While game developers tend to stick with the same genre for a series developer, Popcap Games managed to adapt the wildly popular mo bile series Plants vs. Zombies from a tower defense game to a third-person shooter on consoles. While keeping the humor and spirit of the original series alive, Popcap Games made a fun and sur prisingly deep third-person shooter.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare doesn’t completely abandon the tower defense genre. Instead, it’s a third-person shooter that keeps random tower defense game play elements to make a very strategic game.
Garden Warfare allows the player to pick from two teams: plants and zombies. Each team has four unique classes to pick from, that ex emplifies the zany mood the game creates.
One of the main strengths of Garden Warfare is that it isn’t too serious. The long distance shooting class for the plants is a cactus that fires its needles with extreme ac curacy at a distance. The zombies have a class, which are undead football players, using mini-guns that fire footballs.
By not taking itself too se riously, the simplicity of the game’s mechanics differen tiates it from other third-person shooters. Regardless, the game remains fun as the mechanics that are in place work well, and the game’s presentation is wonderfully executed.
The whimsy of the game is further amplified by the abili ty to unlock different cosmet ic items for each class. There can be things like electrified cactuses or just random su perficial changes.
Each class has a specific purpose though, and the plants and zombies both have a healing class, as well as a class that can create structures and lay down land mines. For a team to be effec tive, a mixture of classes is a requirement.
While Garden Warfare does have a standard team, death-match mode, where players work with their team to get a certain number of kills, the real standout game mode is the Gardens and Graveyards mode. The plants defend their gardens while the zom bies attempt to turn them into graveyards.
The team death match mode can be entertaining however, due to balancing issues with certain classes, a team can be easily overpow ered because of the ones they picked.
After a team captures one checkpoint, another appears until the zombie team either runs out of time or the plant team loses all their check points.
The plants can use pots to put down mini-plants to help them defend locations, heal or do other things, while the zombies can use plots of land to summon AI controlled zombies to shamble forth and attack the current garden.
Gardens and Graveyards is an incredibly fun and chal lenging point in the game. Plants must use all the tac tics they have to fight off the zombie horde, and the zom bies must learn to avoid plant traps and defenses.
However, even the most unorganized zombie team can take out a few gardens too easily in the game mode, leaving players wondering whether or not the zombie team is actually overpowered.
One small annoyance is the game’s card system. Players get coins for playing and can use these to buy packs of cards that can have cosmetic items for plants to use in de fense game types or zombies to use for attacks.
The packs that have the most worthwhile things tend to cost a lot, and it can be a big hindrance in the game if no one has any plants to plant or zombies to rise up because they did not buy card packs recently.
Garden Ops is another en joyable game mode where four players take on the role of four plants and defend a garden against 10 waves of zombies. Teamwork is key in this mode, and on the fifth and tenth waves giant boss zombies appear, which can often mean a quick loss for an unprepared team.
Garden Warfare uses a sim ple artistic style with vibrant colors that has a surprising amount of detail on all sys tems. While the PC and Xbox One versions really shine, the Xbox 360 version looks great as well.