Plants vs. Zombies, PopCap’s ultra-popular tower defense game, has finally been ported to the iDevice and is now available from the app store. Bringing many of the features of the PC version to the handheld iDevice allows gamers-on-the-go to protect their yards from the undead no matter where they may be.
Plants vs. Zombies Pros:
- Cartoonish graphics really pop
- Everything looks crisp and clean
- UI is uncluttered and buttons are easy enough to press without mis-tapping
Plants vs. Zombies Cons:
- No survival mode
Zombies with a taste for brains are heading your way. The only thing standing between them and your house is your finely manicured yard. You have no choice but to rely on your green thumb to keep you from becoming tonight’s main course. With nothing but a handful of peas to start, you’ll need to fend off the horde of slow-moving corpses. Fortunately, those peashooters are dead-eyes when it comes to mowing down zombies. Successfully eradicating the initial wave rewards you with sunflower seeds, which gives you extra sunshine, the game’s form of currency. Sunshine will also randomly fall from the sky, ripe for the picking. You’ll spend plenty of time collecting sunshine, exchanging specific amounts to obtain more protective crops. Each successful defense of your home earns you another packet of a different variety of seeds. Soon, your yard will be teeming with walnuts, cherry bombs, potato mines, split pea shooters, and the like. The zombies will become harder to defend against, as they’ll acquire their own protective equipment and, along with it, the ability to withstand greater amounts of flowerpower, er… firepower.
Plants vs. Zombies contains the 50-level adventure mode from the PC version. The Survival mode, sadly, is nowhere to be found. You’ll earn the opportunity to employ 40+ different varieties of plants to fend off the scads of unique zombie types. There are pole-vaulting zombies, zombies with buckets on their heads, newspaper-reading zombies, zomboni-driving zombies, bobsledding zombies, and more. Not only will you need to defend them in your front yard at high noon, but also at night, in fog, around your backyard pool, and even on your roof. In most tower defense games, towers are placed around a fixed path, shooting at the enemy as he makes his way toward his goal. In Plants vs. Zombies, the zombies don’t stumble past the plants, but rather they go through them, munching on them if they get too close. This results in the loss of your “tower,” causing you to scramble to find another means of defense to keep the monsters off of your porch. If the zombies get through your yard, there are a few lawnmowers that act as a last line of defense, starting up and mowing down everything in their path. This allows you one last opportunity to defend the breached row of your yard before you lose your head.
Graphically, the game is pretty much identical to the PC version. The main interface difference is that the available plant types are now laid out vertically along the left edge rather than horizontally across the top of the screen. As you only have 6 slots to hold seeds, you’ll need to choose which of your acquired plant types you’d like available for the next round. This adds an interesting element of strategy to the game, as your decision could be one of life-or-death. The cartoonish graphics really pop and most everything looks crisp and clean. The one exception is the image of the seed packets at the end of each level. They have a fuzzy look about them that seems out of place. The UI is uncluttered and buttons are easy enough to press without mis-tapping. Plants that are available for use glow brighter than those that are too expensive or refreshing. You can either tap to select the plant and tap the desired location to plant it, or you can drag from the plant icon to the desire location. When placing the plants, the selected row and column light up to help assure proper placement. Tap on the sunshine as it appears to collect it. It doesn’t get much simpler. The soundtrack is straight out of the PC version, as are the sound effects. The music is enjoyable and sounds clear.
Replay value is pretty good, as the 50 adventure levels will take a good chunk of time to get through. Completing the game unlocks a Quick Play mode. PopCap has also included a local achievement system to give players an incentive to keep coming back for more, but some type of global aspect with complementary leaderboards would have really done the trick. The addition of missing game modes, such as Survival and Zen Garden, would have really cranked up the replayability, too. There are some mini-games from the PC version that are available during Adventure mode, though we would have liked independent access, too. Perhaps these are issues that can be addressed in an update. PopCap has released Plants vs. Zombies at a very attractive $2.99 price point, a bit lower than we expected. Could this be a sign of future DLC for Survival mode or more Mini-Games? Time will tell. In its current form, Plants vs. Zombies is a very solid 4-Dimple funfest.
