PC Game Review - Plant vs Zombies

The zombie apocalypse arrives, you are trapped in your house. What do you do? install barbed wire? emplaced weaponry? Not if you are in Plants vs Zombies! This is the one for you garden lovers with a hankering to slay the undead.

You might wonder why the game spawned such popularity at fist: as it boils down to tower defence, not like the 'dawn of the dead meets day of the triffids' crossover I had in mind.

However it differs greatly from all others in the genre, because the zombies do not wander down a pre-set winding path. Instead they just march across 6 lanes of your garden in their hordes, and you simply have to stop them with whatever plants you can get together. It has oodles of humour and charm.

You must choose the seeds you want to take for each level to defend your home, making strategic thinking quite important. all the more so as levels come in a few different flavours where some plants are more effective, creating some interesting game styles. This kind of variety sets this game above others of it's type. It enjoys a massive array of optional unlockables and alternative game modes to try, like zombie bowling (does exactly what you might be imagining), plain old survival and plenty of one off modes. All in all there are 20 mini games, 20 puzzle modes, and 11 survival modes. In the steam version you also have a pretty hefty assortment of achievements you can aim for.

At the end of most levels you discover a new type of plant. I could only assume this is because you (the unseen protagonist) are locked in the house engaged in some fairly intensive plant bio-engineering. The further you get the more entertaining and (usually) useful the plants become. This is compounded by the zombie hordes, who also get a new zombie type in most levels. The zombies come in a highly inventive and funny array of flavours. From Whacko-Jacko zombies* that can summon a thriller team of dancers to moonwalk across the lawn at you; to dolphin riding varieties clad in scuba gear. A zombie apocalypse is usually portrayed in games or movies as a pretty bleak experience. In pvz however, with it’s brightly coloured, cartoonish, graphics; it’s comical zombies; and it’s cheerful plants: bopping away to the music and gobbling up sunshine, it makes the whole affair completely fun and light hearted. I actually laughed aloud a couple of times, such as when you win a level you might get a crudely written note from the zombies poorly trying to persuade you to surrender or leave the house unguarded. One such note is also found in the in game help menu and reads: just sit there and don’t do anything. You win the game when the Zombies get to your houze.

It is not perfect. Once discovering a successful tactic it is difficult and usually pointless to deviate from this, but there remains a flexibility to try some new things. Similarly once a winning formula has been discovered the main campaign never becomes incredibly difficult.

This being said though, I found it hard to find fault with Plants versus Zombies. Starting off it really comes across as a fairly laid back game but with the constant variety it was difficult to resist the itch to 'just play the next level'... and quickly becomes quite absorbing. Try this if you don't know much about tower defence games, and it is different enough to entertain even those that may have become tired by them.

*The more I think about this, the more this seems ironic... or possibly gruesome. Whatever it is you have to remember MJ passed after this game was made.

This was a guest post by our friends at FraggerZine.

CaptainD - PC Gaming Blog

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