Viva Pinata Xbox One X Preview

June 18, 2019 at 6:51pm
By Jason Stettner

One of the more shocking and somewhat hidden elements of E3 2019, was that Xbox One won’t receive anymore Xbox Backwards Compatible games. Despite this note, we did get one final batch from the original console and Xbox 360. With that, came the addition of Xbox One X enhancements to some Rare titles.

One of those very games was Viva Piñata, an absolute classic of the gardening variety. I really did enjoy these games, with Trouble in Paradise being my favorite of the selection. That aside, I thought I’d jump into the first entry to see the boost in resolution. You get a 9x the original pixel count for a native 4k resolution.

This brings new life to the older games by boosting the texture quality, color vibrancy and of course that resolution. It looks fantastic, and this art style does hold up very well. It’s a very distinct look and with it looking sharp the game has never looked better.

It’s honestly surprising that this series hasn’t had any sort of follow-up. It’s actually a fairly solid game, not only for kids and it would have worked well as a Xbox Play Anywhere title. I suppose just getting the enhancement is good enough for now, just nice to play it with a high visual quality.

The piñatas look really sharp here, as do the details within the environmental aspects of the garden. It’s been a long time since I last played, so it was nice to return. Keep in mind that this can be enjoyed through the original Xbox 360 version or if you purchased Rare Replay. At treat of a collection if you missed it originally. This still handles quite well, it’s still a fun game to play and it was nice to see how my critters were doing.

I carved some of the world, planted things and dealt with those deadly visitors that wreck things. It’s a worthy revisit, or perhaps first play as the game was a distinct experience for sure. Something that any audience could easily jump into, there was even a funny Palette-Swap Ninja parody for the Pina Colada song back on the Xbox 360 days. It was quite well known. Fun game overall, check out our review of Rare Replay below.

Read our Rare Replay Review
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