Plants vs. Zombies Game Review

The Nuts: Interesting plants and zombie characters, lovely graphics and audio, great character designs and animations, good attempt at offering variety with the limited story maps, fun for all ages and fantastic re-play value through additional game modes.

The Nutty: Small map sizes can feel restricting, campaign starts off very slowly and is fairly easy for too long, touch devices can suffer from from performance issues and some missed opportunities for other plant species [also has kept me waiting too long for a sequel :P ]

A few years ago I used to go to Starbucks once a week with a couple friends where we'd chill while shooting the breeze and as is pretty common place these days, we would often end up playing games on an "i" device. It was on one of these days when I was first introduced to Popcaps Plants vs. Zombies and almost immediately I fell in love with the title. It's a basic Real Time Strategy and Tower Defence game, you harvest a certain resource (in this case sunlight) and you use it to build/upgrade your Plants (these act as defences in your garden) to fight off the enemy, hoards of brain hungry Zombies. The overall concept itself is pretty simple, you just need to survive a certain number of waves to end the level but everything from the way the game is designed to the sounds, graphics and character animation are beautifully put together. You play as a house owner who is under siege by Zombies that wish to feast on your grey matter, your goal is to protect the property from the incoming attackers, which you'll do with the advice and guidance from one Crazy Dave. This funny and aptly named, eccentric mentor/supplier/fellow survivor, will teach you everything you need to know, to stop the Zombies from getting their feed. If the Zombies breach your defences and reach the front door, it's chow time for them and game over for you. So how do you stop this from happening I hear you ask? By selecting seeds before a level starts and then sowing/growing them during the game, obviously. I know it's probably not your first choice of weapon against the un-dead but you certainly can't deny the results.

Plants vs Zombies - Home Screen [PC]

When I got home I set about getting my own copy for PC and for the next couple months I spent a heck of a lot of time playing it. While there isn't a huge amount of content to the title, you can spend a surprising amount of time playing the game because of it's variety. Adventure mode acts as the campaign and it takes you through the various maps and their settings (day/night/fog), starting off in your front yard and eventually moving you to the back garden before taking you to the rooftop. It's where you'll also be gradually be introduced to the plethora of different plants and their uses as well as teaching you about the different types of zombies and their strengths/weaknesses. The first couple chapters of the game will teach you the actions that can take place, such as selecting and then sowing seeds, unfortunately these chapters are desperately slow pace if your not new to the genre and/or a fast learner. Thankfully the pace of the game does eventually pick up and in the later chapters you do experience some devilishly tricky levels, which might even get a bit frustrating to complete but that just makes it all the more worth while when you finally do beat it. It's good fun to complete the storyline and the chances are you'll end up completing Adventure mode more than once because you'll want to test out your newly acquired plants and upgrades. In addition to this, if you happen to end up playing Adventure mode for a third time, the game gets even trickier because Crazy Dave will pre-select certain plants for you. While not everyone will enjoy this change, those who wish to test their skills will revel in the challenge and it's also a pretty good way to learn new tactics on how to handle plants, that you might not have selected as often in previous runs.

Front Garden - Daytime

Back Garden - Nighttime with Fog

While playing you'll notice that coins are dropped randomly, the silver ones are worth 10 and the gold ones worth 50, it's not much but once you get together enough you can purchase supplies and equipment from Crazy Daves store. The thing you really want to keep an eye out for is the blue diamond, this is worth 1000 and will increase your bank account nicely but of course is not dropped very often. The items from the store include new plant types and upgrades for some existing one, these can't be unlocked by default and are expensive to buy but mostly worth their price tag. For example you can buy a double headed sunflower, this allows you to upgrade a normal single headed sunflower, which will then produce twice as much sun while still only using up one plot of land (space saving is invaluable in the game). There's also a really cool upgrade which can change two Kernel Pults into one Cob Cannon, unfortunately this will still take up two plots of land however it's damage output is huge, easily capable of taking out crowds of Zombies. After your first playthrough of Adventure mode, you should have ended up with enough money to buy all the plant species and upgrades from Crazy Dave's store i.e. extra seed slots, these can change the way you approach certain levels and will definitely make some of them that much easier to beat.

Crazy Dave's Store

As I mentioned earlier, once you're done with the storyline there are a variety of different game modes, which will have you occupied for many an hour more and these fall into three categories: Mini-Games, Puzzle and Survival. The first category as the name suggests is a collection of mini games, most make use of the plants and levels you experienced in Adventure mode but in ways you definitely wouldn't have played before. There are a few other games that use the characters from PvZ but apply them to other games that Popcap have also developed, the most recognisable probably being Beghouled, which is twist on the popular Bejeweled title. The second category consists of two unique game modes, one has you smashing open vases, which will then either produce a Zombie that begins to advance to your front door or some seeds that you can sow. The other mode turns the tables and let's you experience things from the Zombies point of view, using a limited amount of sunlight you need to deploy Zombie units to breach the front lines and chow down on brains at the end of each lane. The third category sets up some of the levels you faced in Adventure mode but makes them last a bit longer and throws more Zombies at you to deal with. Both Puzzle and Survival have a couple 'Endless' variants of their respective games, which basically allows you to play for as long as you can survive, a nice touch and one that will likely increase the time you spend playing this title. One slight problem with this feature (for you, not the game) is that the modes can become highly addictive as you set and then try to beat personal bests, as well as trying to outscore your friends of course. 

