Review: Plants vs Zombies – (brain) Bite-sized gaming
It’s been about two weeks now since we’ve installed and been playing Popcap’s newest hit – Plants vs Zombies! and over those weeks, many hours have been spent vigilantly growing a monster garden to defend my house (and brain) from a never ending zombie onslaught. As with their previous hits, most recently, Peggle, Popcap has pulled through again delivering a great game that can be played in short bursts and is full of humor, clever graphics and classic Popcap-style music.
Plants vs Zombies is primarily set in your home’s back yard where you grow a garden of angry plants which assist you in fighting off the zombies using a variety of weapons including peas, butter, cabbage, watermelons, walnuts, fire, mushrooms and pumpkin shells.. to name a few. The main adventure mode of the game encompasses 50 levels in 5 zones: Backyard, Backyard with water, Backyard night time, Backyard night time with water and your roof where the zombies make their final assault.
PvZ is a unique take on a growing genre of short-duration gaming known as a Tower Defense. Tower Defenses (or Mauls) started as a Warcraft III custom game (similar to DotAs – see our review of DemiGod) where players build autonomous Towers, which can be anything from actual arrow-shooting towers to a recreation of a cartoon character that shoots snowballs, that shoot mindlessly at creatures that walk through them on a static path. PvZ changes the classic TD setting by giving the player 5 rows to fill with plants and having zombies randomly spawn in any of the lanes. There are only a few select plants that can cover multiple lanes; so building the plants in the proper order from the beginning is important in ensuring your brain’s safety.
Overall, the adventure mode took probably 4 to 5 hours to complete and was actually a little too easy to complete in my opinion. There were only a handful of levels that I restarted due to bad placement initially and there were no levels that I outright lost where a zombie ate my brain. I can understand the intent of designing a game mean to be played in small increments to be easier; players would be less motivated to replay a level if they only had a few minutes to play and difficult levels that go on for 5+ minutes would be undesirable. However, for the mode hard-core gamers among us, at least giving an option to play the adventure mode on a Hard difficulty (right now, there is no difficulty selection) for a bit more of a challenge.
Along with protecting your home, one of the primary aspects of the game is collecting money (small coins that pop up on the screen from time to time) which is used to buy a wide variety of products from your neighbor, Crazy Dave, to enhance different aspects of game play. One of the first things you can purchase are enhancements to the plants in your garden. There are over 40 plants you can acquire, plus additional upgrades, and at the start of each level you can only 6 (or more if you buy the proper upgrade), so there is never a lack of thought that can go into the inital planning for your garden. For a full list of plants, check out: http://jayisgames.com/walkthroughs/plants-vs-zombies Besides new plants to grow, there are various other enhancements you can buy with the coins you collect to buy items usable long beyond the adventure.
Where the game really begins to shine is once the adventure mode has been completed. There are a slew of mini-type-games that will keep you occupied long after the adventure has ended and a great reward system to entice you to keep playing. Once you’ve completed the adventure, you start to gain access to Puzzles, Survival Mode, Minigames and a Zen Garden (tended by a lethargic snail). Completing these games earns money, special Zen Garden plants and trophies and will take considerably more time to complete than the initial adventure while providing a lot of entertainment and classic Popcap game references.
Overall, Plants vs Zombies is another instant classic from Popcap that I would recommend to anyone whether a fan of classic Tower Defense games or not. They do a great job of walking you through the initial game play without providing any type of manual or instructions, and, once you have got a basic concept of the game, allow you to create massive armies of zombie battling greenery!
EPIC!
Buy Plants vs Zombies (or get the free tiral) at: http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz/
