Publisher: PopCap
Developer: PopCap
System requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 512 MB RAM, 1.2 GHz CPU, DirectX 8
Genre: Strategy
Release date: Available now

Gardening has never really been a dangerous pastime. You get the occasional insect bite, maybe you even stab yourself with the pruning shears. But nowhere on the Home and Garden channel do they tell you how to raise plants to be offensive weapons. Developer PopCap has recognized this as a situation to be remedied, so they have created Plants vs. Zombies, a goofy but addictive tower-defense variation that pits you and your arborial artillery against hordes of the shambling undead.

You begin with a tranquil scene: your pleasant suburban home on the left side of the screen, your quiet neighborhood on the right. In between is your manicured and (thankfully) fertile front yard. Unbeknownst to you, the zombie apocalypse has occurred somewhere down the block, and the infected are about to climb your fence. But you have just the thing to beat back the brain-eaters: packets of seeds that, when sown, quickly mature into a wide variety of projectile-pitching plants. Of course, the seeds require sunlight to grow, but you take care of that problem by planting sunflowers, which produce sunlight (we all knew that, right?) that can then be combined with the constant flow of energy from Sol to speed the growth of the other leafy weapons in your arsenal. These include pea pods that shoot, er, peas; cacti that fling spines; and mushrooms that emit puffs of deadly spores.

Plants vs. Zombies is played in five levels with 10 stages in each level. The first four levels take place in either the front or backyard of your home, with the final act set on your roof. You start out with six types of plants, displayed in a rectangular box at the top of the screen. Each plant has a sunlight price. You plant sunflowers to generate energy in the form of glowing yellow orbs. Clicking on the orbs adds sunlight to your bank. You use the sunlight to buy more seeds, which you plant in one of the six lanes of grass in your yard. After a few moments, the now-familiar moans of “brains!” signal the advance of the zombies, whose mission is to get past your flowery defenses and enter your home, where they can snack on your tasty gray matter.

If you succeed in reaching the final stage of a level, PopCap changes the rules a bit. Available seed packets appear at random on a conveyor belt in your seed window. You can only use the seeds in the window to attack the zombies. When the window fills up, the new seeds stop appearing, forcing you to keep planting even if the ones you have aren’t the ones you want. The first and third levels take place in the front yard in daylight. Levels 2 and 4 are set in the backyard at night. This, of course, means no sun, but your available plants now include mushrooms, which don’t need sun to grow. There’s also another wrinkle in the night levels: you’ve got a huge swimming pool that takes up the center two lanes of the yard. Since these zombies don’t seem to be bothered by water (some of them even bring their rubber ducky innertubes to keep themselves afloat), you have to place lilypads in the pool to give yourself a place to plant your seeds.

As in most of PopCap’s games, the graphics in Plants vs. Zombies are simple and very colorful. Each of the 26 zombies has something to distinguish itself from the others (some wear buckets or traffic cones on their heads for protection, some of the aquatic zombies ride inflatable dolphins to avoid your attacks, and there’s even a group of dancing zombies that are summoned from the ground by a Michael Jackson zombie in complete “Thriller” regalia). The game’s difficulty ramps up gradually, but once you discover a strategy that works, a rinse-repeat mentality kicks in, making the latter stages of the game somewhat boring. Also, there is very little variation in the background music; you’ll find yourself using the same types of seeds in every stage, making most of the 49 seed varieties useless; and owners of 16×9 monitors will be disappointed by the lack of widescreen monitor support.

It might sound like I’m green-thumbs down for Plants vs. Zombies, but I’m not. PopCap has added a vital strategy element to the game, something that their other popular time sinks don’t have. It’s filled with infectious good humor, it has the “just one more level” effect that’s important for a game like this to have, and it includes enough content outside of the campaign mode to keep you playing long after you’ve slain the boss zombie. But Plants vs. Zombies suffers from a lack of gameplay variety in the campaign, a difficulty level that never becomes really challenging, and the lack of an online multiplayer mode and its accompanying leaderboards. Everyone who loves casual games should own a copy of Plants vs. Zombies, but they should also be prepared for boredom to become a bigger enemy than the undead.

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