Review: Plants Vs. Zombies

Posted by Brad T on February 18th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags: Plants vs Zombies

Plants vs. Zombies came out on PC back in 2009. I had a great time wasting time back when it came out, but hows it fare on my PSN?

PVZ is a tower defense game. Hailing from the folks at PopCap, you know from the startup screen what you’re in for; an addictive outing that will have you sinking some serious hours into it. Things start out simple enough, build a couple sunflowers, build a couple peashooters, rinse and repeat. Level by level, difficulty increases which means more zombie types and more weapon types. The zombie types are both incredibly creative and hilarious, yet remain to not get too aggravating. This means that a difficulty curve never ramps up to hit you in the face. That of course isn’t to you won’t run into some sticky situations…

Over the course of the adventure mode, you do battle over your backyard, your front yard, and then finally your roof. Each locale lends itself (or takes away) a certain type of strategy to the levels. For example, when playing at night time, you’ll have access to fungus type weapons, which have their own pros and cons. The most disappointing of which is that during daytime levels, they’ll be asleep. So you get this sweet armory of different attacking plant types, and then when the sun is up, you can’t use half of them. Win/Lose.

As you progress through adventure mode, you’ll begin unlocking some of PVZ’s multitude of other gameplay options. This includes coop, vs, survival, zen garden, puzzle, and minigame modes. You won’t get them in a hurry however, as the pacing towards getting these are a bit off. If you want the extra stuff, you need to play through the majority of the game. This is lame if you’ve already played through PVZ somewhere else. I loved some of the mini games as they are based off of other popcap games, like heavy weapon and bejeweled. One of the things new to this version of the game is tied to the trophies available. For each tropher you grab, your crazy neighbor puts decorations on your “lawn”. Go onto the online leaderboards and compare your lawn to friends of yours. If you see mine, I have a futuristic house with all sorts of crazy lawn ornaments. Compared to Ben’s quaint starter home, I’m livin the good life.

This game is the prototypical tower defense game, with something here for everyone. Somehow the game still feels fresh and retains its luster. My only complaint is that I wish this outing offered more things I hadn’t already seen before.

For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.