The City of Heroes crafting will come later today for this morning I have Plants vs Zombies from PopCap!
Front Yard -- Night
PvZ is a tower defense type game where the player selects and plants different plants to defend against hordes of zombies. There’s a wide variety of plants (49) and numerous zombies (26) that all perform differently. For instance, above (starting from the left) you have the sun-shroom which starts out small and produces a small amount of sunlight (that yellow orb with spikes there) and eventually grows to the full size shown, then you have the pea shooter which is the basic attack plant — it shoots a single pea that deals normal damage and has the entire field as its range, next is the potato mine which acts as a proximity mine — it takes awhile to arm and that’s its vulnerable period — afterwards it’ll explode dealing massive damage to any zombies in a small area (one use per spud), next is the puff-shroom which has no cost but a short range of roughly 3 squares — it deals normal damage, lastly is the wall-nut — the basic defensive wall — it has a solid shell which can withstand a decent amount of damage but it is vulnerable to zombies that can jump (such as the Pole Vaulting Zombie and the Dolphin Rider Zombie) building its big brother the tall-nut solves this problem but it is far more expensive. And those are just the tip of the plant iceberg that you’ll be using during the 50 levels.
To get more plant types you complete levels, killing all the zombies without having your brains eaten, and receive a card like so:
Doom-Shroom Card
You can also buy new plants (in the form of upgrades) at Crazy Dave’s shop, once you unlock it.
You’ll notice that the row of cards at the top of the screen is the current plants available for use during play. This plant deck can be expanded during the game. You choose the cards to use at the beginning of each match:
Choosing Plants
As well as plant choice you can see what types of zombies will be assaulting your yard. Here we have Conehead zombies which have a medium toughness (basically like two normal zombies), normal zombies (the ones with no extra features), Dancing zombie (the one with the glove… yes he does do the dance and he summons four Back-Up Dancer zombies), and the Screen Door zombie which has a shield that’s rather tough — you can use the Fume-Shroom (the fat one, costs 75 sun) to by-pass its defense. Knowing what you’re facing helps tremendously as you can plan according to what you’ll need in the limited deck space available. Later on you’ll face zombies like the Ballon zombie which will fly over all your plants and you’ll need one of two types of plant to stop it. Another zombie known as a Diver zombie will dig under your entire field and start on the left side, clearing its way out — such zombies will cause you to think differently about each setup and will force you to experiment with the different plants in different ways.
Throughout the adventure mode you’ll be faced with different mini-games, like wall-nut bowling, or a tower defense mode with random plants:
One of the Mini-Games
The plants come down a conveyor-belt style box at the top (as you can see) and you’re tasked to use them as you will to stop the rampaging hordes of brain-loving zombies. Once you unlock the mini-games portion you can also try a slot machine style game that’ll have you trying to gather a set amount of sunlight while you also use it as a resource to spin new plants up. (essentially, it has three rollers, two of a kind gets you one of that plant, three of a kind gets you three)
As for a review, I can’t really give one yet — I’m only over half-way through the adventure mode with about 4-5 hours playtime invested. I can say that the game is quite fun and well worth the price tag, if you enjoy these types of games.
