The Haunted Hoard: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare (Xbox One)

The tower defense genre doesn’t have many titles that penetrate the popular consciousness, but with its silly concept and easy to understand approach to gameplay, Plants vs. Zombies was able to become perhaps the biggest tower defense game of all time. The only one who seems to rival it would be Bloons TD, and while that game’s sequels continue to iterate upon its original design, Plants vs. Zombies took off in an unexpected direction after its first sequel. Under EA’s ownership, the third Plants vs. Zombies title would avoid passive defense building tactics and have the player take up arms in a third person shooter, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare taking a silly pun at the Call of Duty series’s expense and turning it into a surprisingly well conceived team shooter.

 

No matter the mode you pick in Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, the idea will always be the same: one side plays as the plants who are no longer rooted to the ground while the other gets to play as cartoonish zombies who still want to tear those plants apart. Each side has four unique character classes that are not only distinct from each other but also feature very little direct overlap with the other team’s capabilities, this discrepancy leading to the plants having more defensive options and the zombies having more ways to attack an objective. Naturally the modes that play into defense formats will put the plants in the role of protectors while the zombies need to try and break through to capture objectives, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will try to have teams continuously switch from playing plants or zombies every round so you’re never stuck for too long playing on a side you might not prefer.

 

Both teams have a sort of straightforward shooter character, Plants relying on the Peashooter while Zombies have the simply named Soldier. However, even though both have good mobility options for getting to high spots or zipping around the map, their most basic shot does not quite function the same despite both being about dealing damage quickly and reliably. A Peashooters large pea projectiles have some mild splash damage and deal considerable damage when they hit, but they fire slower than the Soldier’s straightforward assault rifle. The differences continue as the Peashooter brings a Chili bomb that works like a grenade to the table but the Soldier fires rockets from long range, and once we start looking at the other team members the capabilities of plants and zombies only diverge more. For example, the Chomper has no clear analogue on the other team, this mean plant with a massive mouth needing to get in close to deal damage and able to actually pull off instant kills if it burrows beneath players or gets behind them. This makes them good for picking off pesky zombies, but they can’t pull these attacks off often and will often die quickly after if they didn’t pick their moment right. The All-Star is a sturdy football player with a minigun who can make powerful pushes, something the plant side lacks, but the plants have the Sunflower who is centered around healing and quick recovery and the Cactus that comes with defensive potato mines, walnut walls, and even a drone they can join the fight with while hiding away from conflict. The zombies have a healer in the form of the Scientist, but he can get more involved with his shotgun-like blaster and proximity bombs while the Engineer has special tools like a bomb to disable enemy abilities for a time and the ability to construct teleporters and turrets at specific locations.

 

Since no class plays exactly alike but are well-suited for different roles in the team, there are already quite a few ways to play to experiment with to see which clicks for you, and with even the Sunflower having some decent rapid fire shots, you’re not ever going to be stuck in a truly passive role unless you choose to play it that way. Teamwork and a good class spread will definitely raise your chances of success, but each class has a responsibility they can fill so if you do have a lot of Soldiers you at least can assume the enemy will be dying often and won’t be able to get to high places to rain down damage from above. The distinct play style of something like the Chomper will also let you break away from the typical gunfight format if you so please with the right amount of balancing put into its design that it won’t be able to devastate the other team since it has the proper drawbacks to its instant kills.

All eight classes are available from the start, although there’s a very brief period where you need to unlock their main abilities one by one. It seems to be an attempt to introduce things gradually and it’s so short that it won’t make up much of your Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare experience compared to something like the push to get the Jump Pack in Star Wars Battlefront. However, once you do have your abilities, you’ll always be on par with the opposing team even as the randomized sticker pack system provides many more unlockables to pursue. Earning coins through multiplayer matches lets you purchase sticker packs that can provide new cosmetics for your plants and zombies, and the game actually does a surprisingly good job of bringing the series’s cartoon designs into a higher fidelity world that features environments with more realistic vegetation. The style is strong and silly and the outfits you get will continue to be wonderfully goofy like giving your gunmen blindfolds or still manage to look cool like having interesting lighting effects on the sunflower’s petals.

