by Lanae Celeste

Created on: June 05, 2008   Last Updated: June 08, 2008

If you enjoy gardening games, you'll probably like Money Tree by Mumbo Jumbo. As the name implies, this game focuses on growing trees as opposed to an entire garden. The story premise is that you are a young male gardener who has just inherited your uncle's farm and you must grow a lot of fruit to make a lot of money to win the love of the rich young daughter of your former employer. The saccharine story line is more or less incidental to game play.

The game itself starts out at a brisk but easy to follow pace, steadily introducing new elements to the game play that keeps the player busy and entertained. At first, you gather falling leaves to "plant" on your tree in order to create buds that will produce fruit, which you then must gather for a profit. This simplistic basis soon becomes hectic as you must keep an eye on several variables that can be detrimental to your fruit growing.

First, the player must keep heat and water in balance so that the trees don't wilt or drown. Soon, caterpillars and crows make their appearance to try and eat the fruit before it can be gathered. As the levels advance, the player can use the money earned from the fruit to buy tools that help control all these variables, like water sprinklers, heating lamps, pesticides, fertilizers, and even scarecrows. What started out as simply clicking on a few leaves falling from the top of the screen quickly evolves into a fast-paced game that requires full attention and a quick-clicking finger.

The animation in this game is very smooth, while the graphics are cartoonish but well done. The acoustic guitar based music that plays throughout Money Tree is perfect for putting the player in a lazy sunny day state of mind. Money Tree has some similarities to other games that require the purchase of upgrades and tools in order to deal with the introduction of increasingly difficult variables. However, it is unique in the fact that the player doesn't use an avatar that separates him or her from the action, creating an addictive "first-person gardener" casual game.

There is only one difficulty level in Money Tree, but there are about 40 levels that become increasingly harder as the game progresses, similar to games like Cake Mania and Diner Dash. If you are the type of gamer that likes to re-play a game to try to max out your score once you've beaten the game once, then Money Tree is a worthwhile buy.

Overall, I give Mumbo Jumbo's Money Tree a 4/5.

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