Austin is back and he needs your help! Having refurbished his house and redone his garden Austin sees his parents garden is in dire need of assistance. Help replant and renovate their decrepit garden. Go through numerous sales finding and then selling off items for cash. Play mini games and various quests in order to gain achievements. Get the garden back to its former glory, Austin’sAustin is back and he needs your help! Having refurbished his house and redone his garden Austin sees his parents garden is in dire need of assistance. Help replant and renovate their decrepit garden. Go through numerous sales finding and then selling off items for cash. Play mini games and various quests in order to gain achievements. Get the garden back to its former glory, Austin’s parents will be so pleased with the results…
The original Gardenscapes (2009) by Playrix Entertainment was a charming if sedate affair. It was alright and not offensive. The semi-sequel Mansion Makeover (2012) felt just that, an expansion of the original game rather than a fully fledged sequel. It also felt tiring and quite irritating at times. Gardenscapes 2 (2013) acts as a proper sequel to the original and while the gameplay doesn’t drift too far from the previous games there are a number of improvements and extras to keep people playing. The game moves the action from Austin’s house to his parents. You still find items in order for them to be sold for cash so if you ever wanted to sell random objects like a peach or a live rat in a sale then this is the game to do it. You are still renovating a garden but there are some interesting touches here and there. Choosing what type of object from along the bottom to buy never gets old. In a nice bit of progression you now collect from hidden object scenes album photos of Austin to store. These old photos provide interesting background on the character; just don’t expect too much character depth, it’s not that type of game.
What else can be said? Hints are in more plentiful supply than they were in the previous game (thankfully) which includes question marks but also the thermostat, camera flash and even now a magnifying glass. Occasionally at the end of every game section Austin will ask you to take a picture to add to the album which is fun to do. Austin also seems less passive aggressive than he was in Mansion Makeover thank goodness. He seems happy to have you there unlike the previous game. Generally Austin is talkative and agreeable which comes in handy as that is an achievement. Wait minute, achievements? Ah yes you see Playrix this time around have integrated an achievement system to give the game extra play time. Some achievements revolve around doing a certain set number of things such as completing a number of hidden object scenes without disabling the time limit or finding a number of fruit or as alluded to before listen to a certain amount of dialogue from Austin. Some achievements are earned by simply progressing through the story. There’s for instance a whole subplot where you have to train Austin on his pool skills which is done by clicking on him after every pool training round. It all adds to a more extended package.
Playrix manage with Gardenscapes 2 to fix the issues of the previous game while adding new modes to help extend the gameplay. This sequel is generally a big improvement. The best thing to come out of doing these games is that the developers then decided to bring Austin to a wider audience via freemium mobile game app Gardenscapes: New Acres (2016), a Match 3 game that successfully earned Playrix (as well as Austin) a whole new legion of fans. The confidence obtained from working on the previous games shows in this mobile game and its success allowed them to release the following year Homescapes (2017), another mobile Match 3 which takes the lead from Mansion Makeover but does a better job a hundred times over. Needless to say Austin’s days of being a butler I’m happy to say are far from over…… Expand
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