GAME PLANT
VS ZOMBIE
Competitive shooters are serious business. They depict
epic battles between modern-day soldiers and insurgents in war-torn cities, or
conflicts between space marines and aliens on distant worlds, or skirmishes
between battle-hardened men and subterranean creatures who try to slice each
other to bits with rifle-mounted chainsaws. There's nothing wrong with any of
that, but there's also no reason the broadly appealing mechanics of multiplayer
shooters always need to be married to grim scenarios.
That's what makes Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
so enticing. Mechanically, it's solid, if unsurprising. It distinguishes itself
from other shooters not through its gameplay, but by successfully couching
familiar shooter action in the bright and playful world of the Plants vs.
Zombies games. Still, the package is a bit thin, even at the $40 asking price
that the game carries on the Xbox One.
Garden Warfare is primarily a team-based multiplayer
game. (The Garden Ops mode can be played solo or split-screen locally with one
other player, but all other modes require you to hop online.) Each mode has you
siding with either the plants or the zombies as the age-old...er, four-year-old
conflict between them rages on. As in so many competitive shooters, gameplay is
class-based. There are four basic units on each side; among the plants, there's
the well-rounded peashooter, whose pea cannon does splash damage, and the
sunflower, whose heal beam can give allies the extra vitality they need to
survive a shootout. The zombie army includes the engineer, who can call in a
drone to attack enemies from the air and rain down explosive,
traffic-cone-shaped death on those pesky plants. They've also got the all-star,
a zombie in a football getup whose pigskin-shooting cannon takes a second to
spin up but does lots of damage once it gets going.
The game does a good job of balancing out the
abilities on each side. The chomper can burrow underground, get under an enemy,
and burst forth to swallow him whole--a wonderfully satisfying move to pull
off--but nearby zombie engineers can use their sonic grenades to stun all nearby
plants, forcing burrowed chompers out of the ground in the process. And the
game makes defensive abilities just as important as offensive ones. The
cactus's potato mines can fortify a location against zombies who are too
reckless to look where they're going, and the all-star's dummy shield can
absorb enemy fire. In Garden Warfare, as in most of the better competitive
shooters on the market these days, you're not always focused on killing members
of the other team; you're trying to use the variety of abilities at your
disposal to most effectively support your team.
Look into the face of the flower that vanquished you
and despair.
In Team Vanquish games, the best way to support your
team is, in fact, to kill members of the other team. This playlist pits teams
of up to 12 against each other in a race to 50 kills (though the game never
uses that violent word, opting for "vanquishes" instead), and
encourages you to revive fallen teammates, which subtracts the point the
opposing team earned for killing your buddy from its tally. More dynamic are
the battles of the Gardens & Graveyards playlist, in which plants work
together to prevent zombies from capturing key points on the map.
Only one point is contested at any time, so battles
for those points are heated, and if the zombies succeed in pushing the plants
back to the last battleground on a map, there's an enjoyable endgame goal the
undead have to accomplish. On one map, zombies launch themselves through a
cannon to an island to assault the megaflower, and on another, they have to
assault Crazy Dave's mansion, which is defended by cannons that launch massive
nuts that roll down the driveway like bowling balls.
There's also the cooperative Garden Ops game type, in
which up to four players defend a garden from waves of AI-controlled zombies.
If you survive all the waves, there's a Left 4
Dead-style escape attempt that some players may survive while others
may not, making for some exciting and desperate final moments. But the AI
zombie hordes aren't as clever, or as enjoyable to mow down, as
player-controlled opponents, so Garden Ops lacks the liveliness of the
competitive modes. Whatever mode you play, the maps give you plenty of
opportunity to try using the terrain to your advantage. The zombie foot soldier
can use his rocket jump to launch onto rooftops, and the cactus's long-range
spike shot makes her a good choice when you'd rather try to stay back from the
front lines and pick off enemies from afar.
The ability to put defensive plants in flower pots
gives Garden Warfare's gameplay the slightest whiff of classic Plants vs.
Zombies tower defense.
There are tons of unlockables in Garden Warfare. Coins
you earn as you play (and that, at least for now, cannot be purchased with real
money) can be spent to purchase sticker packs that contain everything from
accessories like sunglasses for your sunflower to character variations, like
the dapper agent pea, who sacrifices the standard peashooter's splash damage
for a damage bonus on critical hits. It's frustrating that you can't influence
which class variant you work toward unlocking next, though. Even if you buy the
40,000-coin sticker pack that guarantees you a character unlock, it could be
any character; you can't improve your chances of getting that specific class
variant you've seen other players using and really want to try out.
While the unlockables fit right in with the whimsical
spirit of the Plants vs. Zombies franchise, you're left feeling like Garden
Warfare needed a little something more to make it a meal rather than a side
salad. Still, it's that rare shooter whose world and characters might put a
smile on your face, making it a refreshing entry in a genre that usually takes
itself really seriously.
Benefit to this play for the kids is cultivate a brain
to search a strategy or a way out to win this games and how manner in order
that plant to disappear a zombie so that zombie not in to the house.
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