Plants vs Zombies Review

PopCap Games has built quite the reputation over the years as the kings of casual gaming. With their latest release, Plants vs Zombies for Mac OS X, they prove once again why they’re the best at what they do.

Plants vs Zombies is by no means your average tower defense game, far from it. I mean who seriously would’ve thought of doing a tower defense game involving plants fighting against zombies? I would’ve never bought into the idea, but after playing the game, I’m sold.

In Plants vs Zombies your goal is to defend your home against a horde of zombies by placing plants on your lawn. In typical tower defense games the economy revolves around making kills to earn money in order to build additional defenses. Instead of making kills to earn money, you’ll gather sun from Sunflowers and the Sun, sun is used to purchase plants. At the beginning of the game your initial source of income to jump start your garden will be the Sun, after placing a few Sunflowers on your lawn you’ll be able to place more defensive plants at a faster pace.

By allowing players to control their rate of income Plants vs Zombies becomes much more of an in-depth strategy game. Players are faced with the question of how many Sunflowers they should place on their lawn. Of course you’ll want as much income as you can get, but if you place too many Sunflowers too soon you could be overwhelmed by early zombie attacks. On the other hand if you fail to place enough Sunflowers on your lawn you won’t have enough sun to produce the defenses needed to withstand the final zombie wave.

Thanks to great pacing the learning curve is gradual. Slowly easing players into more challenging stages, but not to the point of frustration. As you progress through the game you’ll be given new plant types to aid your fight against the ever expanding zombie ranks. At the start of each stage you’ll be able to choose which plants to take with you, choose wisely only specific plants can counter certain zombies.

Not only will you have to face a multitude of zombies that vary from stage to stage, you’ll also deal with environmental challenges too. I don’t want to spoil the game, so I’ll just give one example of environmental challenges. In night stages you won’t be able to use Sunflowers to produce sun, instead you’ll have to rely on mushrooms. Initially mushrooms produce sun at a very slow rate, but over time they will become comparable to Sunflowers. You’ll have to adjust your game plan to compensate for your limited supply of sun by using cheaper defensive plants early on.

Besides gathering sun to produce more plants, once in a while zombies will drop coins, which can be used to purchase upgrades such as a rake that will kill the first zombie in each stage, last for three stages. You’ll also be able to grow a zen garden, the plants in your zen garden produce coins, so take good care of them.

Even after you beat the game, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in survival mode, which should keep you busy for quite some time.

On a side note, I really appreciate game developers that take the time to make their games playable in window mode, nothing worse than paying a game and hearing IMs/emails and wondering if they’re worth exiting for.

Back to Plants vs Zombies, this is by far the best tower defense game I’ve played on Mac OS X, actually on any platform for that matter. Seriously, if you’re a Mac gamer don’t miss out in this one! Kudos to PopCap Games for making such an awesome game!

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