access to higher islands.

My final praise goes to the graphics. The design of this game is simple, and that works wonders for the world. The character is a simple little robot, and the world around him reflects the simplicity, which builds such wonderful parallelism. Also, the game is just that beautiful on its own. It really does seem like a game where you could just sit at the top of your Starplant and look below as the dual suns disappear behind the horizon. There’s really not much wrong with the graphics, except for maybe one or two graphical artefacts that go away without much concern.

With all these good things, surely something has to be wrong with this game, right? Fortunately, Grow Up has a small speck of dust on its jacket from playing Extreme Gardening.  This speck of dirt is the glider, and it is a small weight added onto the scales that throw things just slightly out of balance. The glider gets a boost when you’ve collected enough crystals, and the boost absolutely destroys the need for climbing up and down things. You can boost higher and faster than you can climb, without the aid of Floraforms of course, and that really seems strange. You spend battery power when you boost, and the game regenerates it so quickly that it makes it really easy to just boost and forget about the main mechanic of the game. This is really a small personal nit-pick because the fix is just not using the glider boost over Floraforms.

In the end, Grow Up does what it wants to do, expanding upon Grow Home. The developer didn’t try to overcomplicate things, and it wasn’t the exact same idea as the first game. This game earns the title of ‘Perfect Sequel’, for it doesn’t have any large pitfalls that can cause a game to topple. And when you’re sitting on top of the moon, looking down at the top of the world, you don’t want to topple!