I have had a massive amount of respect for the crew over at Popcap ever since they came out with Bookworm Adventures, the game that gave you higher scores based on the size of your vocabulary. The simplicity of the mechanics in Bookworm, combined with the depth of the game's nuances showed that this was a company that knew what they were doing in attempting to grab the casual game market as well as the upper echelons (I hesitate to use the term hardcore gamer, given the Halo/Call of Duty/Gears of War bullshit that gets associated with such a label). So suffice to say, I was intrigued when all the hype about their latest offering came my way, and have finally had enough time with it in order to speak on it adequately.
So with as absurd a title as Plants vs. Zombies, you may be wondering what in the hell this game is. It is a very simplified tower defense game with you guarding the left side of the screen with various plant units from the attacking zombie hordes approaching from the right side of the screen. Each plant serves a different function. Some have obvious offense capabilities, some are designed to protect from special zombies that appear in later levels, and there are standard support plants (the biggest being sunflowers/sunshrooms, which produce the sunlight you need to construct other units, in a very simplified Red Alert/Starcraft fashion). Each wave of zombies will last for an increasingly longer amount of time, and it's up to you to maintain your garden to keep these undead bastards from intruding on your homestead.
A relatively normal scene in the outset of P's vs Z's
Right off the bat, it is impossible to not notice the game's characteristically "Popcap" charming animations. They even manage to make the shambling undead look kind of adorable. Pictured above is one of the earlier levels (and I will say I looked for a screenshot demonstrating better strategy than the one I found, but couldn't pull it off), which provide a very gentle introduction to the game. On your first playthrough, different plant units are introduced as they become relevant, which makes figuring out when to use them later in the game much easier. As you progress you encounter nighttime, which forces you to rely on different, fungus based units, as they cost less sunlight, foggy nighttime, which forces you to keep up outposts so that you can view the battlefield more adequately, and your own rooftop, which forces you to place a pot down before any unit can be placed due to lack of soil. The game has no difficulty settings, which does become frustrating to anyone who is used to playing tower defense games, as there is a definite formula for victory that is relatively simple to figure out (hint: don't do whatever the dumbass in the above picture is doing) but as a result, it is a title that is VERY appealing to the casual crowd. I certainly didn't beat every level on the first try, mind you, but as someone who is pretty well versed in tower defense games, the campaign ceased to be much of a challenge for me after about 3 levels (30 stages or so out of 50). But what is important to bear in mind is that Popcap keeps in mind as their demographic is "the everyman", and they are good at what they do. Even newcomers to the genre will find themselves joyfully mowing down the undead like a pro in almost no time at all.
In addition to the main campaign (which is just a series of progressively harder zombie waves, changing settings every 10 stages) the game offers a few other modes. There are challenge modes, which provide a certain set of circumstances above and beyond the campaign (for example, a mode where the zombies are invisible, or a mode where everything moves twice as fast), puzzles where you attempt to breach plant defenses by strategically placing zombie units on the board, and survival modes which are exactly what they sound like. All of these modes, while never really differentiating from what you learn in the main campaign, provide just enough variety for you to keep coming back to the game, which is good, because the main game stagnates at a somewhat alarming rate. See, when you beat the game once, on your second playthrough, your friendly helper/shopkeeper Crazy Dave places three random plants in your inventory every round, which in theory adds a new dimension of play to the game. The thing is, if you have the game's system figured out, this doesn't actually affect you that much and just becomes kind of annoying, especially since extra item slots cost a LOT of money (which you do not accumulate quickly). So if you spend one playthrough working towards buying one slot, only to have three taken away, you still have a net loss of two, so it starts to itch in the back of your head: "why the hell did I bother with this bullshit?" But being the intrepid reviewer I am, I played through the game a second time, figuring that the third time would be the charm and I could finally dominate like I wanted to. I beat the game twice and was greeted on my third playthrough with... the exact same scenario: three random plants in the inventory and identical zombie waves. It was around this point that the number of shits that I gave could be said to be "zero".
Fuck you Crazy Dave. Right
In your crazy ass.
The game also hosts a Harvest Moon -type minigame called the "Zen Garden", where you can collect and cultivate plants, and the more you cultivate them, the more money they give you so that you can buy more things. This was where the game really lost me. I like accruing a bunch of crap in game, don't get me wrong, but when the point of accruing money is to buy better units (which you absolutely do not need to beat the game) so that you can beat the game again and accrue money to buy more units so that you can beat the game so that you... you get the idea. The bottom line is, in spite of the initial loads of fun I had with this game, it simply stopped presenting me with anything interesting or new after I beat it twice and completed the challenges (which, while an entertaining diversion, will not take you that long to beat).
But this game wasn't really meant for my ilk. Not as a long term investment anyway. Like I mentioned above, Popcap makes games that attempt to be accessible to everyone, and for that level of success they should be heartily commended. If you are the type of person who has not particularly cared about any of the games I've written about in this site's history, you should check out this one, because I have yet to meet anyone, big-time gamer or civilian, who does not have a lot of fun with this game, and if you are someone who doesn't really care about "beating" a game and just want a fun diversion to head to every once in a while, then this is the game beyond the browser flash crap you have been playing, and it will scratch your itch for a while. Just don't expect it to happen forever.
P.S.
One final note I will make. While I cite that this game is available for PC and Mac, it is also available for iPhone and iPad (as Popcap is kind of in bed with Apple). I didn't mention this before because, well, given that I sold my soul for a Klondike bar earlier in the year (perhaps a poor investment in retrospect) I couldn't sell my soul to Apple for any of their equipment. I've heard that the iPhone version is somewhat laggy in later stages, but fun, and the iPad version is the full game and the touch screen works very well for the game. So there are those options available. If you're scared to use a real computer.
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