Casual games. The bane of all hardcore gamers… apparently. I for one respect the idea of a casual gaming scene, and I even enjoy some of said “casual” games. Inisaniquarium, a bit of Peggle (though it’s a bit too “automatic” for my taste), Zuma, amongst others, are casual games that I love playing. Casual games aren’t at all a bad thing. Sometimes even I like to have a bit of a break from all the “hardcore” stuff, since most games catered to the hardcore audience right now are 3rd or 1st person shooters that all play the same(sadly… developers need to vary a bit). Casual games are also a great introduction to gaming for non-gaming audiences and might lead to them playing more “hardcore” stuff.

Now joining the increasingly big casual game market is Plants vs Zombies. One thing I’ll say right away: the guys at PopCap are marketing geniuses. How did they announce this game and build up hype? THIS (click the link). And that was enough to get people hyped. No gameplay shown(well, about 2 seconds without any zombies), and only the lyrics and animation to guess that it was a tower defense game, with barely any hint on the gameplay otherwise. Until release, there was only one video on the plants vs zombies youtube channel that actually showed gameplay(and it really didn’t show much). The rest ripped-off Nippon Ichi with the whole Prinny going to work thing (but replace the prinny with a zombie). So really, the hype was built up really well, and I’m sure this generated a lot of talk about the game and made people buy it.

So I pre-purchased the game and hoped for the best. At 10$ on steam (or 20$ if you buy it directly from PopCap), I wasn’t wasting too much anyways.

So, does the latest casual game by PopCap live up to the completely random hype and manage to interest both the hardcore gamer and the casual gamer, or does it fall flat on its face?

Read on!

Looks and sounds
I won’t lie, the games look very childish. But looking beyond that you see a very nice style. Relatively well animated sprites, very cartoon-like style, interesting visual effects. The zombies, that look almost huggable normally, almost look scary when you see them behind the fog. There’s not a big variety of stages (front lawn, front lawn at night, backyard (with pool), backyard at night(pool+fog) and the rooftop… and sometimes the same stages put with rain), but each of them is quite well done.
The zombie design is relatively good. They made a basic zombie, and modeled multiple other zombies from that basic design, and there’s a big variety. From miners, to Michael Jackson in his Thriller outfit (looks EXACTLY the same), to scuba divers, to… many other types, there’s a lot of different enemies to fight and all of them look awesome.
The plants are also pretty cool. They also mostly follow a certain design, but there’s a ton of different looks. Mushrooms(range from ice shrooms to exploding black doom shrooms), plants (pea shooters, triple versions of that, ice version of that), nuts, catapults, flowers and other vegetation. Each of them look unique and fun.

Sound design is all over the place. On one side you have the simple but interesting super-joyful music, as well as the relatively well done zombie voices, but on the other side you have sounds ripped straight from previous PopCap games. The most noticeable one for me was the money and jewel pickup sounds from Insaniquarium. The music is fun and quite unique, but the sound effects are just taken from other games, showing a bit of laziness on that side. Not bad sounds, of course, but it’s quite noticeable if you played PopCap games before.

Overall though the game looks and sounds great. No big complaint on that side.

Gameplay
So the game is, as said before, a Tower Defense game. But it’s not the usual type where you have to build turrets and the enemies will circle them and such. Instead, you are given a few lanes (5 in front lawn and roof stages, 6 on the backyard/pool stages), and the zombies come straight at you on those lanes, and they don’t change lanes (unless you have a plant that does that). You have to protect your house from incoming zombies, and to do that you need to plant plants that will stop the zombies’ attacks. Letting just 1 zombie pass your defense is enough for you to lose.

So how does everything work? Well at first, for defense, all you have is a lawnmower protecting you, which clears the lane of zombies once, and then that lane will lose the protection of the lawnmower. Just a note about the lawnmowers: they don’t work well in water, and there’s none of them on the roof, but there’s buyable upgrades for that. So, since the lawnmowers are very limited in numbers, you have to build defense by yourself. To do that, you need resources. In this game, instead of money, you use SUN POWER. Some of that is dropped by the sun, of course, but just that won’t lead you to the end of a level. So you have to build units that will provide sun power to you. Sunflowers in the day, and sun mushrooms in the night. Each plant has a sun power cost which is pretty much relative to their power. Each lane has 9 squares that you can place plants on, and it’s 1 plant per square.

