Video game review: Plants Vs. Zombies (PC)
Plants Vs. Zombies is a tower defense game created by PopCap Games for the PC as well as the Mac (an Xbox Live version is on the way next year and an iPhone app is about to hit iTunes) in which you defend your home from an army of shuffling zombies trying to cross your lawn, pool or roof.
Instead of using traditional weapons, however, you use packets of seeds for various defense-minded plants with wordplay-inspired names like “Pea Shooter” (a plant that spits peas like bullets) and “Wall-Nut” (a giant nut that blocks enemies who have to chew and claw their way through it).
The traditional concept of money has given way to the idea of collecting falling sunlight, which is used to “buy” a plant for your army. Sunlight also comes from Sunflower plants and Sun-Shrooms, which become absolutely essential for victory in levels that take place at night.
Like many of PopCap Games’ titles, Plants Vs. Zombies is easy to learn but hard to master. The game starts you off with a relatively easy assortment of enemies in the earlier levels where the zombies pretty much just shuffle along slowly – at worst, you contend with a zombie wearing a traffic cone on its head as a sort of helmet (it takes twice as many hits to take this one down).
Later on, however, you start seeing more athletic zombies like the Football Zombie that charges quickly across the field and the Pole Vaulting Zombie that can bypass your first line of defense as well as more dangerous zombies like the Jack in the Box Zombie that carries an explosive toy and the Miner Zombie who digs his way under your defenses to attack them from behind. There’s even a Dancing Zombie that bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain “thrilling” musical artist and summons four Backup Dancer Zombies for you to handle.
Indeed, your head will spin at times during the later levels when your screen is filled with a horde of advancing zombies and the rainstorm-like barrage of ammo going forth from your plants. It becomes very hectic as you scramble to collect all the sunlight as it pops out or drops, figure out where to place your available plants if you even have any room, and decide which of your soldiers to uproot if you don’t.
And that’s just the Adventure mode. There’s also a Survival mode unlocked when you pass level 50 of the Adventure mode, and it’s exactly what you expect if you’ve played other PopCap Games. The difficulty level is ratcheted way up but the rules of gameplay change a little bit – in between each wave of enemies, you’ll have the opportunity to select a whole new arsenal of plants to use with the defenses you’ve already established, which allows for interesting scenarios where your existing sunlight generators are going full steam, protected by your Pea Shooters, Threepeaters (Pea Shooters with three heads each of which fires at a different angle) and Tall-Nuts (like Wall-Nuts only, er, taller), so you can drop in the big guns like the Gatling Pea (shoots four peas at a time) and the Cob Cannon (catapult which hurls a cob of corn like a missile at a particular spot on the field with destructive results).
Finally, there’s a Mini-Game mode that includes relatively brief gaming jaunts that are tied to the concept of the main game but are otherwise standalone experiences. Some are twists on the gameplay of the core game – ZomBotany, for example, sees you defending your home against plant-zombie hybrids that require a somewhat different strategy than your standard, run-of-the-mill zombies – while others, like Wall-Nut Bowling where you roll Wall-nuts down each lane of the playing field (with some deflection physics to allow for multi-kill combos), are actually refresher levels interspersed within the main game. Still others are clever mash-ups like Beghouled, which is a cross-breed of the zombies from this game with the gameplay of PopCap’s most famous product, Bejeweled.
Plants vs. Zombies is a shining example of why PopCap Games is the most successful casual games company in the industry. The game is incredibly addictive (I often find myself suffering from “just one more level” obsessiveness) because of a simple yet brilliant game design that eases players into the more complex aspects of the gameplay by getting their feet wet with the basics first. The game never throws more than one new ally or enemy at you at once, allowing you to improve your strategy and skills at a more reasonable pace.
The well animated, cartoonish 2D graphics work perfectly in tandem with the appropriately campy soundtrack and sound effects to produce a game experience that is as wonderfully cheesy and funny as it is entertaining. Plants vs. Zombies is one of those games that can hook you for months like Tetris and Bejeweled did years ago, and at $20 retail price, it’s a no-brainer purchase.
Final score: 5 out of 5
Parent to parent
Plants vs. Zombies is a safe purchase for children. As simple as the overall gameplay design is, it might still be a little complex at the higher levels for younger children but the appealing cartoon graphics and the creative character designs would definitely be right up a kid’s alley. The “violence” in the game amounts to plants killing zombies by firing giant peas or cactus needles at them. There is no overt gore in the game although right before a zombie dies, its arm and head fall off and disappear.
If you want to be extra certain that the game is right for your kids, you can try out a few levels using their online trial game.
Experience this for yourself!
- Plants vs. Zombies (PC/Mac)
(Amazon)
- Plants vs. Zombies (iPhone):
