Plants vs. Zombies is without a doubt, my favorite game on the iPod Touch.
When there is a zombie apocalypse, what would a normal person do? Board up the doors and grab their gun of course. But in this game, all you have is plants. Zombie fighting plants! These plants will be your defenses throughout the game, and there is a large variety in them.
Plants vs. Zombies is different from other tower defense games in that there is no trail enemies come from. All of the zombies come from the right, and you have to defend your house on the left. If a zombie makes it to your house, it will activate a lawnmower and kill all zombies in that lane. If it makes it to that lane again, the zombies will eat your brains.
Your plant army is very diverse. You have sunflowers that create sun, which is your currency that lets you plant your army. When you have enough sun, you can plant peashooters, which are your basic defenses that shoot peas at incoming zombies. If a zombie comes in contact with a plant, it will start to munch it down. You can plant Wall-Nuts, which can absorb more damage than regular plants and are good for defense and buying you time. There are also explosive plants that are good for a single use.
Another thing that makes the game have variety is the different conditions. There are daytime levels, nighttime levels where sun is scares, pool levels where two lanes are filled with water and you need to plant lily pads on the water to plant your army, fog levels, which are pool levels at night plus fog which obscures your view, and roof levels, where the playing field is at an angle. There are 10 levels in each type of level and 2 minigames at the 5th and 10th levels, you play a minigame.
The zombies are also very diverse. You get your basic zombies which don't have anything special. There are also zombies that have cones or metal buckets on their heads that will take more hits. There are also zombies that can vault over your plants and dancing zombies that can summon backup. There is a lot of variety with the enemies and it makes the game a lot more fun.
Before you play a level, you need to pick what plants to take with you to fight off the zombies. It's important to keep the enviornment in mind when picking plants. You'll also see what zombies will appear when you are picking, so that can also influence your decisions. You can only pick a limited amount of plants, but you can buy more slots.
Aside from sun that is used to soil your plants, there's also money you can collect. The money is used for purchasing items at Crazy Dave's shop(he is hilarious by the way). Coins and diamonds are dropped by zombies, and you collect them by tapping them. You also get coins from lawnmowers you didn't use. At Crazy Dave's shop, you can buy quite useful items, like extra plants, slots for your plant army, and garden rakes that can kill the first zombie that appears on the screen, buying you time to build up your defenses.
Graphically, it looks identical to it's cross-platform cousins. It's colorful and cute, and they are very charming. However, when there is a lot of activity on the screen, the game will suffer from slowdown.
The controls are simple. To plant your defenses, just tap what you want to plant, and tap a square, and there you go, it's there.
The music is wonderful. All of the tunes are catchy yet deriviative, but still well made, especially the final song, "Zombies on Your Lawn" which you will want to listen to more than once. The sound effects are also nice, especially the grunting of the zombies and Crazy Dave's mumbling.
THE VERDICT!
Plants vs. Zombies is a charming, unique, innovative, and addicting tower defense game. It's efforts to seperate itself from other games in the genre succeed, and the final result is a tower defense game with a unique premise, plants and zombies at war. If you are looking for a cheap tower defense game, you won't do any better than this game. You can also find this game on XBLA, PSN, PC, and the Nintendo DS.
Final Score:
10- Prime