There’s a lot of different plants to use. There’s Peashooters, which shoot peas at a regular interval, and a few different upgrades and better versions to that. You also have some special versions like ice pea shooters which slow down zombies. For nighttime, you have various types of mushrooms, including some free ones. And finally the other main type of plant is catapults, which vary in effects and damage, and pass over screen door shields to hit the zombies right on the head.
There’s a bunch of other plants too that have various effects. Quite a few one-time-use plants which either kill 1 zombie, destroy an area or lane, or remove certain types of zombies. Other special plants are meant for protection, with more life than usual plants and get eaten slower, and can have properties like preventing certain zombies to pass over them, and some plants boost the power of other plants. Finally, 2 special plants, lilypads and pots, are used to plant your other plants in spots you wouldn’t normally be able to (lily pads in the pool, pots on the roof). There’s a bunch of plants you can use, and you can use them however you want to make you own strategies. This aspect of the game is awesome.

The reason for all the different types of plants, of course, is the huge variety of zombies. You have normal zombies, of course, but there’s tons of other types. Ones wearing road cones or buckets on their heads have enhanced defense, zombies with screen door shields have big defense, but it can be passed through by a certain mushroom types. Football zombies are faster and stronger,  dancing zombies (aka Michael Jackson) summon 4 more zombies to the field, some zombies can pass over obstacles and some can go straight to the end of your lawn and move back to eat all your plants from behind. There’s also a few stage exclusive zombies, such as scuba diving zombies in the pool stages and bungee zombies in the roof stages. There’s a bunch of zombies to fight, each with different weaknesses and strengths. Before each level, you see exactly what type of zombies are coming at you, so you can choose the proper plants for the stage.

The gameplay starts out easy, but it gets faster and harder as you progress, but it never becomes too hard. It might be hard to handle new types of zombies, but after a round or two you’ll be able to handle anything the game throws at you… until you get to new stages with different gimmicks, but a few stages there and you’ll also be fine. The first stage is simple enough, but at night it’s harder. When you handle the night well, you’re back in the day and you have a pool to protect which is completely different to defend, then you’re back at night with the pool, but with fog blocking the first few lanes where zombies come in, changing the whole way your defense is built and then the roof is also completely different. There’s surprisingly a lot of variety for a tower defense game.

The last thing I could mention about the gameplay is special stages. Mostly halfway through a level, you see a special stage with different gameplay. Bowling with wallnuts, smaller zombies, stuff like that. The final stage of every level is a “boss stage”-like. Instead of collecting sun power, the plants you can use come on a “conveyor belt” kinda thing on top of the screen and you can’t really choose what you want to use, and you need to readapt your play style.

Overall, the gameplay is great. Lots of variety, relatively frantic gameplay, and overall just… very fun.

Other stuff
There’s a lot of extra stuff here. First up would be Crazy Dave and his shop. Crazy Dave, as expected, is pretty damn crazy, and he sells a bunch of stuff. Upgrades for plants, upgrades for certain stage types, extra slots to carry more plants in each stage and a bunch of other random stuff.

Other than adventure mode, there’s 3 modes of play.
Mini-games are, as you can expect, small games using the gameplay engine, but with modifications. In there you get plant-headed zombies that attack you from afar, a bejewelled variation, a take on Insaniquarium (but not nearly as fun) and other random games that make you plant plants in different ways and such.
Survival mode is where you try to live as long as possible, keeping your plants after every round(with an “endless” mode for that).
Puzzle modes include the Vase-breaking variation from the adventure mode (but a lot harder), and a mode where youplay as zombies against cardboard cutouts of plants (the zombies asked Crazy Dave for practice on invading homes). Both of those have an endless version too.

All those modes add EVEN MORE variety, making the replay value near endless.

The only other things I can really talk about are the zen garden, but i didn’t invest much time in that, so I don’t really get the point yet. There’s some products in Crazy Dave’s shop just for Zen Garden, including extra gardens for different types of plants, but for now it just seems like a slow way to get extra money.

Overall
This is a very well done game. The gameplay, while a bit slow at first, is fun and addictive. The game does look a bit childish, but it doesn’t really matter, because it looks great.
If you end up being addicted to the game enough, there’s a ton of things to do, and it’s fun to replay. And with all the modes and sub-games, it’s even more fun!

I suggest this game to… EVERYONE. There’s little reason NOT to get it. It’s a fun introduction to Tower Defense for casual gamers, and with all the mini-games and puzzles and survival challenges, there’s a lot of fun to be had for the hardcore gamer as well. This game is definite proof (if you were an idiot and didn’t believe that already) that casual games can be of interest for hardcore gamers as well.

For me it surpassed the hype and will be a game I’ll be coming back to for a long time.

Screenshots
Here are a few screenshots! I didn’t take that many >_<

jobocan Games, PC, Review