If you thought that all farming games are alike, Bloom Busters is out to prove you wrong. Most farming and gardening games have a customization element where you buy upgrades and build up your farm, giving you the sense that you are managing your own farm. Not Bloom Busters – this game is a garden-themed action adventure, through and through. You won’t be able to make your own improvements to your farm that last more than a single level. Instead, this game focuses on a variety of gardening tasks, with an emphasis on action over all else.

You can choose to play either of the heroes, Jimmy (who is stronger) or Jessie (who is faster), as they struggle to run a farm left behind by a mad scientist. This mad scientist’s experiments spawned a healthy gaggle of strange (but cute) monsters that will often pop up and harass your attempts to grow plants or feed your animals. Worse, they try to knock you out or even attack your livestock. Fortunately you can smack these creatures into the middle of next week with a swatter, or shoot them with a nifty slime gun. Sometimes a guard dog will help you fight off the monsters, which is good because these slimes, giant eyeballs and furry beasts could pop up all over the place. There are also bonus items that will appear at random spots in each level – some increase your health, others give you more points, and others boost your slime gun.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s more to Bloom Busters than just fighting monsters. Throughout the 40 levels of this game, you’ll find some timed tasks like growing flowers, as well as plenty of simulated animal husbandry. You’ll learn to gather foodstuffs and water bottles and use them to nourish your farm animals and garden plants. But you’ll also find plenty of cute but annoying monsters to defeat, in just about every other level. In fact, with all this monster fighting, we found this game having more in common with some clickfest action games like Diablo than with the typical farming sim.

Some other reviewers have complained that the game gets too hard in later levels. It’s certainly true that some missions, where you have to guard plants and shepherd animals while fighting monsters, can get really hectic. But the game provides a handy map in the monster fighting levels so that you can see where the enemy is, and the click-and-go interface is polished to the point where you’re always fighting the enemies, never against the controls. Also, you can play the game alongside a friend in two-player mode, which helps make things considerably easier.

The creatures and garden levels are bright and colorful like something out of a kid’s storybook, and the monsters are always more cute (there’s that word again!) than scary. Sometimes the musical cues have a slightly eerie sound to them. In the end, Bloom Busters is a charming little arcade action game with gardening and farming elements thrown in, and it’s a bit difficult for one player, but works well for two.

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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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