 

The actual upgrades and alternate characters are the bigger concern for fairness, but the upgrades are at least incredibly small increases in competence like having a touch more ammo before you need to reload. The alternate characters are also more about specialization than being straight upgrades to the default versions of the classes. For example, the All-Star has a charge tackle maneuver by default, but one of his alternate abilities you can unlock is a charge that deals more damage but takes much longer to recharge after use. The Ice Peashooter’s blasts have a slowing effect at the cost of slightly less damage, and the Cactus can go from firing spines from its mouth one at a time to a quick burst of three shots that have longer breaks between them. While these do definitely have upsides that might outweigh the drawbacks, you’re not going to see someone run wild with some ability you have no access to simply because they got the better random stickers from their draws, so when you can afford a sticker pack it ends up being a nice way to expand your capabilities rather than one that is necessary to remain competitive. Even if you were bothered by the small customization on offer, the game’s major competitive modes have Classic variants where there are only the eight basic classes with their default abilities to pick from.

 

One thing that sticker packs do provide that perhaps would be better as a default ability though are the consumables. Both the zombies and plants are able to produce back-up with the consumables, plants putting them in little pots to help with defense while zombies are able to call support up from bone piles to shamble towards the objective. There are an incredibly wide range of these with unique abilities and clearly superior options amongst them, but for the most part they won’t have a staggering impact on proceedings because of their intentional limitations. The Bamboo Shoot may be a great way of launching little air strikes, but it can be blasted to bits in an instant, and while a zombie that wears a coffin or porta-potty as defensive armor takes the opposing side a long time to put down, they are pretty much there to draw fire by moving towards the objective mindlessly. Making the better ones rarer pulls does mean players won’t waste them as readily, but it is one area where the haves and the have-nots will actually diverge in their capabilities despite it being a small factor in the overall success of a team. They are an interesting addition at least and add more texture to a fight since you might suddenly find yourself set aflame by a Snap Dragon or rushed by a group of speedy zombies, but there might have been a better way to implement them than relying on random draws you need to buy that also detract from your ability to get new cosmetics or alternate characters.

 

So we have a good set of varied character classes, some unlockables to shoot for, and a collection of spawnable support that adds to the experience even if it’s not perhaps handled in the best way, but the rule sets and modes will really determine how these components will be able to shine. Garden Ops serve as the game’s only mode that can be played in single-player but it can be played cooperatively with up to four players as well. In this mode you play only as the plants defending a singular garden from waves of AI controlled zombies. On any difficulty but easy you’ll need a fairly competent Sunflower on your side to succeed since healing is important to keep plants up and fighting, and the consumable potted plant supports are definitely most important here since they’re good for keeping hordes at bay. There are two boss rounds in each game of Garden Ops though, and while these bring in tough zombies with special abilities, there really isn’t much variety to be found in them. You’ll constantly see the disco dancing zombie, zombie vampire, and the two variants of the giant, and fighting against them is usually either unremarkable or difficult because your team composition is bad. The vampire is particularly annoying because his teleportation maneuver is so quick and constant it almost looks like the game is lagging out. Disconnecting in Garden Ops seemed to be a common issue compared to the smooth competitive multiplayer modes as well and getting back into an ongoing online game seemed luck based, so not only might the game be frustrating because your team is ill-equipped against sometimes annoying zombie types, but you might lose all that progress when the server decides to boot you.

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is definitely better focused on for its competitive side, and there are many different modes and maps to choose from. Team Vanquish is the game’s standard race to get the most kills, plants and zombies both trying to earn 50 before the other team can. Revives can prevent a score from being achieved and while group sizes can get big in this mode, there’s definitely room for the battles to be exciting even with just a few participants. Defensive skills and healing can definitely still work in your favor in this mode despite the aggression focus since keeping things team focused means there will be a lot of unofficially exchanging dominance over a region of the map, and different variations of Vanquish like Vanquish Confirmed! require you to run in to grab orbs dead players drop to get the points so traps have a chance to catch point collecting players off guard.

 

Gardens vs. Graveyards is the mode that most clearly plays into plants playing defense and zombies needing to assault an objective. Plants start the mode with every garden on their side, but the undead attackers can turn a garden into a graveyard by occupying it long enough. The zombies need to take each garden in a specific order so the action stays focused on one important area at a time, ensuring players are constantly coming into conflict, jostling for control, and utilizing their class’s specific skills to play to their strengths. Gardens vs. Graveyards has the largest maps that all contain distinct sections, so in a place like Driftwood Shores it starts at a battle in a mountainous area, shifts into battles near the docks and marina, and will head to an unexpected castle environment, the designs giving different advantages like the castle being easy to defend but the docks have many points of approach for the zombies. These are the longer matches that benefit from huge player counts, and while some contain areas similar to the suburbs or the pirate focused Port Scallywag level featured in other modes, it’s the only place you’ll be able to storm a mansion or defend a golf course. Many of the maps do go for an urban setting, Garden Center and Chomp Town both being city streets, but areas like Jewel Junction’s mine mean things at least avoid being too similar when you’re playing a mode with a single level focus rather than Gardens vs. Graveyards’s starkly different interconnected portions.

