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On the other side of the Tower Defense genre comes Pop Cap’s Plants Vs Zombies. First off, don’t buy the game from that page. It’s only 10 dollars on Steam, and it’s not like Steam is having a sale. This originally seems a bit weird, but I actually think that it’s kind of genius on Pop Cap’s part. The people who buy Pop Cap games from Pop Cap are casual gamers. Moms and such. They’re used to paying 20 dollars for a casual game, and they don’t even know that Steam exists. Meanwhile, over on Steam are all hardcore gamers who are very, very willing to come out and tell you that your game is overpriced. This way, Pop Cap has its cake and eats it too: they get the added revenue from the casuals who would spend more for a new Pop Cap game, and they also get more revenue from the hardcore, whom this game is clearly aimed a little more towards, even if it’s accessible to anyone.

That out of the way, Plants Vs Zombies is totally worth your time.

I had just bought Defense Grid, and was playing it, and having a good time. But Twitter, that damnable twitter, was going on and on about Plants vs Zombies, so I decided I should try it out. I downloaded the demo, which is timed for an hour. The hour went by like THAT. I found myself very unhappy that the demo had ended. I dropped my 10 bucks right there. It was even nice enough to still have my save file when I got the full thing.

Whereas Defense Grid is as classic a Tower Defense game as you could make and still have a full-featured game, Plants Vs Zombies is almost tower defense in name only. All of the tropes of such games are basically gone. There are five rows on your front yard. Zombies pick one of these rows and walk straight down them. If they get to the end, then they walk inside and eat your brains! Which is bad, of course. So you have to plant plants to stop them. The vast majority of plants only affect things on their row, so you have to basically keep up the fight on five fronts. You can only take a limited number of seed types into any one level (It starts at 6, and goes up as you play until you get to 9, the max) and depending on what you pick, you can really vary your strategy. Will you set up lots of walls to slow them down, and have a minimal number of attackers? Will you hide mines and other such traps all over the place? Will you attempt to slow or debuff the zombies to lead you to victory? There are 49 different plants in the game, I believe. There is a lot of variety, although you’ll likely be using Peashooter variants for a lot of levels. Also, a lot of plants are only useful during night levels, or during the levels when you’re defending the pool in your back yard, etc, so you don’t always have a full arsenal.
One plant you always have to bring, though, is the Sunflower, (Or Sun-Shroom, during the night) which gives you sunlight to power your army. Most Tower Defense games give you resources for defeating enemies, but in this one, you must farm them with Sunflowers. This means you’re devoting valuable space on your lawn to these sunflowers where you could be planting attack plants, so you have to strike a good balance. You also have to actually click on resources to pick them up, which can help make the game additionally hectic.

The real stars of the show, though, are the Zombies. There are a ton of different Zombie types. You get to see the basic spread of zombies before you start a level so you can pick your seeds correctly, and you really do need to choose wisely. Are there a lot of Zomboni drivers? You’re probably going to want to bring the Spikeweed plant that stops them in their tracks. Zombie Dancers? It would be a good idea to bring a Cherry Bomb to take out the hordes of backup dancers they summon. They’re all playing off of simplistic jokes that anyone can enjoy, but they still have plenty of personality, and the game is good at throwing completely off-putting mixes of zombies just when you develop strategies to take out certain types. I often found myself going “I have to take care of BOTH of those?” and having to rethink my strategy. I liked that.

This game is no Peggle, though. As I mentioned earlier, this game gets really hectic really fast, and can get really difficult. Peggle is accessible to everyone, no matter what the difficulty. It is always fun, even when you’re failing, and you can take it at whatever pace you wish. While Plants vs Zombies does a really great job training you to understand what you need to do and how you need to do it, starting you off nice and slow, there’s no question that the fast pace and real-time nature of the game are going to make the more casual gamer fail more often than perhaps they think they should.
Still, if you’re reading my silly blog, you’ve probably played a game or two in your lifetime, and if so, you can probably handle and love Plants vs Zombies. It’s just an amazingly solid game all around. I used to look down on Pop Cap, like many did, for just repackaging expensive versions of common casual games. But I think that after Bookworm Adventures, Peggle, and now this, they are proving that not only can they appeal to a casual audience, but they can also make some awesome games. They’re pretty well sold me on checking out whatever they come up with next. I’m extremely happy with my 10 dollar purchase of Plants vs Zombies. If you’re at all interested, please download and try the demo. But, fair warning: You will probably get hooked.