Family Tree Switch Review
Loco Roco meets Angry Birds
You play as Mr or Mrs Fruit who’ve had all their baby fruits stolen by an evil blue floating candy skull called Pedro because being the responsible parents you are left all your babies to sleep outside alone while you slept in your comfy bed. Rather than steal all your babies to make some tasty smoothies, Pedro has transported them to the inside of trees. Now you must journey up a whole lot of trees to gather up your billions of lost babies.
There’s a wacky story, colourful graphics, an awesome theme tune, a fun concept, 4 player multiplayer. Family Tree seems to have it all.
You play by firing Mr Fruit towards the sky, Angry Birds style with the analogue stick, then use L and R to move around, Loco Roco style. Collect your babies and 4 golden coins each level and progress to the end.
Every 8 levels you get a bonus side scrolling level where you can fall to your doom, finish that and the season changes. Then back to climbing those trees.
You earn points for collecting all your babies, the gold coins and finishing quickly though unless you’re a completionist there is little benefit in it, all you really need to do is reach your other half who’s waiting generally near the top of the tree. This was my gripe with Family Tree,it would’ve been awesome to have online leaderboards and a shop to buy hats, scarves and glasses for Mr and Mrs Fruit using the coins you collect.
You get cannons to fire you up, pinball bouncy pads and some enemies roaming around, who are they just to get in your way rather than actually kill you. Family Tree, hence the name is very family and child friendly. I had an absolute blast playing for short bursts but the minute or so long levels do start to get repetitive, still the further you get, the more interesting the levels are, this dragged me back time and time again to play some more. Also I’m probably not the target market of this family orientated game and I can tell you now, a 6 year old would’ve absolutely loved bouncing around in Family Tree.
The 4 player mode is confined to competitive Endless mode, a slowed down but difficult to pick up and play mode where you slowly fling yourself up small platforms. It wasn’t particularly fun two player but I imagine 4 player could be great fun as you bounce off each other trying to climb as quickly as possible so the others fall off the bottom of the screen, or more likely whoever doesn’t actually own the game will just miss a platform band fall to their doom.
The graphics are fine for what the game is, if Angry Birds was called Angry Fruits you’d pretty much get this. The characters all look quite cute and there’s some vaguely trippy times when you collect enough fruit and go into LSD mode (it isn’t actually called that).
The soundtrack and effects are absolutely perfectly fitting for this game, a mix of chilled out dub-step and techno with a raptastic theme song in the menu, coupled together with cute and typical pinball sound effects.
With 160 levels things get repetitive, there’s not enough new features introduced to enjoy a long play session but that doesn’t change the fact that short bursts are really fun. If you have a young one that’ll love the relaxing and forgiving nature of Family Tree I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Family Tree is available now on the eShop for £6.99/$7.99/€7.99 with 20% off until 23rd October. A huge thank you to EastAsiaSoft for providing the review code.
