Blooming Daisies Review

Would you like to create your own urban park to provide people in the city with a touch of nature? Blooming Daisies by Interama allows the player to do just that. While the premise certainly sounds fun, the game’s slow pace and open ending-nature won’t appeal to everyone.

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

Pretty but slow-paced park simulation.

Would you like to create your own urban park to provide people in the city with a touch of nature? Blooming Daisies by Interama allows the player to do just that. While the premise certainly sounds fun, the game’s slow pace and open ending-nature won’t appeal to everyone.

The game opens as Daisy and her uncle Larry decide to open and care for a garden park in the city. Blooming Daisies only features one mode – Endless – without any mandatory goals or tasks. A tutorial – which lacks some very important information – guides the player through the beginning and explains the basic gameplay elements.
Blooming Daisies
Your main tasks will be buying flowers, decorations, and equipment. Money is earned by the tickets at the entrance of the park, and by selling goods to your visitors. These prices you can adjust yourself, but unfortunately there are no stats to show you any relation between prices and demand, which makes this option rather pointless. Furthermore, it takes a very long time to earn any noteworthy amount of money, so you will spend the majority of the time waiting for new income to buy more decorations and flowers for your park.

Apart from shopping and decorating, you are also responsible for maintaining the park. Flowers and trees have to be watered, monuments need cleaning every once in a while, footpaths need to be renewed, and trash has to be collected. New items appear in the store on a regular basis. You are also able to earn various achievements, which also award you with a nice and helpful chunk of money. It is not absolutely clear whether new items become available after certain time periods, or by other factors, which means that waiting can be quite boring at times.

On the positive side, Blooming Daisies also features charming graphics with cute animations and a really wonderful music that fits the theme just perfectly. It’s quite adorable to watch your park growing and blooming, while more and more animals as well as visitors animate it. The achievements are a nice addition to the game, although you only learn what these achievements are when you fulfill the requirements. Additionally, visitors will occasionally leave behind positive or negative notes about your park to give you a hint what you are doing right or wrong.
Blooming Daisies
Unfortunately, Blooming Daisies is lacking in many respects as well. There is no real storyline to speak of, the micromanagement is too superficial, and the pace of the game is so slow that it gets very frustrating quickly. What makes the latter point even worse is the fact that you cannot leave the game for too long, although there is not much to do most of the time. Furthermore there are some minor issues that really complicate the gameplay, such as not being able to zoom out to see the whole park, or to move the screen per click-and-drag.

Blooming Daisies will probably only appeal to those players who are turned off by games that are too challenging or fast-paced, and who enjoy building up a new structure slowly and with passion for detail. Others will soon be disappointed in the lack of any real goals, progressions, or complications. Even some optional challenges or special events would have added much more color to a game whose premise is quite interesting, with an idea that has not been seen a hundred of times on the casual market. As things are the game neither qualifies as a challenging time management game, a deep simulation requiring various strategies, nor as a truly fulfilling resource management title.

All in all, Blooming Daisies is an easy but basic game which lacks any difficulty and real changes. It shares a lot of the same issues as Alice Greenfingers or HappyVille: Quest for Utopia, but is even less satisfying when it comes to pace. In the end the trial should give every player enough time to decide whether this game is your cup of tea or not.

The good

    The bad

      50 out of 100