PAX07: Hands on with Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol

Not all creative ideas are good ones. Take Crystal Pepsi, for instance. The clear, syrupy concoction failed to inspire taste buds. Perhaps consumers just didn't see what the fuss was all about.

The same could be said of our initial impressions of Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol; a game that still hasn't been released despite it being 16 months since our first hands-on at E3 2006.

Park Patrol tasks you with developing a public space in order to attract visitors. The park starts off as a barren plot of land that must be planted with flowers, fitted with benches and water fountains, and maintained just so to keep guests happy. Improvements are purchased with happiness points, a form of currency that enables you to buy in-game items and services. The more visitors to your park, the more points you receive to enhance it.

This is all easier said than done, though, since you don't play as a skillful landscape architect. Instead, you control a miniature robot. Constrained by its size and power, your ability to shape the park is appropriately limited. You run off a small battery that drains with every step, forcing you to constantly run back home and recharge, although later in the game you can purchase an upgrade that extends the amount of time you can stay away.

In our time with Park Patrol, we tackled the straightforward task of watering flowers. Beautifying the park meant getting as many of the perky petunias to open up and show their colours. We equipped a watering can by tapping on the touchscreen and then sprayed it on a small patch of flowers. Once the pretty petals were exposed, we began a reproductive dance routine. Some swipes of the touchscreen instructed our robot to dance, which resulted in our watered flowers spreading their seeds in order to grow new flowers. We can't wait to see that on next week's Gardeners' World.

Following our reproductive day, we directed our robot to return home for the evening. Come the morning, new flowers had sprung up and were ready to be watered.

A Nintendo representative informed us that much of Park Patrol revolves around this form of virtual gardening, which seems awfully monotonous. Despite promises of arranging benches for our park patrons to sit on and fountains to entice birds – and there are also rumours of evil invading the park later on – we weren't able to experience any of those goodies in the demonstration we played.

And even discounting the innate monotony of the horticulture, it was hard not to get really annoyed with the robot's battery life. Approximately every minute its battery would nearly empty, forcing us to trek back to the charging station. We had to do this five times just to keep the thing running; as such, we spent more time dealing with battery power than actually playing the game.

So from what we've experienced of Park Patrol, we're not exactly keen to sink any more time into it. Feeling more like an interactive toy than an actual game, it seems uninspired and lacking in variety.

But perhaps the most bizarre factoid about the game is that in the US, it will be only available in Wal-Mart stores. Don't expect this to translate to (Wal-Mart owned) Asda exclusivity in the UK when it's released sometime this winter, but of more importance is the feeling that Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol's slow pace seems unlikely to result in the game flying off the shelves of shops that do stock it.