A wonderful Tower-Defence game
User Rating: 9 | Plants vs. Zombies PC
Plants Vs Zombies is a tower defence game where you place various plants in a grid to defend your house against the zombie invasion. Your area is 5 or 6 rows with 9 columns where each square can hold one plant. Zombies will come right to left, and you have an initial defence of one lawnmower per row. If the zombies hit the lawnmower, it sets off and destroys the zombies on that row. If they reach this point again, they enter your house and you lose the game. Plants cost sun, and sun falls during the game but can be generated by placing sunflowers which you will end up placing 10 or so as you build your forces. As you progress through the levels, new concepts are slowly introduced which give you a chance to learn about new flower or zombie types and incorporate this into your strategy, which means you slowly evolve and learn the tactics with time. Zombies can come with various items which give them extra armour or abilities. Zombies with cones and helmets have extra defence, zombies on pogo sticks can bounce over your flowers, zombies with ladders can climb over defenses. There are all sorts of flowers, some defensive like the walnut or pumpkin, some are one use items like the jalepeno or ice-shroom, and some are offensive like the pea-shooter, cabbage-pult and chomper. Before each level, you have to select several plants to define your arsenal for that round, so you need to choose wisely given the zombie line-up. As you progress through the Adventure mode, new type of stages are also revealed. Lawn is the normal stage you are introduced to first, but then you will be introduced to the concept of night where sunflowers won't be any use, and you will have to use more nocturnal plants; mushrooms which are cheaper and attack differently. Pool stages introduce water plants, and using lilypads to drop normal plants onto them. The final stages are set on the roof, where catapults are necessary on the slanted area. These change in stages have a more drastic change to your strategy compared to the introduction of a new zombie type. Coins are dropped by some zombies which can be spent in Crazy Dave's shop which have extra weapon upgrades or garden plants to be used in the Zen Garden, which is a way of farming coins. Many twists on the formula are found in puzzle and mini-game modes where you will find bowling games, whack-a-mole, pot smashing etc. Then there's the endless mode which poses more of a serious challenge. Overall, Plants Vs Zombies is a fairly simple concept which is implemented very well. The game becomes addictive and is very easy to pick up and play. The games learning curve means it can seem a bit easy at times, but the extra modes provide enough twists to add extra challenge and game length. There isn't that much to criticise but it has to be noted, even though the graphics are quite crisp, the resolution is rather low.
