First Impressions: Plants vs. Zombies

Yes, while working today, I decided to load up steam for the first time in a couple of weeks. To my surprise, Plants vs. Zombies, a game from Popcap, was out and ready to demo or buy. Well, I jumped on the chance to download the demo, and after playing through the whole demo, and right now buying the game, I would like to give my first impressions.

First off, the game is really fun and easy to pick up and play. It is definitely a casual title for the casual gamer. what you do is you have a lawn (that’s all you get in the demo), and you are pitted against a horde of zombies. Well, you use pieces of sun that fall down magically from the sky to get what look like plant trading cards in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The pea-shooter, the green one in the picture, “costs” 25 sun pieces (or whatever the hell you’d want to call them). Each piece of sun gives you 25, and once you get 100, you can give them all up to get one. You place it on your lawn, which is in a gridded format as for easy configuration of plants and the like.

Zombies come one after another, in all shapes and forms. You can put sunflower plants (that cost 50), on your lawn, and those will give you more sun pieces so you can get more plants to fight off the zombies. As you fight off the zombies, you will destroy the “normal” horde, and then at the end, a whole plethora of them will start coming at you from every angle. After you defeat the big horde, most of the time you will be rewarded with new plant cards that you can use in future “battles”, or maybe a new item such as a shovel, that allows you to dig up plants if you don’t want them in a specific place any more.

From what I’ve played, the game is shit-tons of fun, and once I play a good part through the regular game, I will get a review up for you guys. I’ll try to get a review up by Friday or Saturday at the latest. Definitely though, if you’re interested at all in the concept, or just want a casual, fun, and challenging game to play, definitely pick up the demo on Stem, and if you like it, go ahead and drop the $10 to buy it.