The Fifth Gate Game Review

 Download The Fifth Gate for the PC

 Download The Fifth Gate for the Mac

Watch a demo video of the PC game! (Mac version)

Eden is trapped in a series of 5 magical gardens and must escape by unlocking the The Fifth Gate! Use your strategy and time management skills to grow plants, kill pests, harvest the right mix of flowers and create the most profitable potions. Help Eden as she completes quests and makes enough money to secure freedom from her captor in this fast-paced floral time management game!

At the start of the game, Eden wakes up to find herself in a mysterious garden. As she tries to figure out how she got there and how to escape, she meets the owner of the garden: an evil-looking magical nymph. Apparently, the nymph brought Eden to the garden so she could help maintain and grow it. She was also warned that the last assistant tried to escape, and had to be "dealt with". There is still hope for Eden though; the nymph promises to unlock the fifth gate and let Eden go once she manages to successfully cultivate all 5 gardens.

The story in The Fifth Gate might be slightly cheesy (a magical nymph who is able to kidnap people needing help with a garden?), but the gameplay is refreshingly fun and innovative. The game requires a mix of fast reflexes, strategic planning and the ability to make lightning-fast decisions on which action will provide the most benefits. Its unique features make it quite different from most of the time management games out there.

There are 5 gardens in Fifth Gate, each of which require you to complete over a dozen quests (or levels) in order to progress. Each garden features a different theme of plants, including South American and even alien themes. The game consists of 2 main phases: the harvesting and planning phases. The harvesting phase is the time management phase. You need to click on flowers when they sprout in order to harvest them, click on the plants when they need water, and then keep clicking on pests to kill them before they kill the plants. Each harvesting phase gives you a limited amount of time to get everything done before the phase ends. In addition, the amount of flowers you can harvest is limited by the size of your storage area, and the amount of plants you can water is limited by the amount of water in your watering can.

The planning phase is where all the strategic decisions are made. Time stops in this phase, and you can slowly plan what's the most efficient thing to do. You can use coins to refill your watering can, upgrade the amount of flowers you can store, expand your garden or grow more plants. But where do you get the coins to do all this? Each flower that you harvested can be sold for coins. However, a more profitable option would be to combine the flowers to create a variety of potions and then sell those potions. These potions will always net you more coins than selling the individual flowers themselves.

In each garden, you usually start with one type of plant. After completing quests (which usually involve earning enough coins, or collecting enough flowers, or making a potion), you will gain access to two more types of plants, and each of your plants will be upgraded to produce 3 different grades of flowers. This is important because you will need specific amounts of flowers of the specific grade in order to create your potions.

This is where good strategic and planning abilities are required. You will need to figure out which potions you think will be the most profitable for you. You will then need to decide how many of each plant you need in your garden to produce the required combination of flowers. Good planning is also required in the harvesting phase. Usually, the amount of flowers you can harvest is not limited by the number of plants in the garden, but by the amount of storage space you have. So you will need to prioritize which flowers you want to harvest and which ones you are going to ignore. For example, if you need grade 2 roses and grade 3 lavenders to make your best potion, those flowers will become your top priority and you should ignore other flowers if your storage is close to filling up.

The Fifth Gate contains a unique blend of time management, reflex, strategy and planning elements. It may not be an entirely original concept, but the various differences from the typical time management games make this game fresh and exciting. Overall, The Fifth Gate looks like it has mixed the time management and strategy game genres quite successfully, and is a nice enjoyable package. Get the Mac version here.

Rating: 4.0/5.0  

Watch a demo video of the PC game! (Mac version)

 Download The Fifth Gate for the PC

 Download The Fifth Gate for the Mac

Related PC Games at Big Fish Games:

The Fifth Gate

Kelly Green Garden Queen

Burger Bustle

Wiki

For a complete list of time management game reviews, visit our Review List page.