Plantera 2: Golden Acorn Review

Plantera 2: Golden Acorn is a charming idle clicker title where you will grow a world with a couple of helpers, a lot of animals, and cute decorations to fill your vast new farming empire.

As an idle clicker title, it really doesn't have any story, but the idea of just booting it up and starting your adventure is enjoyable nonetheless. You start off by catching some butterflies with your mouse and then planting your first seed, but soon thereafter, you'll begin to get a bunch of helpers around your world to help facilitate the process of earning money.

As you begin to grow and get new items, including crops, bushes, and trees with fruit, you will start to see more "thieves" pop up. These rascals come in various shapes and sizes, with birds that try to steal your fruit (and smile adorably while doing so) and bunnies that demand to be fed your crops. To fight them off, you'll have to whack them with a hammer to make them leave your lands. Lest your chickens be chased by foxes forever and your cows abducted by aliens, you'll need to keep a sharp eye to protect you and yours.

A little boar intending to scare my pigs!

Although this sounds potentially catastrophic to the wholesome nature of Plantera 2: Golden Acorn, you have nothing to fret about. The "enemies" in the game never directly hurt any of your animals, and you — in turn — smack them hard enough to make them run away. It ties in perfectly with the cute and relaxing theme that the game has going, and it makes sure to stay within its wholesome roots the entire time.

The Golden Acorn part of Plantera 2's name comes from the new (presumably, because I haven't played the original... yet) feature the game introduces, which is the golden acorns you can use to upgrade your tree at the centre of the world. With this, you'll get various high-tier upgrades you can use to make the idling part of the game faster and more efficient, and it's a nice way to see the world progress, as the tree grows ever larger the more upgrades you buy.

Unfortunately, Plantera 2: Golden Acorn does not come without its flaws, one of which might have been a bug but essentially trivialises the nature of an idle title. While trying to write this review, I have consistently entered and left my world's oak tree at least two dozen times. The problem? The game is always listening for input — including keyboard. This means that keys like WASD will move the camera accordingly in your world and make it jump around aggressively, making it difficult to enjoy the world developing in the background as it fiercely drags from one side to the other.

The biggest drawback Plantera 2: Golden Acorn has, however, is how criminally short the game is. With just four hours for me to complete the game and get all of its achievements, I was not ready to leave all of my chickens and unicorns behind. That being said, although the achievements are relatively easy to get, the nature of the idler genre is that you come to revisit your world, grow it a bit more, and see it blossom. Sitting at three million coins and counting, I'm not ready to let go of Plantera 2: Golden Acorn just yet, and I'll likely come back to see the world advance, if only for a few minutes at a time.

This relaxing and adorable world has not seen the end of me and is unlikely to for a very long time. In between soulslike titles and frustrating PvP moments, Plantera 2: Golden Acorn will be the short reprieve of stress I'll need to carry on gaming shortly thereafter, and I hope it'll be so for a long time to come.