The game's simpilicity makes it accessible, but not for everyone.
For nearly eight years, the Bejeweled series has been lending a helping hand to procrastinating students, husbands, wives, employees and employers everywhere. It wasn't until the later release of Peggle, however, that PopCap would truly step up and threaten to put an end to real-life as a concept in its entirety. With the unprecedented amount of buzz surrounding Peggle's release, it really doesn't come as any surprise to me that PopCap's latest foray into stealing our souls has garnered such a significant amount of attention and hype.
Plants vs. Zombies is in essence, a proud, simplified, whimsical installment in the ever-popular tower defense genre. As gangs of marauding zombies have seemingly become the norm in middle-class suburbia, the only logical thing for any afflicted citizen to do is to equip one's yard with deceptively cutesy, malevolent agricultural minions.
From the incredibly absurd title to the comically animated undead that plague nondescript lawns, it's easy to tell that Plants vs. Zombies has been developed to be entertaining in the most extreme sense of the word. Often, zombies will leave written notices of their coming onslaught or to attempt to coerce emergence from the plant-barricaded home. A neighbor called Crazy Dave (he's Crazy!!) pops up at odd times with a disturbingly acute knowledge on the effects of plants when applied to shambling flesh-eaters. These attempts at humor aren't quite as resonated as they seem intended to be, but they're certainly force a few smiles or chuckles every now and then.
The actual game is played on your own front lawn, which apparently consists of six lanes up which zombies travel toward your home. The initial stages of the game start off with fewer than that, but quickly throw in the full extent of the real estate that you'll be given to deal with. At first the game isn't overly complex, but as more and more different types of zombies are introduced into the fold, things can rapidly get out of control as the missions progress.
At the start of each stage you'll be allowed to select seven different types of seeds to use against your attackers. Your collection of different sorts of seeds starts very small, but progressively expands to a point where it becomes necessary to forge a specific personal play style to assist in deciding which ones to bring into the game. Many of the seeds exist as zombie-specific weaknesses, such as a tire-destroying plant that stops those pesky lawnmower-operating in their tracks, or smoke-shooting mushrooms that easily pass through screen door obstructions.
The game changes a bit depending on the time of the day. While the sun is up, solar energy is far more plentiful. Solar energy acts as the resource expended to construct plants, and is gathered from the sky during daylight, as well as sunflowers. At night however, solar energy doesn't drop from the sky, but still can be gathered from sunflowers. Also changing at night is your arsenal. During the day, the weaker--but cheaper--mushrooms aren't available to use, but at night they are. Also present at night are graves, obstructing tiles from being used and occasionally giving rise to a ghoul or two. These object can be destroyed by a certain type of seed, but given the limited amounts of seeds that can be brought into a stage, it's up to the player to decide if it's worth it.
Outside of the campaign mode, Plants vs. Zombies sports a variety of mini-games ranging from wall-nut bowling to a slot machine mode. Some of them are easy, some are fun, and some are frustratingly challenging. The purpose of the mini-games seems to be the gathering of additional money to use in the campaign. Money is used to purchase seed upgrades and additional seed slots from Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies, as well as a few other perks.
After playing the game for many hours, the only observation I made that could be considered an issue for some gamers is the difficulty. For the hardcore crowd that seems to be slowly trickling into the casual gaming market, the game isn't really going to pose any sort of challenge. However for the casual audience, there actually might be just a little too much going on with the screen at any given time. In this sense, it seems difficult to gauge who exactly it is that should be playing this game.
From the outset, it's very obvious that Plants vs. Zombies doesn't take itself at all seriously. Like Bejeweled and Peggle before it, the game really is just another small stride made in PopCap's name toward the domination of anyone and everyone's free time. There are certainly games out there that are similar, but somehow this experience remains unique. Given the price tag and the amount of hours you're likely to spend playing, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you're pulling up your Steam client to punch in your payment info as you finish reading this. Hell, color me surprised if you held out this far.
