Quick Review: Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare (Xbox One/Xbox 360/Windows)

Plants versus zombies started life as a tower defence game on pretty much every platform of imaginable. Launched in 2009 the title was a hit amongst casual gamers. With Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare however, it seems that EA are trying to get the serious game is on board too.

So what’s new?

The top-down perspective has been done away with and replaced by what is essentially a first person shooter in the mould of Team Fortress 2 or Gotham City Impostors – essentially imagine Call of Duty, but with the brown and grey hues replaced with a very garish green. Don’t be fooled though – it may look like a toy, but it is powered by the very same Frostbite 3 engine that sits under the hood of Battlefield 4.

The game works entirely online and will connect you with other players, and from here, the games can begin. There are three modes of play:

Garden Ops takes the classic PvZ formula of fending off hoards of zombies and tasks the players with working together to use a wide variety of weapons from a pea shooter to a cactus to protect your garden from zombie destruction.

Team Vanquish meanwhile will be more familiar to seasoned shooter veterans – this is the standard team deathmatch mode. It’s first to fifty kills, and unlike the stark reality of Modern Warfare, players can revive each other and lower the death count.

Then there’s “Gardens and Graveyards” mode, which is objective driven, and sees players on alternating plants and zombie teams trying to capture, or defend certain areas of the map.

And finally there’s a mixed mode which cycles through the latter two options.

It controls almost identically to modern shooters – so if you’ve played CoD or almost any game of the last 5 years, you’ll instinctively know how to play this.

The Verdict

So is it worth it? Hardcore gamers might find it a bit lightweight – with many features you’d expect to see in FPS-style games stripped back. That said – if you do enjoy something a little more lighthearted than another grim war story, this could be exactly what you’re looking for. Whilst it lacks the charm of Team Fortress 2, or the familiarity of Batman spin-off Gotham City Impostors, it is none the less a solid game. Don’t expect anything revolutionary – but it is indeed a colourful distraction.