Reviewed by Meagan Lemons
I’m a closet casual gamer. I love talking about how good the latest installment of a certain series is or how a certain sequel game compares to its original counterpart, but at the end of the day, sometimes I just need to unwind with a game I can pick up for thirty minutes before I have to cook dinner or write a paper. Imagine my surprise, then, when I picked up Plants vs. Zombies for the first time, expecting to play for an hour at most, then looking up five hours later and wondering where my evening went… for a week straight.
The premise for the game is simple; there has been an outbreak of zombies in your town and you must defend your house and your brain from the onslaught of undead. But rifles and baseball bats are things of the past. In order to defend yourself in Plants vs. Zombies, you’ll be relying on – you guessed it – plants.
Each plant has its own way of helping keep the zombies at bay. Peashooters, for example, shoot peas at zombies from a distance to damage them while Wall-nuts provide a defense for your other plants by standing in the zombies’ way. You’ll need to collect lots of Sun during each stage to “purchase” your plants, which is provided by Sunflowers you can plant as well. At the beginning of each stage, you’ll be able to pick a number of different plant types from the selection screen to take with you into battle against the undead, and you’ll have to choose carefully because each zombie type requires a different type of plant to best defeat it. But no matter the type, they’ll all try to eat their way through your garden or avoid your plants altogether to reach your house.
The game’s main attraction is the adventure mode. In this mode, there are five levels with ten stages each. Each level introduces new elements that add to the difficulty and puts your zombie-fighting skills to the test. As you progress through the adventure, you’ll unlock different, and often more powerful, plants to use which will come in handy against the increasingly powerful zombie onslaught. Every five levels or so, you’ll be able to play a mini-game instead of a regular stage, which helps keep things from getting monotonous. The mini-games range from playing a stage almost completely in the dark to zombie bowling.
Some of these mini-games and a wide variety of others can be unlocked to play any time by playing through the adventure or completing other mini-games. Some are more fun, and less frustrating, than others, but they all feel different and provide a lot of varied zombie-killing experiences. Some are even modeled after other classic PopCap games such as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium (imagine zombies in scuba gear).
There is also a “Zen Mode” in which you can grow plants in your backyard greenhouse. The plants you keep here, if kept happy with frequent watering and fertilizing, will spit out coins you can collect to spend on additional plant types to use in the main game as well as other special items. The downside is that you can only harvest coins when Zen mode is active, but this is easily circumvented by running it in the background while you do other things. You can buy a snail that will collect all of the coins for you, allowing you to “set it and forget it”, as it were, only having to check on him every once in a while to make sure he hasn’t fallen asleep on the job.
Plants vs. Zombies has a lot of personality that helps set it apart and define it as something other than just another casual game. From the humorous descriptions of the plants and zombies found in the Almanac to the various “modes” you can activate – one word: “moustache” – the attention paid to every detail definitely shows. When you need a break from zombie attacks, there is plenty of reading material to keep you busy, and you may even learn some helpful information in the process.
Honestly, there aren’t many negative things I can say about this one. It could be longer than fifty stages, or at least have more variety, as there are only three distinct areas to defend – two of them you will defend during the day and night, adding up to the five levels. There are a lot of mini-games and survival stages to make up for the short adventure mode, and you can even play through adventure mode multiple times, but really, I would have liked to see a longer main game.
Plants vs. Zombies is one of those rare casual-meets-serious games that has a wide audience base, appealing to casual gamers, Tower Defense junkies, and zombie fans alike. And with fairly low system requirements, it’ll run flawlessly on a netbook, so almost anyone will be able to install it. (But sorry, Grandma. I don’t think your old Compaq running Windows 98 will quite make the cut.) It’s a great game packed with lots of fun and originality that will sink its teeth into you and won’t let go until you’re shuffling around moaning “Braaaaaaains!”