Survival Games Menu

 
The last mode that the title has to offer is the 'Zen Garden', occasionally while playing the game (Adventure mode or otherwise) certain gifts will be dropped for you to pick, these items will then be stored and/or can be used within your Zen garden. The garden is split into four areas: a greenhouse for your day plants, a night garden for your nocturnal plants, a fish tank for your aquatic plants and the Tree of Wisdom. The most commonly dropped gift are plants and these will be delivered as generic seedlings to your garden, after some nurturing via water/music/plant spray, they will bloom into one of the in game plant characters. This doesn't bring anything new to the game but it's nice to collect the different plant varieties, even if it's just to admire them. There is however one benefit of having a full garden, once fully grown the plants have the ability to produce money for a brief period of time everyday. While this sounds great, it's still a lot of effort to click each individual coin but there is something that can do the work for you. Introducing Stinky the snail, always found snoozing in a corner of the garden, you can tap his shell to wake him up and once awake will go about collecting the coins for you. Being a snail, his pace is pretty slow and by default he'll go back to sleep after ten minutes, so you'll always be better off collecting the coins manually. But if you feed him some Chocolate (another randomly dropped gift), he moves faster and will remain active for an hour, it's not a bad idea to leave the game running and let him do his thing but as a primary way of making money it's not the most efficient. The tree of wisdom is expensive to grow but each time it is fed, you are given a piece of knowledge related to the game, these tips and advice can be quite enlightening but given the age of the game, can be found from other sources (so save your money).

Zen Garden with Stinky The Snail

Tree Of Wisdom

 
There are few minor grips I have with the title but some of these might be just because I enjoyed the game soo much. The first thing is the lack of resource collecting plants, while you can defeat the multitude of Zombies with a plethora of offensive and defensive plant species, there's no plant types that can harvest sunlight on your behalf. I mean, why is it that there is a plant to automatically collect the randomly dropped Coins, which isn't crucial to your survival but not one for the all important sunlight? The very same sunlight that is also capped at 9999, which for long endless games is simply not high enough after a certain point. The second thing is that the gardens that serve as the front line, aren't very big, that is to say there's only soo much space that you can safely plant seeds both offensive and resource producing. This can make the game feel a bit restrictive and to an extent a bit repetitive because once you've formulated a tactic that works well, there is little incentive or need, to deviate from it. Following the same patterns over and over again i.e. planting your sun producing flowers at the rear, takes a bit of the challenge away and if anything just pre-designates half of your battlefield before the level has even begun. 

Twin Head Sunflowers and Cob Cannon

Speaking of sunlight, during some of the more hectic levels, making sure you keep a decent stock of sunlight while trying to co-ordinate your attack can be quite taxing on your clicking finger. I think an option to assign hot keys for the PC version would've been a nice but I guess in the grand scheme of things, it's probably not essential. Arguably catching sunlight is less of an effort if you're playing on a touch device but for PC and console gamers, having to tend to your plants and collect resources, can get a bit tiring on the harder levels and longer waves. It's a big missed opportunity to have a plant that automatically collects sunlight, like the magnet plant, which can be upgraded to attract Coins. Another thing that I also noticed after playing the PC version is that touch devices can seriously suffer from periods of very sluggish gameplay, in particular when playing endless game modes and campaign levels where there are lots of zombies attacking at any one time. I'm not sure how much stress this puts on those touch devices but it's slightly concerning when you notice a serious frame rate drop and you've only just hit double figures on endless survival. As I said these are only issues for me because I played the game quite a lot but they are still issues worth mentioning none the less. 

Pre-Selected Plants by Crazy Dave

Having said all this I enjoyed playing the game immensely, so much in fact that this particular title was one of the main reasons why I started making video tutorials in the first place and you can find those tutorials by visiting the page linked at the bottom of this article. If you haven't tried the game yet I really can't recommend it highly enough, it's available on pretty much all platforms and if you're curious but still not sold, I have no doubt that someone you know will already have it installed (or you could download the very limited demo). Give it a try and I'm willing to bet you'll be pleasantly surprised, then you too will be one of hundreds of thousands eagerly awaiting the next instalment ;) Recent releases of the game have also introduced a trophy list that you might want to tick off, as well as the ability to play the game with and/or against other human players [consoles only], something the original PC version did not have. Given the age and consequent prices of the game, not to mention the re-playability factors, you really can't go wrong with this purchase, no matter which platform you buy it for (though given the choice, a powerful touch device would be ideal). 

Plants vs. Zombies, is in my opinion, one of those few timeless games that you'll fondly remember long after you stop playing. To the point where you'll keep it installed, just in case you ever want to have another quick game and that one game, will almost certainly turn into a few more :D


Rating: Great/Amazing!

Reviewer: Sir_Alan_


Other Related Articles:
> Plants vs. Zombies Page [Contains the links to my video walkthrough tutorials]