It’s surprising that Plants Vs. Zombies hasn’t attracted more imitators. The charming and intuitive strategy game helped make a name for PopCap and spawned a massive franchise including merch, comic books, and interestingly, more competitive team shooters than strategy games. But while it lends itself to comparisons to tower-defense games, its key mechanics are still basically singular to PvZ itself. Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted brings a nicely modernized facelift to the original game, and while this remaster offers only a few new frills, the game itself is still one of a kind.
For those new to the series, or who have only played the Garden Warfare spin-offs, the core idea of Plants Vs. Zombies is deceptively simple. You’re the owner of a house beset by a zombie apocalypse, and your only defense is an army of living plants. You collect sunlight to power your seeds, which you plant across five horizontal rows as zombies approach from the right side. You can plant Sunflowers to generate extra sunlight, and you’re constantly juggling priorities as zombies approach from the other lanes. If they reach your plants, they’ll chomp down on them and you’ll have to replant them, so it’s best to keep them from reaching that far at all. As the game continues, it constantly adds new wrinkles, like nighttime levels where you have less access to sunlight and need to rely on fungi, or a pool where you need to plant lilypads for your other offensive plants to sit on. This is alongside a steady stream of new zombie types that demand different configurations of plant defenses.
And the zombies themselves, in this case, are far from threatening. They’re goofy and often even kind of cute, with cartoonish affectations like a propeller hat or a disco outfit to signify which type of zombie they are. A zombie with a cone or metal bucket on its head will take more hits before you can knock the cone off and finish it off, a football zombie has heavy defense and also charges more quickly at you, and so on.
