Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is a simple game. I mean there’s absolutely nothing complicated about it. It is a third-person action game that takes the initial theme and characters of PopCap’s original mobile hit, Plants vs. Zombies, and makes it more modern for consoles. Ultimately, though, the original concept is still very much intact; you are the plants, you are fighting zombies. Pretty simple stuff.
Using the Frostbite 3 Engine to do its dirty work, PopCap has pulled off the unthinkable, which is to take an addictive strategy game and make it into a competent third-person shooter. I honestly wasn’t too thrilled with the announcement back in 2013 at E3. I mean, what could PopCap possibly do to make this concept of turning PvZ into a third-person shooter even remotely interesting. On paper it was a tough sell for this editor.
Then I played this sucker.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is broken up into two modes, each containing its own bit of wealth. Here they are broken down:
– Garden Ops: You can play solo Garden Ops or you can co-op with friends/strangers. You are thrown into one of eight initial maps. Each map has several garden areas that you establish and must defend for 10+ rounds (you can only establish one garden area per game). Once the area is established, you defend it against waves of zombies with two waves being boss levels. The neat part of this is how cooperative you must be to keep your team alive. When someone dies in the game you have the option to revive them or let them die and have them respawn between waves. Neat concept, kind of cruel sometimes if you have a-hole teammates. Other neat things about Garden Ops include the ability to plant weapon plants/fungi/healing flowers in pots scattered around the garden you established in hopes of getting some defense (directly from the original game). Not so neat is the A.I. of the zombies, which can get quickly annoying because of sketchy shooting mechanics. It’s still my number one mode of choice in this game, regardless of the repetitive nature of it. Each game lasts about 20 minutes, which is long enough to not make it seem ‘long’.
– Multiplayer: What do you think this is about? Hah, good guess. You against other players in a various amounts of multiplayer situations. One of those situations is called Team Vanquish, where you compete either against zombies or plants. The first to get to 50 eliminations is the winner. It’s neat, simple and the levels you play on Garden Ops are opened up due to the multiplayer nature.
Another neat multiplayer mode is Gardens & Graveyards. This is probably my favorite of the bunch. You have various locations on a map where you fight either zombies or plants to take control of locations. If you are a plant, you’re fighting to establish a garden. If you’re a zombie, you’re fighting to establish a tombstone. The more points you score through captured areas and elimination of opponents. Still one of my favorite. Also a great place to earn a lot of coin.
Other multiplayer experiences include Classic Team Vanquish (no upgrades/unlockables allowed), Classic Gardens & Graveyards, Mixed Mode (exactly what you think it is), Gnome Bomb (this is epic)and a crazy game of point shaving called Vanquish Confirmed. There’s plenty here to do and a variety of different levels of difficulty to do it with. All in all, not bad.
If I had one complaint with the gameplay of PvZGW, and I’m still getting used to it, it would have to be the shooting mechanics of the game. I’ve had this game for under a week and the aiming is still a bit all over the place. Having played plenty third-person and first-person shooters, I know it’s not me. At least, I think it’s not me. Anyway, I probably hit my target every fourth or fifth shot. Give some credit to the enemy A.I., and loads of it for multiplayer matches, as they purposely avoid the barrage of gunfire. Still, the shooting mechanics seem a bit loose, but they’re manageable — certainly not bad enough to quit the game.
Shooting aside, let’s talk about value added to the game.
To up the variety in the modes, PopCap has included upgrades on zombies and plants that allow a bit of customization for gamers. To earn the upgrades to characters and customize their appearances, you must keep playing the game to earn coin and level up. The leveling unlocks characters and other things, while the coins will purchase you packs of cards that unlock items such as potted plants, zombies, clothing and accessories and wonderful weapons to use during gameplay. The card packs, which come in a variety of different levels of importance, are motivation to keep the above modes going. You want to see what the $40k pack has in it, so you’ll want to keep playing to earn coin and get there. It’s a nice bit of additional depth to what can be considered a simplistic game, and it helps nicely with replay value, which is vital for a game like this.
