Nurture your garden, raise animals, give them names, and then feed them to each other: despite the sunshine and green grass, Viva Piñata has always been quietly shocking. Sure, this is a game that lets you make friends with a Fudgehog – but if that relationship doesn’t work out, you can also batter him over the head with a shovel and watch as his insides are picked apart by his furry playmates.

Rare’s primary colours may suggest a game that’s both simple-minded and somewhat twee, but the title’s morbid fascination with the pragmatic violence that lies at the heart of nature means the original found time to explore some surprisingly meaty themes along the way, with the death of a simple Quackberry carrying far more weight than the disappearing corpses of a hundred COD infantrymen. Happily, while the sequel has made the game easier to get stuck into, deep down, Trouble In Paradise sees the series remaining as brilliantly perverse as ever, and an hour’s play will no doubt find you with blood on your shovel once more as you serve up innocent Mousemallows as lures to Syrupents, and slaughter your excess Whirlms with abandon.

And even if the game may traumatise any children who play it, at least this time they’ll be able to get further into the candy-coloured bloodbath without being overwhelmed by fiddly menus, obtuse tutorials and unforgiving pacing. Although the core mechanics remain the same, the new Just For Fun mode tugs the emphasis away from multi-tasking and layout optimisation and towards checking out the range of available wildlife, giving you a much bigger garden from the off and providing fewer of the game’s hurdles, such as attacks from Ruffians and regular visits from Sour Piñata raid-parties. Elsewhere, a new tutorial draws you into the main game far more comfortably, and the option to move your cursor outside of the garden perimeter slims down the UI by allowing options such as crating and dispatching your piñata to escape from the menus and appear as physical objects. It also opens up the often claustrophobic world of the first game, with new arctic and desert locations which can be visited to lay traps for more exotic animals.

Alongside this, there are the expected additions, including new piñatas, new toys and accessories, and a range of solidly crafted minigames. Trouble In Paradise also features co-op play, supporting two local players or four over Xbox Live. While the ensuing action is likely to turn your well-ordered lawn into a war zone of splinters and twigs, as the garden owner you can at least decide what level of control to grant any visitors, allowing them a full suite of powers or merely giving them the opportunity to watch your careful spadework.

Most of the time, however, this remains a sequel with a suitably Darwinian focus on simple refinement. Part trowel ’em up, part collectathon and part ghoulish, open-air restaurant sim, Viva Piñata may still be too quirky for some, but if you’ve got the stomach for another round of Sparrowmint butchery, it’s hard not to recommend another trip to the bottom of the garden.

8/10