Viva Piñata was an attempt by Microsoft to reach out to people who don’t particularly like the Xbox 360’s staple shooting and racing games. They had the best intentions in the world, even going so far as to develop a children’s television show to accompany the release of the game. Two fatal errors were made: 1) the game was not as accessible as it needed to be and 2) Microsoft neglected to advertise the game at all, thus the project was nowhere near as successful as hoped. The game began to gain popularity after being bundled with the Xbox 360, which has now resulted in a sequel, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise.

Trouble in Paradise quickly attempts to set itself apart from the original game by introducing scant traces of something resembling a plot, just to give a little more purpose to your breeding activities. It seems Professor Pester (the antagonist of the previously mentioned cartoon) broke into Piñata Island’s central computer with the intention of stealing the vital statistics and other information on every creature on the island. Unfortunately, one of his dim-witted goons erased all of the data, so it’s up to you to restore it while fending off Pester’s attempts to break and steal your piñatas.

At first, it seems like very little has changed in the two years between Viva Piñata games, so if you didn’t like the first game, Trouble in Paradise won’t be your cup of tea. The game is still all about attracting piñatas to your garden, breeding them, making them happy (to make their candy more delicious, apparently) and increasing their value. Everything you do contributes to your experience level; increases in your experience level grant you access to more room for your garden. This makes it seem a bit recycled and overly familiar at first, but as you spend more time with the game, you begin to discover the more interesting and intuitive additions the folks at Rare have made.

One of the major follies of the first Viva Piñata game was that it dumped you in the garden with little instruction or further guidance, which was pretty silly given the game’s intended younger demographic. Trouble in Paradise provides players with plenty of direction, instructing you on its garden and control basics before letting you loose on a series of challenges. Langston will assign you a challenge from various different regions around the world – usually a request for a specific type of piñata or one that has eaten a certain type of food. For the challenge to be completed, the requested piñata must be at maximum candiosity (i.e. full happiness). Once a challenge is complete, the piñata will be recorded in Piñata Island’s central computer, and you’ll be rewarded with chocolate coins (and an accessory every now and then).

Piñata Island now plays host to two additional areas for the player to visit; the Pinarctic and the Dessert Desert. Each area has its own native flora and fauna which you need to capture and bring back to your garden. It’s a little disappointing that you can build separate gardens in these areas, but you can put down sand and ice areas in your main garden to satisfy the needs of the piñata that you catch in the other locations. Trapping piñatas is pretty straightforward – buy a trap, put in the piñata’s preferred type of bait, then sit and wait for the greedy bugger to get caught and pick up the box from the post office. The process can get a bit annoying, especially when going for speedier piñatas, which will run off before the trap will trigger. Trapping wild piñatas in these areas is vital to completing Langston’s challenges.

New piñata can be scanned into your game via the Xbox Live Vision camera. One card is provided with the game, though others appear on the Viva Piñata website, in the Prima play guide, and other random places. These cards give you new piñata (sometimes free, others will cost you) – some cards will provide only the animal, but others might give you the prescribed species along with a few accessories. Wildcard piñata are rare, and worth a lot of chocolate coins. Scanning these cards in with the Vision camera is a real ordeal – it took this writer 15 minutes to get it right the first time around.

There are more than thirty new piñatas (bring the total past 100) to catch, train and breed, along with a bunch of new plants to grow, and a few other pointless additions, like toys and decorations. To make things more complex, there are new variant piñatas, as well as twin piñatas, both of which are very valuable. Some of the resident and romance requirements for existing piñatas have changed, which should keep returning players on their toes. Piñata can be entered into races and beauty contests, winning chocolate coins for your kitty and increasing their worth. The breeding mini-game is still here, and still feels pointless after the first time.

Navigation around the garden and basic control has been made a lot easier due to Rare streamlining a lot of the menu processes. You can use the d-pad to cycle through your garden tools, rather than running through the menus. Seeds can be purchased without having to run through Costalot’s store – a seed bag tag on the menu lets you take care of your seed placement and purchasing in one fell swoop. Finding a specific piñata in your garden is also a lot easier as you can now cycle between them with the left and right bumpers.

Trouble in Paradise also features a much more robust multiplayer mode. Whereas the original game let two players share one cursor for garden/piñata maintenance, Trouble in Paradise lets up to four people play on the one garden, each with their own cursor. The cooperative system is drop in/drop out, so players can jump into your garden whenever they want (provided you’ve set up a Live game if you’re intending to do it online). It’s best utilised as a tool for teaching the young and inexperienced how to play, as some players cannot resist the temptation to utterly devastate your garden.

While Trouble in Paradise is a more refined experience, it still has a large number of glaring issues. Piñata direction and pathfinding is still utterly dreadful; sometimes your piñata will completely ignore your requests for movement, and other times they will just veer off in an unrelated direction for a few seconds before going the right way. The mini-games are devoid of anything remotely resembling fun, and are therefore superfluous. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the game is the almost non-stop interference of Professor Pester’s goons. Having an antagonistic element to the game is important, but you barely get a moment to catch your breath between goon attacks after you reach the higher levels of experience.


The original Viva Piñata’s full use of the colour palette set it apart from the majority of the Xbox 360 library. Trouble in Paradise maintains this colourful aesthetic, and adds a layer of polish to the specific parts of the game world; water reacts more realistically to movement, and the grass moves with the wind. The designs of the new piñatas are fantastic; Geckie is a cute little lizard that waddles around while licking his eyeballs, the Limeoceros is a rather hefty rhino that likes to play rough, while the Sarsgorilla is a nod to former Rare favourite Donkey Kong, as he throws barrels at his enemies. While the game’s soundtrack is excellent, the voice acting is limited and grating, detracting from the overall experience.

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is the result of refinement of a successful formula. It doesn’t have a whole lot of new tricks, but it provides enough content for anyone who enjoyed the first game to jump on the wagon again. It’s much more friendly to new players than the original game, and the structured challenge missions help give the game some much needed direction. There are still a few kinks to work out with regards to the game’s pathfinding and enemy invasions. If you’ve got a bit of a green thumb and a thing for papier-mâché animals, then Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is worth a look.