Who would have thought a game about gardening could be as wonderfully designed as Green Fingers is? More to the point, it's fast paced, challenging in the right way and looks like a real amount of polish has gone into the game.

Primarily a score based reflex game, the premise is very simple. Five columns, five plant pots. Items drop from the top and you have to swap the pot positions so that you catch the right item in the right pot. It'll start off simple with seeds and sunshine, but eventually it will pick up, with water, bees, pliers and ever increasing amounts of items to sort and utilise. The game will not give you any item that doesn't belong to a pot, and if you land it in the wrong one it's game over.

...the bright colours and toned down acoustic guitar backing really add a warmth to the game that's difficult to express in words.

The touch controls are flawless - simply swipe between pots to swap their positions, or alternately tap one to highlight and then tap another to switch. Furthermore, you can grab extra points if you swiftly tap an item before it reaches the pot - a bonus of up to 10 points for playing the game quickly.

Green Fingers makes liberal use of transitional animation, whether it is between levels in the game or screens from the main menu - but none of these animations feel contrived or overblown, they just lend a sophisticated air to the game's presentation. So too, the bright colours and toned down acoustic guitar backing really add a warmth to the game that's difficult to express in words. There is a certain glitch with the backing track though; it's of a reasonable length but fails to loop once you are far into the game.

In addition to this is the superb achievement system, leader board and statistics that come with the game - although the 'more games button' achievement is a little overkill, the 15 achievements range from extremely easy to long term goals that will only come once you've played the game obsessively. We found this type of system to be highly successful in the developer's previous title, Alphabetic, although now it's been taken to the next level with OpenFeint integration as the icing on the cake.

Truly, Green Fingers is not as boring as watching grass grow. If you're sick of timed puzzles that involve swapping gems endlessly, then you'd do well to pick up this highly engaging, fun distraction as a great test of reflexes and an excellent example of how to a 59p game. It is worth much more.

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More by this developer

Super 7, B

Review by Ben Briggs, April 26, 2010

Alphabetic, C

Review by Ben Briggs, January 10, 2009

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