God bless the Zombie, each and every shambling, groaning, flesh munching one of them.
Where would we be without them? What enjoyment would we have missed out on? Resident Evil would have been a rubbish tour of an empty mansion with people who had less acting talent than a lower school nativity play. The spectacular addition to Call of Duty: World at War, Nazi Zombies, would just have been you and your mates shoddily attempting carpentry. Left for Dead would just have been left and Dead Rising would have been a shopping trip to a trashed mall – I can do that in Newport on a Saturday for free, I don’t want to pay for the privilege, thanks!
Honestly, these slightly grey, brain-obsessed fellows really do give us more than we think. And now, thanks to those folks down at Popcap (responsible for the uber addictive Bejewelled series), we’ve got another to add to the list. Welcome to the app store, Plants Vs Zombies.
Those of a PC or Mac gaming persuasion will know that this game has been available through Steam for quite some time but it has only recently stretched out its cold dead arms to embrace the iPod/iPhone and we are more than happy to receive it.
Let’s get the nitty gritty out of the way; basically, this is a tower defence game in which you protect your home from a barrage of the walking undead. Now rather than the usual guns or turrets you use plants (Plants Vs Zombies…see, like a popular varnish, it does exactly what it says…). The zombies walk from the right to the left of the screen across the front lawn of your home and you have to sow plants, each with their own powers and attributes, in order to halt their progression. These range from sunflowers (who generate sunbeams, see below) and peashooters (who shoot peas, obviously) to wall-nuts (who create barriers) and Chompers (Venus flytrap looking dudes who swallow zombies whole).
As you progress you unlock a variety of new plants to use such as landmine like potatoes and Ice firing, zombie slowing peashooters. Now as well as having different attributes, these plants also have different reload times so, for example, the cherry bombs can take out a large number of zombies in one go but destroy themselves in the process and it can take a good minute or so to load the next one. Therefore strategy and timing really is the name of the game here. To make things even more interesting (read: frantic), the plants that you grow are limited by the amount of sun that you can collect.
During the day sun will drop from the sky, which you can tap on to collect, as well as be created by your sunflowers. However, during the night time levels there is no sun to collect, only what is produced by your plants, therefore smaller sunlight producing fungal plants are available during these night missions, that require less sunlight and, after a short time will start creating as much sunlight as the sunflowers, as well as spore firing and hypnotic mushrooms.
The zombies aren’t restricted to just one type either, as the levels progress you get a greater variety such as ones with buckets on their heads which give them slightly more armour to quarterback zombies that are significantly quicker in addition to having more armour. Later in the game some other variants turn up that I’ll leave off mentioning for now, needless to say you’ll have to alter the way you play to vanquish these.
At the beginning of each level you’ll have the option to choose which plants you use and this really can make or break your chances of winning, it does give you a brief look at the zombies so you know what to pick based on their weaknesses but it still can be a little trial and error.
To break up the levels there are also a number of mini games such as wall-nut bowling for zombies, which is pretty self explanatory, and whack-a-zombie where you wallop your foes with a wooden hammer as they emerge from the ground, simple, but very good fun. Also included are a number of achievements which you unlock by completing tasks such as blowing up 10 zombies in one go with a cherry bomb or completing a pool level without using peashooters.
Now most iPod gamers will know that there are a lot of tower defence games available on the store, ranging from the good to the downright awful. Plants Vs Zombies thankfully rests quite far above the former. It looks brilliant, very colourful and very clear, the animation on each sprite is detailed and the sound (both effects and track) is incredible. Parts of it really made me laugh in a slightly geeky, totally obvious kind of way.
It’s not entirely without its faults, don’t get me wrong. For example, when the final wave of zombies that you get on every level shows up and every peashooter starts firing in one go then it can stutter a little and in severe circumstances can seem like looking at a series of still images, however this is quite rare.
All in all, I can not recommend this enough, I honestly have lost entire evenings over the past week to this and that is saying a lot, I’ve had little sisters to save for crying out loud. For just shy of £2 you get easily the same level of content as a PSN or Xbox Live download and you can play as much or as little as you want, if you close down a game halfway through it’ll ask you if you wish to continue from that exact point the next time you load it up, a simple feature but one that many iPod games are lacking and which makes this an awesome choice even if you can only play for minutes at a time. An essential purchase for all.
Now… I’m off to plant some Daffodils before the shambley sods turn up. Happy planting.
