7.9 KiB
| title | date | score | game_release_year | howlongtobeat_id | howlongtobeat_hrs | game_name | game_developer | game_genre | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plants vs. Zombies (Game Of The Year) | 2023-05-05T09:33:00+02:00 | 5 | 2009 | 7106 | 8.2 | Plants vs. Zombies | PopCap Games | Puzzle |
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The most popular PopCap game everybody and their grandmother played back in the day was certainly the tile-matching browser game Bejeweled. I can vividly remember not paying attention during computer classes in high school precisely because of this. It must have netted PopCap millions: not long after that, they fire-started their acquisition rounds, and in 2011, EA bought PopCap for a whopping $650 million.
But in-between the chaos of money, George Fan worked with PopCap to first help publish his fish simulator Insaniquarium and in 2009 develop one of the most iconic tower defense games ever created: Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ). Who knew that plants would be able to fight off hordes of zombies that are trying to invade your home? I think the concept is beyond brilliant! PopCap, known for their accessible puzzle games, also wanted to appeal to "real" gamers this time, meaning PvZ was designed for both a casual and hardcore audience, which is unusual for a tower defense game. I don't think I know anyone who hasn't played this: it's instantly recognizable, it's goofy, and above all, it's highly addicting.
The premise is very simple: all sorts of zombies slowly but surely start scrambling their way from right to left, towards your back/front yard or on the roof, during day and night. You collect sun energy by clicking on sun symbols that during day fall out of the sky and are generated by sunflower plants. These in turn can be transformed into plants by selecting a card in one of your available slots: a standard peashooter costs 100 sun energy. Place it on your lawn and it will auto-attack approaching zombies. Survive one to three waves each level and you'll earn money to expand your flora repertoire.
In Adventure mode, your crazy neighbor Dave---who calls himself Crazy Dave BECAUSE I'M CRAAAZYY!---helps you learn the ropes of the game by gradually unlocking more potent plants, while the enemies also gradually become more cheeky. A repeater for example shoots twice as many peas that'll help deal with Cone Zombies that have extra protection, but if you place a burning tree in front of them, the peas will catch fire and do double damage. But then there's a Pogo Zombie who simply hops over your plants that can be countered with a Magnet Shroom: most zombies have specific strengths and weaknesses which can be studied in the almanac after encountering new species.
Crazy Dave has a shop where even more cards can be bought. Wait, what, cards? That's right; deploying a plant means selecting a card in one of the six (but expandable) slots. According to Wikipedia, the mechanic was inspired by Magic: the Gathering, but I fail to see the resemblance: contrary to for example Floppy Knights, there's no "deck" or "hand", the cards merely serve as a way to activate a "skill" like in MMORPGs as they also come with cooldowns.
The game is fairly straightforward, and that's exactly the brilliance of it. Pair that with Laura Shigihara's cheerful piano strokes that quickly become earworms, the obvious pun and humor put into it, and the cartoony look powered by the "PopCap Engine" and you've got yourself a goofy looking super-polished---and accessible---game. Critique such as the repetitiveness can be easily dismissed: tower defense games are designed to be repetitive!
Also, PvZ is chuck full of different game types. Adventure mode serves as the base which will take about eight hours to plow through and unlock other modes such as various mini-games and puzzles, including a very creative reverse PvZ one---ZvP, where you deploy zombies instead of plants. If you can't get enough of the regular gameplay, there's endless Survival mode. In every single session, there's coins to grab and trade with Dave for plant upgrades, even though after a good play session or two you'll manage to buy most Dave has to offer.
The bright graphics, sadly locked at a 800x600 resolution, is another reason to boot up PvZ: whether it's the funny shuffling animation of the zombies or the a telling "BRRAAINNZZ" sound after the launch of the assault, PvZ is just a joy to play. Granted, there aren't particularly complex gameplay mechanics involved here. In that sense, I view PvZ as the Animal Crossing of the tower defense games: it's strangely relaxing to fire up a session.
The only thing I perhaps get tired of after a week of replaying this 2009 classic is the click-fest required to gather sun energy. The suns---and coins, for that matter---aren't automatically collected and literally have to be clicked on, and if it's day, they appear at random places. In practice, this sometimes means frantically moving the mouse cursor back and forth the top bar where your actions, the leftmost region of the lawn where you usually place your plants, are and the rest of the battlefield where the coins and energy are. I tried playing this in bed with a laptop on my belly and can't recommend it.
There is a solution for that, namely the Nintendo DS port. Besides the heavy compression of both graphics and music, the gameplay is exactly the same, and the suns are perhaps easier to collect with the help of the stylus. Unfortunately, the top screen is barely used, and by cutting animation frames and compressing graphics, a big part of the charm has been lost. If you're looking for a mobile version, you're probably better off with the iOS port.
The worst part of PvZ is its 2013 sequel, Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, only released for iOS and Android. By then, PopCap was already acquired by EA and they obviously smelled money as this is one of those atrocious "freemium" games that start out free to play but require multiple injections of money to unlock content such as special plants or even levels/worlds. It's very sad to see such a move: I'd happily pay $25 for the full game, but instead, what we're left with is time- and money-locked content to fuel the addiction. Especially considering PvZ 2 contains a lot more variation in terms of plants and world themes. EA could have re-released the fully unlocked game as a remastered one but somehow the successor was never seen as anything but a mobile game.
The Plants vs. Zombies games eventually evolved from a cheery tower defense game to a multiplayer focused shooter called Garden Warfare that nobody really wanted, so when EA announced Plants vs. Zombies 3 in 2019, there was a glimmer of hope, until it was squandered by two words: "mobile" and "microtransactions". EA will never learn. The art direction also took a wrong turn, going from charming to a cheap looking plastic, as you can see in this YouTube critique video.
As for the Game of the Year Edition, there's a Zombievatar menu added that generates a useless zombie avatar, and that's about it. The GOTY Steam Cloud feature even managed to corrupt my save... Other minor fixes are barely noticeable.
If you like popping zombie heads with vegetables, stick to the lovely 2009 original. Everything else is garbage, even though they might contain good ideas.