Ah, those little piñata. You’d never guess from looking at them how close they can bring a grown adult to teeth-grinding frustration and the temptation to create a DS-shaped hole in the nearest window. That’s always been the tension at the foundation of Viva Piñata: on the one hand, the player just wants to build a lovely and harmonious garden that’s full of colour and happy animals; on the other, the piñata like nothing more than to fight, moan about not having enough turnips or thistles, and generally create trouble.

It’s what makes Microsoft’s attempt to position Viva Piñata as a children’s brand confusing: the game may look like it wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but in reality it will happily wring its neck. It’s a deep strategy experience wrapped up in candied colours and awful songs, and hides its merciless nature and constant demands behind sheens of buddy-buddy companions and sweet FMV. And in Pocket Paradise this distinctive aesthetic has been translated without loss: the piñata are bright and delightfully ruffled, and their character comes through as strongly on the small screen as it ever did on Xbox 360.

There are other distinctions between this and the original that are few but crucial: the total size of the garden is smaller, there are some extra piñata to attract to your plot, and the interface (and view of the garden) has been changed to better suit the demands of the portable platform. It’s the latter point that’s of particular interest: the interface is a huge improvement because the game changes completely with this more tactile feel for the mundane tasks. Double-tapping on weeds, whacking a sour piñata or simply throwing four or five seeds down in combination is all of a sudden a pleasurable part of the experience rather than something that has to be worked through until you can employ workers to do it for you.

There are some little annoyances that never quite coalesce into a bigger problem. Movement, for example, is at a constant speed, which when your garden increases in size becomes tiresome. Something as simple as making the speed of movement between the touchscreen and D-pad differ, even slightly, would have been welcome – it is possible to skip around by pulling out of the garden view, but constantly switching views simply in order to navigate shouldn’t be necessary.

There are other improvements that prove themselves slightly lopsided. The mating minigames of the original, which became hugely annoying after a certain point of critical mass, have been jettisoned. However, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious replacement for the welcome injections of gold these bring, meaning the first few hurdles of the game are spent desperately\ mating your stocks of piñata to sell their babies. Red in tooth and claw, and all that.

If Pocket Paradise makes you want to throw it against something, though, it’s only because it succeeds in making gardening compulsive. It’s undoubtedly found an ideal home on a platform designed for ten-minute segments of activity and attritional landscaping – and if it suffers from one or two little weeds then, well, you’ve just got to grit your teeth and get on with it.

7/10