Ready your green thumb because it’s time to get planting in Plantera!
Plantera is yet another clicker game made available on Steam. You’ll start off with a simple plot of land in which you’ll need to plant some fruits. This will very quickly expand into multiple plots, comprised of three different tiers of plants. As you expand, you’ll be able to plant more and more stuff, as well as be able to have various animals wandering around your fields. Prepare yourself for a lot of clicking and a lot of waiting as that is what is in store for you in this game.
I was recently offered the chance to cover Plantera over on my personal YouTube channel, and I decided I would use this opportunity to write up a full review of the game as well. I had had Plantera on my wishlist since before it came out several months ago, so I was definitely very interested in checking the game out and obtaining my green thumb.
As you complete actions in Plantera you’ll gain some experience. This experience will help you grow in levels, giving you access to even more plants and animals. Once you quickly unlock the base sets of these, you’ll unlock their upgraded versions as you continue to level up. The thing is, even though you’re “upgrading” the lower tier items, the highest tier of each category is pretty much the best moneymaker regardless. This is a bit disappointing as it turns the strategy towards simply trying to get only the highest tier into your plots.
Moneymaking can be somewhat slow at times, especially once you start getting towards the latter parts of your progression. As you place more of each type of plant or animal, it’ll cost more and more to continue to place that type. The yields are, overall, fairly small, all things considered. There are multipliers that you can purchase, but I’ll touch on why this is also somewhat awkward in a bit. The other issue is that unless you’re there helping out with clearing out all of the fruits (something that is hard on my carpal), you’ll often see items just sitting on the ground for quite some time.
As you grow in levels, you’ll gain more helpers alongside what I mentioned earlier. These helpers will be the automation in getting your items harvested. The problem is that there simply is not enough of them, and you can’t purchase anymore with gold – they all come from levelling up. I would often scroll through my fields and find that there was just piles of items sitting on the ground since no helper had come through for a bit. The helpers also like to clump up together, something that leaves room for a lot more of the item piling than it should. I wish that I could have directed my helpers on where to go, or at least been able to tell them “hey, over here”.
Like other clicker games, Plantera allows you to turn off the game and it’ll keep going in the background. The thing is, the amount of time it’ll actually idle in the background is limited based on how many offline time extensions you’ve purchased. I found this concept to be absolutely ridiculous, especially considering how many other things you need to purchase as well.
Then there’s the gold multipliers you can buy. The description of this states that it will “double your gold income”. This is extremely misleading, as all it actually does is add one to your gold multiplier (x2, x3, x4, etc). The part that doubles about it is the cost, and every time your purchase this upgrade, the cost will increase by exactly double.
One of my other annoyances with this game, aside from the lying multiplier description, how slowly money goes up sometimes, and the limited offline idling, is the name for the birds. Now I know this is something really simple, but the game refers to these as “magpies”. The birds in this game are not magpies. I see magpies all the time in my day-to-day life, and these very black birds (in the game) look nothing like what a magpie does. It would have been more accurate to describe these birds as simply birds, or even crows (I mean, you are scaring them away with scarecrows).
Plantera has a lot of promise, but a lot of the design decisions make it fall short. The game feels too limiting and feels nowhere near as good as other, free, clicker games. After the initial first few hours of the game where you actually unlock stuff, you’ll find that there’s not much left to do besides wait until you can add on more plots, plant more things, and then continue waiting. I find it to be a poor choice to limit how much you can leave the game offline, especially since it isn’t immediately obvious as to what that buff is for. I’m having a hard time giving this game a recommendation, but at the same time I also don’t think it deserves a low score. As such, I’ll have to settle with leaving it a “middle of the road” score instead.
Plantera Review Score
2.5/5
