PvZ Garden Warfare Review

Did you enjoy the Plants v Zombies series on Apple and Android devices over the past few years..?

Frankly, it doesn't matter if you did or not. Garden Warfare in vastly different to that of both the original PvZ and PvZ2 games we all know.

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is an idea that on paper at least swings wildly between stupid and obvious.

On the one hand, Plants vs. Zombies as a series has been a charming casual success, full of bright, fun character design and easy-to-grasp mechanics — none of which seems all that suited for a shooter powered by the same tech behind the Battlefield series. But Plants vs Zombies is also a game about militant plants that destroy zombies by blasting them apart, smashing them or otherwise ruining their day.

So, here we are.

The good news? The alternately great and weird idea of moving PVZ into the third-person shooter space works. Garden Warfare artfully starts with great shooter chops and uses PVZ to take bold risks with its design, with inspired twists on multiplayer conventions.

Straight off the bat...Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is strictly multiplayer so there is no campaign mode. You get to play on either the Plants or the Zombies side. I suppose think of it as Battlefield 4 only with...well Plants and yep, Zombies! Complete with it's very own kill-cam, Garden Warfare holds up against other less 'odd' shooters.

Anyone would tell you, I am not a big FPS fan but adore 3rd person shooter/platformers. So to me this is one of the best shooters I have gotten my hands on and therefore it definitely had scope for the unheard cross-over between avid shooter fans and the more casual players who love everything about Plants vs Zombies(me)

The competitive multiplayer Team Vanquish (think Team Deathmatch) as well as the objective based, capture and progress Gardens and Graveyards (think Rush in Battlefield) would be for the former. Garden Ops would be for the latter. Mostly!

Garden Ops is a co-op wave based survival mode where each player chooses a plant character as part of a flora team asked to defend a garden from wave after wave of zombies. Quite similar to the version on an iPad but also very different. I found it tirelessly difficult and if you do not have the full complement of team members fighting for the same cause, you are not going to complete the mission. Even on easy with just 2 crew members it was exceptionally difficult but beatable.

This seems counter to how aggressively Garden Warfare courts a broader and maybe younger audience than just about any other third person shooter. This is especially apparent in the surprisingly robust and compulsive Sticker Store. Each match and mode in Garden Warfare doles out PVZ coins, which can be used to by sticker packs of increasing rarity and price. Stickers can provide packs of single-use items — defensive plants to put in pots for Plant players and classic PVZ zombies to call forth from graves for the Undead — or permanent limited ability bumps for specific classes. There are also alternate character skins that can be collected piece by piece. It's a fun system that doesn't currently have a pay-mium model in place, though I have to wonder how long it'll be before that changes.

The Sticker Store underlines the glue that holds Garden Warfare together. The aesthetic of Plants vs. Zombies is so vital to the series' appeal, and budding from every surface of the game. It really ties the room together, if you will — even though the newly "realistic" renditions of the titular Plants turned out much more terrifying than the walking dead did in the transition to third-person shooter.