Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare This is probably the most spectacular act of franchise-milking since George Lucas strapped a feedbag and ar...
Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare
This is probably the most spectacular act of franchise-milking since George Lucas strapped a feedbag and artificial udders to the Star Wars franchise. So far, none of that has stopped it being very good fun. As you can probably tell, Garden Warfare is a Plants vs Zombies game that thinks it’s a third-person shooter, in which up to 12 oddly ferocious vegetables and 12 oddly cute corpses fire off class-specific weapons and abilities at each other. It is thus the only game in creation in which you can shoot a grinning sunflower in the face with a light machine gun. Botanists beware.
Each team’s four classes roughly correspond to those you’ll encounter in a more sombre breed of shooter such as Battlefield, but interesting things happen when PopCap refracts these familiar ideas through the Plants vs Zombies fiction. The nearest the vegetables have to a shock trooper, for instance, is the Chomper, which can tunnel under bullets to guzzle down zombie players in one bite; the trade-off is that you don’t have any ranged attacks, though you can spit purple gloop to disable your opponent’s abilities. The Zombie Engineer, meanwhile, can remote-pilot a flying skull turret and is able to speed around aboard his power-drill, chuntering like an agitated squirrel. As for the Sunflower, she’s a lot nastier than she looks: besides tossing flowerpots that radiate restorative energy, she can root herself to the spot in order to upgrade her basic attack into a surprisingly terrifying death ray.
Reflecting its modest £35 RRP, Garden Warfare is hardly feature-stuffed – besides 24-head competitive multiplayer, you've got a four-player wave survival co-op mode and some Xbox One exclusive split-screen support, but there doesn't appear to be a campaign mode. Still, if you’re after a lighter specimen of multiplayer blaster to keep you awake while you wait for Titanfall, this could be worth digging into.