Plants vs. Zombies 2 3.1.1

For those who were born yesterday and for those who missed reading the Galactic Trends magazine on your way to Earth, I must send this update: Plants vs. Zombies is the epitome of the Tower Defense genre of games. In my view, it has perfected this style of game by requiring much more participation from the part of the player than just placing some structures and upgrading them from time to time. In PvsZ you had to proactively defend 5 separate lanes from incoming zombie hordes. You had defense elements that expired and needed to be cautiously placed, while every structure was destructible and had to be placed in an intelligent manner behind or in front of another and closer or farther from the edge of the screen. This left room for improvisation and the sheer number of defense structures allowed the player to develop his or her own style.

Moving forward... in time!

After having saved the lawns of the world from ravenous zombies, Crazy Dave shows up again, eating a taco. After eating what apparently was the only taco left in the world, he asks Penny (a self aware RV that can talk) to take you two back in time so he can savor it again. Unfortunately, Penny sends you a bit too far back in time, more precisely in ancient Egypt (2500 BC, more or less). What do you find in ancient Egypt you might ask? Well it's not Dave's taco for sure. As you soon find out, the ancient world is overwhelmed by zombies also. You therefore need to battle zombies while trying to get back to the early 21'st century. In your failed attempts you will visit the age of piracy, the far future and the medieval times among others.

The basic game play remained the same. You harvest falling sun tokens to pay for plants that attack, defend or do both with different degrees of power and of variation. The sunflower is still present, as there are all the basic plants we love so dear.

Some enemies now drop coins. Coins are used to buy plant food, which is a one-shot universal power-up. You can store up to three plant foods and you can spend one on any plant to put it in super-mode for a limited time. For example, a pea shooter gets to attack about fifty times faster while a sunflower will spew up five sun tokens almost instantaneously, a walnut will become armored and so on. You can buy plant food for 1000 coins apiece. Quite expensive considering you only earn about a few hundred coins per level. Still, there is the occasional green glowing zombie, which gives you a freebie once you've dismembered it.

The progression is now clearer than ever. You will always see how many levels are left in a specific stage and what plants will be unlocked after each level is completed. As such you can also re-play levels if you wish.

For each time period, you also get three Vasebreaker levels. In these you will need to break all vases on the lawn. Some release zombies and some release plants. It is then up to you to place the plants so that they deal with the released zombies. This mode has a puzzly nature and it is a good escape from time to time. Oh, this variant can be accessed voluntarily, it is not part of the general level progression.

Finally, Plants vs. Zombies has much more in store (pun intended) than what I had just presented and is layered in such a way as to keep the experience fresh.

Conclusion

Another dose of Plants vs. Zombies is what everybody needed. New enemies, new outfits and new means of dispatching them across interesting new backdrops. What's not to like?