Grow Up

Right, so word of advice that you probably don’t need – don’t go buying shit you don’t know anything about just because it cost less than £5 and has the word ‘platformer’ under the genre. That’s exactly how I came into possession of the digital license for Grow Up. Apparently Grow Up is a sequel to a game released on PS4 and Steam which is a bit perplexing considering it’s come to Xbox without the option of playing the first one?

Grow Up follows the story of BUD, a robot who’s spaceship (called MOM) crashes on a distant thing that sort of qualifies as a planet and has to find all the parts of his ship to rebuild it and escape. BUD is not alone in this quest though. POD is there to be your eyes and ears on the planet. But he can only go as high as BUD has previously gone which is just a bit weird.

The gameplay itself is awful. There is a no other word for it. BUD is a lumbering piece of robot junk who makes moving around so difficult that it makes me look back on Octodad with fond memories. You have to use the planet’s plants to traverse the landscape and considering how many shitty little islands there are, traversing around the place is a fucking ballache... until you get the balloon like thing that actually lets you go upwards, then the game becomes a tad easier.

Aside from rebuilding the ship, there are abilities to unlock, checkpoint challenges to complete, and crystals to collect which give BUD enhanced abilities. I wish I had known this at the beginning of the game as when you collect 60 of these crystals BUD gets a rocket propelled glider than makes traversing the landscape a piece of piss. He is still a cunt to control though.

The sound effects are just shit. It sounds like the game is designed for 3 year-olds and if 3 year-olds are expected to be able to complete this game, I may as well quit gaming now as I don’t have a hope in hell. Graphically it’s pants too. It’s glitchy, temperamental and not very pretty.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

I’m not going to lie, I struggled to get motivated to finish this one off. It didn’t help that I also started playing the latest Goat Simulator DLC at the same time so all the Xbox One games I was playing were shit – but after Skyrim everything was going to seem shit.

Anyway, there is no real direction to the game so the order in which things unlock is completely random as is some of the shit that they want you to do.

Visiting all biomes is basically exploring the whole word and one that everyone has managed to get. The first one I did though was for stacking 10 mushroom plant things on top of each other – I must have been keen to get the game logged on my Gamertag.

There are three achievements for grabbing the various animals on the planet and doing things with them (no jokes) – like taking them to the moon, completing a challenge while holding one and flinging one over 100 metres.

Another one that gave me trouble was for using two sporchids to shoot 400 metres in the air. BUD’s clumsy controls made grabbing two of the things at the same time beyond difficult and then there was an element of luck in that they didn’t both launch together. I must have spent a good half hour dicking around with the plants before successfully getting this to pop.

There are five achievements associated with collecting all of the shit around the planet. This involves completing all the challenges, unlocking all of the teleporter things, flowering all Starplants, unlocking all the seeds and last but not least, finding all 150 crystals scattered throughout the world. This last one was the real fucker because there are so many of them and no in-game way of tracking which ones you’ve got. I let out an audible noise when the last one appeared on my radar and I knew I was going to be done with this shitty game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Grow Up was not one of my finest gaming choices and I simply can’t recommend it to anyone ever. I didn’t find any joy in the gimmicky nature of the gameplay and there was nothing precious about the childlike nature of its construction. It’s completable but not enjoyable.