Plants vs Zombies

By
Dave
 – May 13, 2009

plantsvszombieslogoGenre : Strategy
Publisher: PopCap
Players: 1
Retail Price: $20
Availability: PC, Mac

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Rumors began circulating a while back about PopCap developing a zombie themed game and today here we have Plants vs Zombies, which is easily one of their best releases to date. I was skeptical when I first heard about the title, because honestly how exciting can a game about Plants going up against Zombies really be? Well it turns out it can be pretty damn exciting, and once I started playing I couldn’t get myself to stop.

So if you haven’t heard anything about this game and you’ve only seen the title, I imagine the concept seems a bit far out. The game most closely resembles a tower defense game, but at the same time is vastly different from just about any other title in that genre. The main goal is to stop the zombies from making their way from the right side of the screen to your house on the left side of the screen. The only way to stop them is to use your incredibly large assortment of plants, and kill them before they make it across the lawn.

The concept seems simple enough, and the game does start out pretty easy with only your standard zombie, or maybe a couple with road cones on their heads. That simple gameplay becomes much more complex though as you progress to the later levels of the game where you’ll have to defend your house from much stronger zombie enemies like zomboni, who drives a zamboni out onto your lawn, or the dancing zombie, who summons backup dancers to help him. There are a ton of different zombies that each require a different strategy to defeat, and trying to customize your lawn to combat the numerous types of enemies can be an incredible task.

plantsvszombiesscreenshot11Like most tower defense games, in order to put out your plants you do have to perform some resource management. Plants cost sunlight to deploy, and you gain sunlight either from planting sunflowers or mushroom, or on daytime levels it drops from the sky. In addition to the sun that gets dropped by your plants, you’ll also want to be on the lookout for coins that can be dropped by zombies, which will allow you to purchase more powerful plants, and other items.

The main adventure mode will probably take you a few hours to beat as it contains fifty levels spread across a variety of scenarios. You begin with just an open lawn and later are forced to deal with swimming pools and fog. These additional obstacles in addition to the limited number of plants you are allowed to bring to the level, can make for a challenging gameplay experience. After you beat adventure mode you can then always play it again, but the second go around you’ll be in for a bit of a surprise.

If you get bored with the main adventure mode offerings, the game also features a variety of other minigames and challenge levels you can try your hand at. I was impressed with the variety of minigames and I love that they threw in things like Beghouled, which is a clone of Bejewled, except you need to match up the plants before the zombies eat them. There is also a survival mode that you unlock upon completing adventure mode, which tasks you with defending your house over the course of several levels, with each becoming more challenging.

Plants vs Zombies is another example of PopCap’s ability to create a simple yet incredibly complex game. If you thought Peggle was an addicting game, watch out for PvZ because I can just about guarantee that you’ll be spending large chunks of time playing when you should be doing other things. Heck, this review would have probably been up sooner if I was able to put the game away for more than five minutes at a time.