When Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare was announced at E3, I really had to check twice to see if I actually saw what I thought I just saw. They were taking this popular tower defence game and turning it into a bigger budget third person shooter that had a Call of Duty pun in its tittle. I did not have great faith, but I did not have to pay much attention to it because it was only out for 360 and Xbone, me and my PS3 and PS4 would sit quite happily over in the corner. With PVZ2 being a let down, I wouldn't miss it. Then came last week when it came out for PS4, I had just got paid so thought why the hell not, the sourness of PVZ2 had left me and I was in the market for a good multiplayer game. Much to my surprise it's what I revived, a very funny, polished and strange game.
Before I go any further, I should state this is a multiplayer game, it even says on the box Playstation + Required, the lady at the counter must have assumed I did not read the cover because she even told me this. I think it has one mode which you can play solo, the Garden Ops mode, but I doubt it would be easy nor any fun, so if your looking for a single player journey look elsewhere.
The game has one main mode and then some other multiplayer modes, the main mode is called Garden Ops. Its essentially horde mode that has made quite a few appearances in shooters over the past years. You and up to 3 other players are deemed with job of defending your chosen garden from up to 10 waves of Zombies with each wave having more and different zombies. You and your crew are the plants, which make up the classes in the game.
There is the Pea Shooter, who if you just like to shoot stuff is the class for you. Fairly straightforward, Pea fires at a slower rate than other classes but does quite a bit of damage and does splash damage, also able to hunker down and turn into a stationary Gatling gun. The Sunflower is the healer, similar to Team Fortress 2, Sun will use the heal beam to heal friendly players, while also having a weak attack. The Chomper is a tricky one, the Chomper bury's itself underground and you can come up from underneath enemy players killing them straight away. Once you have eaten an enemy though your slowed and unable to attack for a few seconds. If you get your Chomper behind an enemy you can also eat them in one go too, very good class. The last plant is the Cactus, this class is a Sniper class, able to zoom in and hit enemy's from faraway its its speciality. It is also able to use a drone to seek enemy's from the sky.
The Zombies class's are similar but different, the Foot Solider is very similar to the Pea Shooter but has faster shooting yet no splash damage. The Engineer who carries around a fast shooting grenade launcher and is able to throw bombs that stop a Chomper in its tracks. There is the Mad Scientist who is the Zombie healer, but instead of a beam you have to place down a heal station that heals friendlies who get near it. This one also has a teleporter and a sticky grenade. Last but not least is the All Star, big and powerful, has a mini gun and shoots crazy fast and does a t of damage. Also able to lay down cover and throw "Grenades".
You can't play as the Zombies in Garden Ops though, only the multiplayer modes, which include a team Deathmatch plus a variant, a demolition mode and rush mode (Gardens and Graveyards). G+G is my favourite, one team is the plants who are defending parts of the map, the zombies have to advance one by one taking them over in order until the reach the very end where they will have to do a certain task depending on the map. As the plants you want to try to stop them as they only have a small amount of time to take each point.
None of this is any good to me though if the game was not fun to play, but it really really is. Each team as a wide variety of classes to choose from and each one is fun to play. Usually in shooters like this I would not enjoy all the classes, in Call of Duty I generally hate sniping and in Battlefield the role of a shotgunner sounds unappealing. Here though I can happily play all of them, I tend to wait until the teams have been filled then pick the unit that we have the least of, which usually means I'm the healer, my favourite is the Chomper though, such a blast to sneak up on enemy's and one shot them.
Classes level up individually, they level up not through just winning matches but by completing challenges such as use this move on this enemy or kill this many enemy's from above. It gives me personally more to play for and has me playing in different ways than I usually wouldn't so I can complete the challenge. By winning matches and just playing the game you get coins, which can be spent on card packs (Random item boxes) that depending on what card set you buy will give you good or normal or great stuff. Most of it is cosmetic things for your classes, but some are actually useful like variants on your class such as a faster moving Chomper or a ice pea shooter. You can of course pay real money for these coins but you get them so quickly and easy I never felt I needed too.
The game has a great look to it, not in its technical merits, which although are pretty good its nothing mind blowing. No its it's style, the bright colours or humours things scattered around the maps. Zombie scribblings on walls and just the overall look or everything just looks so damn nice, you can't help but smile. The classes all have there unique look and feel to, especially the Engineer whose crack is ALWAYS Visible. The games soundtrack has some nice remix's from past games and some nice new ones, the character noises are great too and just make you laugh sometimes.
Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare is a very nice change to what has become a very stale genre, no longer are we playing another WW3 shooter with lots of greys and real black guns, were looking and underground sharks and scientists with sticky grenades. At its lower price too I really find this game a good deal and you will have a lot of fun with it.