PvZ is the latest release by the makers of the addictive BeJeweled and Peggle casual games. Basically, it's a stripped down tower defense type game with charming graphics and tongue in cheek humour. Here the themes of a typical zombie invasion ties in with ...gardening? and it does so very well indeed. There are 3 distinct areas which require slightly different strategies, plants are your 'towers', there are attack, defence and support towers. Zombies are the 'creeps' which range from weak cannon fodder to a hulk-like behemoth that destroys your plants in a single hit.
The zombies will try to invade your house from the right and eat your brains, your plants will shoot from left to right and try to destroy them. Let the planting begin!
Thoughts
- Content packed, high replayability, gradual learning curve
PzV has an Adventure mode which is basically a giant tutorial in itself, over the course of 50 levels a new type of plant or two is unlocked every round. Even so, Adventure mode is only about half the game itself.
There are 3 other modes, Mini games, a forte of PopCap, features quick spurts of fun with Bowling and BeGhouled a variation on their popular Bejeweled. The mini-games tie in with adventure mode, allowing you to use the unlocked plants. The second mode is Puzzles, featuring several stages of two puzzle type games, one even letting you play as the zombies. The third and probably most lasting would be survival mode, letting you fight against endless hordes of zombies after you've completed the main quest.
On top of that there is a side game called 'Zen Garden' where you can collect plants from the levels and take care of them with various gardening tools. This gives you mostly a chance to take a break, earn some cash and unlock cheats.
-Made for pick up and play
On paper, PvZ looks like a quick casual game to spend a few minutes of your life. However it features an insidious autosave that doesn't display itself, this leads to two things.
1) Immersiveness, you never realise that the game is doing something in the background like when a "Saving" icon pops up, you just fight zombies.
2) Addictiveness, I usually use the saving icon as a means of gauging time when I am playing videogames, this fits in with the common game design of 15 mins or so per checkpoint to fit in with the attention span of a normal player. Without cuts to the menu or anything that disrupts the 'flow' of the game, you'll be tempted to just play until the end of the round, or the next and the next...
-Resource management and constant interactivity
Alot of tower defence games basically give you a standard resource at the beginning and let you manage that for the rest of the round, like the recent 'Savage Moon' on PSN which lets you get money to build towers from killed creeps. PvZ increases your interactivity in two ways,
1) you have to plant 'mana farms' in this case Sunflowers for 'Sun' their form of mana, the flowers will generate some Sun icons every few seconds and you have to manually click on it to pick it up.
2) Coins, coins allow you to purchase upgrades among other things, Zombies drop coins, since the Suns are usually on the left side of the screen and Zombies on the right, you don't simply plant your towers and watch the action, you have to click on the goodies before they disappear and since your towers are at risk of being destroyed all the time, you have to be on hand to build new ones and replace old ones.
-Variations and Mastery
The idea is simple, there are three main stages, the lawn, the pool and the roof, and these feature variations like fog, graves and 'special' zombies. These add a false layer of complexity into the game, essentially forcing you to use the new tools for the new level, your old towers become obsolete.
On the other hand, there is some thought here into increasing the difficulty of the game. Some plants are only useful against certain zombies while being less useful against the rest, as part of the gameplay mechanic, it uses up valuable slots on your lawn and forces a tactical decision. There are other typical strategic choices, offense vs defence, allocation of resources etc,all which comes in in the final Survival stage where all the plants and zombies come into play.
- Exploit free, Loot Theory
Generally, the economy in PvZ is well balanced, you can always get what you need by playing a couple of levels, but never to the point of needless grinding. A cool feature has your happy plants in the Zen Garden pop out coins, a snail you can buy will collect dropped coins automatically, however it falls asleep after an hour or so to prevent people from leaving the game on while they go outside. The number of unlockables are pretty satisfactory, upgrades, plants to fill your entire gardens with and a tree of wisdom that gives advice and unlock costumes. Hardcore players might want to grow their tree to incredible heights, spending a huge amount of time to get the final costume cheat codes. A small complaint is that certain plants tend to drop rarely, which I suppose encourages people to play more.
- Art Style, Theme and music
The theme of gardening, plants and zombies are integrated very well throughout the game, your crazy neighbour in the time of crisis charges exorbitant prices for plants and fertilizer. References to zombie movies are well done, zombies love to eat brains, they chant "braains" every now and then, when you lose a level, a 50's style game over message shows up "The Zombies have eaten your Brains". The menu itself is a grave with flowers on it with the interface worked into it. The music is catchy without being too intrusive, kinda like enjoyable muzak, simple tunes that matches the rhythm of the game.
The plants posses different expressions suited to their class, a Sunflower or Marigold will smile while a the fiercer of your peashooters have a helmet and a angry expression. Your Wall types will have a resiliant expression before shedding tears as a indicator of low hp.
The zombies come in all shapes and sizes, from the typical suit wearing to a simple variation of cone head and bucket heads to indicate different hp. Special zombies include the digger, the pole vaulter, the 'zombini' driver and a huge one that carries signposts or other zombies as weapons. The unlockables add mustaches or silly glasses to them for comic effect.
All in all, Plants vs Zombie is one of the best designed game that I've seen in a long time, it appears to appeal to all demographics from the casual to the hardcore. It takes a simple concept, adds enough variation on it to increase tactical choices and adds tons of casual addictive gameplay on the side. People will be playing this for a long time to come.
Further Thoughts
PvZ was apparently made by only 3 people, a programmer, an artist and a musician with a support staff of course. Does that mean I need programming or art skills to enter the industry?