 

The post-release updates added in some new modes, these having varying degrees of success. Suburbanization was very hard to find a game in and is a simple control point focused mode where holding a spot for your team earns points, this leading to Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare moving away from its greatest strength. Keeping the action centralized allows for many classes to consistently find purpose, with classes like Chomper or Scientist not really working well if the whole team and opposing side has incentive to move all around an open map. Vanquish modes can hit on that issue, but shifting spawn points and the natural draw to where players are does a better job of keeping things together than a mode where someone can run off and try to solo capture or defend a point. Gnome Bomb does a better job of spreading the action out, since a bomb will suddenly spawn somewhere on the map and then can be carried to one of three of the enemy’s gardens or graveyards to try and blow it up. Things do start spread out when the bomb is still up in the air, but delivering it centralizes the action for a while and the ability to pick your target means you can try and coordinate a good offensive while the defensive team still can try to fortify their remaining points if some have been blown up.

 

Taco Bandits is a surprisingly sound mode despite its silly name and is great for quick play. The plants need to defend a taco stand while zombies try to run in and cart off the tacos to their UFO. It’s a capture the flag mode with a twist in that one team is trying to capture the whole time and the other is strictly defense, and since scooping up a taco is quick you don’t need too powerful of an offensive push to start ferrying a taco out, the team protecting the stand won’t become so entrenched you can’t break their defensive line. This mode can tip pretty strongly towards plants if they’re well coordinated or have good Sunflowers, but zombies still have the chance to gain ground and gradually grab all three tacos they need for victory if they can spot openings or strike in the right manner.

THE VERDICT: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare’s asymmetric perks found within not only the zombie and plant sides but their individual classes lead to many exciting clashes in the competitive modes that focus player attentions well. Modes like Gardens vs. Graveyards prove a strong host for shifting power dynamics and sections that feel truly disparate in how the players will need to work together or utilize their abilities, the different classes all having fun ways to contribute to the action even if they’re a support class. Some modes like Garden Ops can grow stale quickly and modes like Suburbanization that split the action make for less thrilling conflicts, but even simple modes like Vanquish do a good job of gently guiding players to exciting action or outright make the attack and defense aspects a strict focus like in Taco Bandits. The sticker packs add something to shoot for despite the slight unevenness they add to things with the support consumables, but overall Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare manages an enjoyably varied battle system that gives players a lot to chew on.

 

And so, I give Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. When both sides are in frequent contact with each other thanks to modes with good incentives for grouping up or approaching dangers, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare provides an exciting team shooter experience. A regular player can take a decent amount of damage even when they’re a squishier class so you aren’t going to die to unexpected attacks too often, but in a chaotic conflict you can utilize your unique powers to contribute in distinct ways. An All-Star might come tearing through weak plants with a powerful minigun push, but then a Chomper rises up and eats him. However, then that Chomper would be easy pickings for a Soldier, who might charge in to capture the objective only to trip a Cactus’s mine. An Engineer could come roaring in on his high-speed jackhammer ride to try and pick off a Sunflower only for a Peashooter to root itself and use its gatling gun ability to tear him to shreds, but that leaves him stuck in place for a Scientist to warp forward and blast the peashooter apart with his shotgun-like weapon. The give and take augmented by conducive level design or little support plants and zombies really makes those moments of focused action strong and enjoyable, and that’s likely why the game stumbles when it tries something like the wave defense structure of Garden Ops where there isn’t enough content or special conflict to keep it fresh. If you disregard the weaker modes you still won’t find this scraping up against the likes of Team Fortress 2 with its multipurpose classes or Overwatch with its plethora of unique characters, but Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare keeps itself grounded and tries to avoid any unfair design with the upgrades and alternate characters it does provide so that it makes for a game you can quickly get into and enjoy without needing to understand a huge variety of variables.

 

While a big departure from tower defense, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare carries over the original’s corny concept into a third-person shooter surprisingly well. The plants have such distinct abilities that tie well into their designs and purposes and the zombies, while being a bit closer to what you’d expect from a shooting-focused game, bring special options to the battle as well to make playing as either side entertaining. This genre shift was approached not only with a lovely degree of whimsy but close attention to making sure things are mostly well-balanced, so while not every mode on offer is a winner, it’s still an accessible and solid class based shooter that brings something bright and delightfully condensed so that you don’t need to keep track of a mountain of gun varieties to squeak out small advantages.