But to make the formerly one-dimensional zombies suitable for a player to control, Lindley says the team spent months designing and redesigning characters to be the right blend of comical and useful. "People were very shocked that we went from a tower defense game to a 3D shooter… but the plants were always shooting," remarks franchise manager Gary Clay. From the beginning, it was clear that PVZ’s plants made sense. If you ask the development team, the zombies were the biggest hurdle to turning PVZ into a online shooter. The plants and zombies make excellent foils for one another, both individually and as a team. The zombies, meanwhile, have abilities that give them enhanced mobility and devasting single use attacks, like a jackhammer that the Engineer can ride into battle like a motorized pogo stick, or the All-Star Zombie’s dash tackle which sends enemies flying through the air. The zombies don’t have a sniper like the Cactus, and the other three plants can burrow into the earth to turn into powerful stationary turrets - or in the case of the Chomper, a giant purple piranha plant that swallows enemies whole, to avoid detection by tunneling through the ground. As you might expect, the plants are at their most powerful dug into the ground, and not just figuratively. Where TF2 is a mirror match of identical character classes, though, the plants and zombie teams each feel unique. If it sounds like I’m describing Valve's famous cartoony action shooter Team Fortress 2, that’s no accident: Garden Warfare producer Brian Lindley readily admits that a mix of PVZ and TF2 was one of the game’s original goals. There’s also the Sunflower, a support class that heals with focused beams of light, and the Foot Zoldier Zombie, which can rocket jump up to the tops of buildings and deal death from above. Meanwhile, the plant team’s Cactus can snipe from a distance.
How far do you want to be from the fray? If you like getting close and personal, the Zombie Scientist’s goo shotgun will do the trick. The 12-on-12 matches are wonderfully hectic and delightfully diverse, partially because the huge environments (including cartoony towns, suburban neighborhoods, and a castle) are well laid out, and partly because each of the four different plant and zombie heroes have distinct, satisfying playstyles. But if you can keep your expectations in check, Garden Warfare is still loads of fun.īut I soon forgot all about "Garden Ops" when I dove into the real meat of the game: 24-player online skirmishes and capture-the-base turf wars where actual players also control the zombies. Though EA has successfully managed to turn PVZ into a bonafide online shooter while retaining much of the series’ charm, it’s not an obsession so much as a casual diversion. Unfortunately, that stickiness isn’t fully present in EA’s attempt to bridge the two genres: Plants vs. It’s arguably that stickiness, playing “just one more round” than you intended to play, that made these games so popular. Zombies hit upon a similarly addictive formula for 2D puzzle games: each time you successfully fend off the waves of zombies trying to reach your house - by placing, say, piranha plants and exploding chili peppers in their path - you unlock new plants and face new zombies which invite you to change up your defenses. They feature incredibly tight feedback loops: nearly every time you kill a enemy or achieve an objective, you get points towards new weapons that kill more efficiently and spectacularly the next time around. These days, big-budget shooting games like Call of Duty and Battlefield are designed to be objects of obsession.
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