Brightly coloured, fluffy, and sacharin sweet; Viva Pinata must be for kids, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. But of course, you’ve every right to be. Sent to an early retail grave by the mixed messages it sent out, Viva Pinata wasn’t going to appeal to your average Gears of War punter but was far too complicated to be truly suitable for the young chidren it seemed to be aimed at. Snatch a quick glance at the box art and you’d be easily forgiven for expecting the game to be an upmarket version of Ubisoft’s Petz range. ’Viva Pinata: Filled with fun!’ claims the cheery introduction video, and as cynical as i’d like to be about the lyrics to the cute little jingle, there’s undeniably a lot of truth behind this bold and fuzzy statement. What it fails to tell you however, is that the Pinatas are very much eager to visciously eviscerate one another in order to greedily gorge on the ’fun’ that fills the other animals. Viva Pinata has a dark side, and this immediate realisation can be a fairly harrowing discovery...