While the shooting is a bit loose, the rest of the game is pretty straightforward and simple. The gameplay set up for gamers, while severely lacking an offline mode (get to that later in the review), is pretty good. The co-op and multiplayer modes are spot on and methodical with what a player can do and how much replay fun gamers will have with PvZGW. Don’t get me wrong, there could be more (and there will be, I’m sure), but what you get in terms of gameplay and modes isn’t bad at all. PopCap did a great job with turning their 2D idea into a 3D funfest.
Modes aside, how does it look? Did PopCap really pull off the visuals as well as the gameplay?
The game carries over the same style that the original game brought to the table. Instead of 2-D zombies and plants, the models are perfectly fit into a 3D world. The simplistic art style of non-detailed textures, like something out of a theme park in Disney, works well for the game. The environments are enormous. When I say ‘enormous’, I mean ‘enormous’. Multi-tier levels that are accessible and a spread out battlefield, depending on mode of course, is just what the doctor ordered to take PopCap’s 3D world of PvZ seriously. The maps are not just textual repeats of each other, they’re well thought out ideas. You get a nice town in one map, a pirate cove in another and a massive castle in yet another. There are more, but those stand out.
With character models you get more of the same love. The plants have personality through their gestures (like reloading) and facial expressions (bring it on-esque), while the zombies are terrifyingly stupid in every way we’ve come to love. Every leaf movement, cactus stiff shuffle and every whacky zombie look, you get some fun in it (and simplistic details). In short, the looks of the characters are completely spot on the looks from the original games. The transition from simple 2D strategy to third-person shooter in nicely sized environments makes the presentation seem seamless.
Having said that, I’m sure that some folks will bitch and moan about the lack of real details in the levels. They will gripe about how some of the buildings and environments are visually restrictive and fall short of even the last generation of consoles’ capabilities. Maybe they’re right, but for me the visuals fit the history of the game Garden Warfare was born from. Do we really want Resident Evil type zombies scaring the bejesus out of kids? Probably not and Pop Cap didn’t want that either, so if it looks like a duck, quack likes a duck then it’s a duck. Let’s treat this game’s presentation value like the duck it is.
As for the audio side of the presentation, the music is themed like the mobile game for branding, as is the gibberish spouted from the evil zombies and the good plants. Sometimes cute, mostly annoying gibberish. Definitely nothing to write home about, but much like the graphics, it fits the bill.
So with all this said, is this game fun? Well, considering that it’s got online co-op and a cornucopia of multiplayer modes, yes it’s fun. The multiplayer online could have been stuck with a so-so campaign mode and this game still would have enough fun to warrant the price of admission. That’s the biggest catch there, the price of admission is $29.99 on the PlayStation 3. I was almost expecting something around $39-49, but for $29.99 this isn’t pricy enough to feel the sting of the lack of traditional single-player. I would pay $29.99, if I hadn’t gotten it for free, for what Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare has to offer. It has some nice customization, a neat twist on the original game’s gameplay and a multitude of ways to play online. What’s not to love?
Well, the fear of online only might be a loveless venture. While reviewing this over the weekend, a DDoS attack on Sony’s PSN network occurred, which caused it to go down for a couple of days. That caused Garden Warfare to be pretty much unplayable, as the beef of this game is online. While I know that online only isn’t really threatened by such events all the time, DDoS attacks of this size are rare, the lack of a single-player campaign pretty much crippled this game into uselessness when PSN went gah-gah. There has to be something offline offered for this to make it a bit more diverse in its gaming demands. I do appreciate the price tag, but seeing the lack of usefulness of PvZ once PSN went down made me want to pay $10 dollars to open up an offline story mode. Heck, just include the original game for amusement, it honestly couldn’t cost that much and it still is a very entertaining game.
Anyway, onto the summary!