When I first laid eyes on Planted!, I thought we were onto a winner. It looked like someone had taken Overcooked’s chaotic energy, thrown in a little Moving Out, and decided that instead of working together, we’d be digging each other’s metaphorical gardening graves. Planted! is a chaotic horticultural party game where gardening has become a competitive sport. Forget peaceful and cosy tending to your allotment. Instead, you’ll need to water those carrots and fertilise those prize-winning cabbages like your life depends on it.

The premise is relatively straightforward: sow, grow and throw. Players will claim their own little patch of land, plant seeds and water/fertilize crops before harvesting and hurling them into the designated scoring area. Of course, you won’t be the only one on the playing field, and nothing is stopping your opponents from wandering over and helping themselves to the fruits of your labour. Literally.

Supporting up to four players, either locally or online, or if you have no friends (like me, hehe, kidding), it has the option to fill the remaining spaces with NPCs. Planted! Has up to eight different environments to battle through, each introducing its own hazards and challenges, alongside a variety of powerups to have the upper hand.

A Growth Splurt

Now, Planted! Does have a single-player campaign, although calling it a story campaign feels a little generous. There’s no real story to speak of, other than this dude is fully aware he is properly shit at gardening in a competitive nature and he’s being walked through the do’s and don’ts. The story largely serves as one enormous tutorial. Each world, that I could play at least, is dedicated to introducing various mechanics which are vital to even a sliver of winning any game over an opponent.

We’ve got the basics first, such as growing, sowing, blocking opponents and navigating obstacles. I understand the need to teach players how everything works, but why am I on the third world and still learning new things? It seems a massive waste for a party game that seemingly wants people to jump in and cause chaos; it’s just a rather drawn-out introduction.

One of my biggest gripes with this approach is that the game seems to expect you to master these mechanics almost immediately, despite having only just introduced them. In the second world, one challenge involves defending your goal against NPC bots trying to chuck their produce in. You’re taught how to block incoming produce, which sounds fine, right? Straightforward enough. Except eventually the bots are firing vegetables faster than you can reasonably get from one side of the goal to the other.

Blocking also briefly interrupts your movement, meaning by the time you’ve recovered and repositioned yourself, you have to be razor sharp at throwing the prize vegetable into the goal. Getting hit leaves you stunned, which is a fair penalty, but by the time you are out of your stun, fruits have already sailed past you, given just how long the stun lasts. This makes the NPC score FAR higher than yours, and a difficult margin to claw back from.

What makes this baffling to me is that, despite being annihilated by the bots, the game then congratulated me for getting the hang of things. HAHA SORRY WHAT? My NPC had finished around 500 points more than me? Unless the lesson was how to embarrassingly lose to the NPC, I’m not entirely sure what I was supposed to have learnt. To rub salt in the wound, the score accumulates over a number of rounds, which means eventually you might as well never look at a carrot again because there isn’t a hope in hell you’re catching up.

The stealing tutorial isn’t much better. When practising stealing your opponent’s crops, you have a bar that fills to show you how much time is left before it’s plucked out of the ground. Tell me why, when they steal my crops, their bar filled considerably faster than my own did when I tried stealing theirs. Throwing produce to stop them also felt wildly inconsistent. Sometimes, it sailed straight over their heads, sometimes it landed at their feet, and occasionally bounced harmlessly off them. Not interrupting any movement or action on their part. So that didn’t make the mechanic any easier to understand, let alone master.

A Rotten Harvest

That’s ultimately the problem here with Planted!’s approach to teaching its mechanics. There is a difference between introducing a challenge and expecting players to perform it flawlessly before they’ve had a reasonable opportunity to practice. Even bots set at Lvl. 1  in multiplayer, both Finger Guns Fam Josh and I got absolutely pummelled. This isn’t a case of ‘get good’ either. We genuinely couldn’t even keep up on the same team against level one bots. The game demands a level of speed, dexterity and precision that its own controls don’t support, making what should be a relatively on-the-surface ‘accessible’ party game feel unnecessarily punishing.

