Plants vs Zombies is one of the best games you can buy right now, and you have absolutely no reason to do anything but buy it and enjoy it. One of Popcap’s more high profile releases, this tower defense game combines the best parts of its venerable genre with the best item collecting and trade-in tropes from other games. This is a game that makes “one more turn” look like an egregious understatement. You’ll play this game until you’ve beaten it, and then you’ll play it again, and you’ll play its minigames.
To say that PvZ is merely a “great tower defense game,” is selling it short in so many different ways. Take for instance the game’s titular setting, a domestic scene so cutesy and adorable it can’t help but capture the unending devotion of the pens of the gaming press. You are a benevolent gardener, planting various vicious, and amusing flora in your front yard (and later your backyard and roof). Unfortunately for you, a zombie invasion is taking place.
Luckily for you, your plants are gifted with the ability to resist, destroy, and otherwise hamper the groaning, slouching invasion forces.The zombies themselves come in various formats, from the simplest, slowest shambling corpses to amusing, unusual zombies, like the dangerous, dancing Michael Jackson look-alike, or the unpleasant bungie-jump zombies. Still, I could be describing the disparate unit types of any tower defense game, like Defense Grid or Fieldrunners.
What sets Plants vs Zombies apart is its implementation and its purity of vision.PvZ takes place on a tightly restricted plane. Unlike the previously mentioned tower defense games, which task you with creating obstacles made of towers across sprawling open spaces, PvZ takes place (for the most part) on a 5 X 7 space. From time to time you can expand or lose spaces, but for the most part that’s all you have. Zombies will lumber in from off screen, impeded and aided by various obstacles and aids.You start in the front yard, the house at your back, the street in front of you.
At first you’ll have an easy time of it, building pea pods to shoot enemies, sun flowers to collect sun (building currency), and killing slow zombies. Then the game throws zombies with tra
ffic cone hats (tough) and pole-vaulters (can jump over one obstacle) at you. You are given new tools to defeat these zombies, and are then slowly introduced to new zombies.In between new zombies, new areas (a backyard with a difficult-to-defend pool) and new strategies, the game throws minigames and alternate modes at you. These range from assembly line random power-ups (how do you halt the zombie horde with peapods that only shoot backwards?) to the slow, rewarding (money-wise) zen garden minigames.
deckard47
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Well, they've figured out a way to spend their time making good, focused games... They don't have huge amounts of pressure coming from the Press (like EA Redwood's follow-up to Dead Space, sat), so they can try to make the game they want, not the game every single person who reads Kotaku and Joystiq wants them to make. Also they kind of kick ass. |
OneNerdyGirl
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Popcap is a great company. They may make what some would call casual games or time wasters but let me tell you! When I start playing one of their games I tend to get totally sucked in! No matter the category they always make something good. I'll have to check this one out too! |
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