Talking of dexterity, if there is one thing that got under my skin, it was the controls. Everything feels oddly slippery, almost as though your character is permanently running around on a freshly polished kitchen floor. The movement lacks precision and regularly asks you to make quick decisions, dodge incoming produce and navigate awkward obstacles. Even the button layout takes some getting used to, and maybe that’s on me and years of muscle memory, but why isn’t the jump button ‘X’?  I know that is a minor gripe in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re already wrestling with the movement, having to consciously think about what button does what doesn’t help.

This becomes particularly noticeable during the platforming sections, which are far more demanding than not only anticipated but what is realistically required. There’s something called the carrot race. Oh, the carrot race. I cannot begin to explain how much this particular challenge tested my patience. I feel as though they’ve been designed for someone who has already spent 500 hours mastering and memorising the layout, rather than someone who was just introduced mere rounds ago.

You’re expected to dodge a thousand different things from all directions whilst not falling or being hit midair, make precise jumps and react to hazards in quick succession, with VERY little room for error. You only have 3 strikes until you will end the round with a score of 0. This might sound reasonable, but attempt it. Go on, I dare you.

 I felt like Hercules during that training montage where he’s repeatedly being slammed into things. But unlike Hercules, I wasn’t progressively getting better, I was progressively getting closer to launching my controller through the TV. There isn’t a reprieve either; there were occasions where I’d fallen off a platform, simply trying to make my way back, only to continue getting absolutely battered by obstacles along the way. It made recovering from a mistake feel almost as punishing as making it in the first place.

I don’t mind a difficult game, in fact, ya gal has spent the last few weeks blasting through Elden Ring for the first time. I quite enjoy the challenge when it feels fair and allows me to improve. When you’re working with controls that already feel imprecise, that combination becomes exhausting rather than entertaining. There is a potentially enjoyable game here, but I would only genuinely say this would be the case if you had three other real humans to play against. Although we do need to factor in that the explanation of the game is completely wrapped up in the story, and therefore I hope all your pals have time to play the story first, or you all might as well be gardening with your eyes closed, because there is zero explanation of how to play the game, or what the power-ups do, how to utilise them the best you can, etc.

The Horrors Persist, But So Do I.

Visually, Planted! is colourful and cartoonish and gives the impression of a light-hearted party game. The different environments that I got to play in multiplayer and the various challenges that came with them do look like promising fun. There is a nice variety of ideas behind the levels with different layouts, hazards and objectives to shake the gameplay up. Unfortunately, I can’t really comment on how successfully these ideas are executed across the entire game, because I couldn’t even progress through the single-player campaign. Past the beginning of the third area, I have no idea what the rest of Planted! had in store for me, and not for the lack of trying either.

I can forgive a game for having a few bugs here and there, a little graphical hiccup or an occasional shutdown. However, this was an absolute technical nightmare. I think I spent more time fighting the game trying to get through its glitches, bugs and crashes than I did actually playing it.

By the time I had reached the third world, the crashes had become relentless. Error reports, restarts, lost progress- you name it, either myself or the Finger Guns fam witnessed it. I persevered because I genuinely wanted to give Planted! a fair chance, but when it comes to crashing in the exact same place every single time, and then the rest of the campaign is locked because I need to progress.

My hands are tied. That’s where I had to call it quits, because this wasn’t a case of getting frustrated with the difficulty or deciding I had enough of having my ass handed to me by a LVL. 1 bot carrot enthusiast. I physically couldn’t play anymore, and I sort of needed more explanation to continue with the multiplayer too? Which just feels like poor execution when a simple, readable explanation could have been fine. There is sadly a difference between being rough around the edges and something that fundamentally doesn’t function as intended.

Unfortunately, what looked like a recipe for some wonderfully chaotic fun quickly turns into an exercise in patience, frustration and questioning whether I even know how to game. There is a good game buried somewhere beneath Planted!’s exterior, but with its slippery controls, questionable difficulty balancing, and enough technical issues to make me consider taking up actual gardening, I struggled to find it. As I write this, Planted! isn’t ready, and I couldn’t and won’t recommend it upon release.

Planted! is out 29th October 2026 for PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.

Developers: Cloth Cat Games

Publisher: Curveball Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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