PopCap has gone to great lengths to offer as much content and variety as possible, but even so they can’t quite match the original game – which has been added to and refined constantly over the last four years.
Or you’re forced to set-up your plants at the start and then not allowed to change anything until the end. The game is as eager to modify the rules as much as it is the plants’ abilities, and once you’ve beaten all the levels in a set you start getting new objective-based variants where you only have a limited amount of sun or plants with which to compete. This can be used on any plant to power it up and unleash a super attack, with Cabbage-pults releasing a barrage of mortar fire or lowly Peashooters suddenly transforming into photosensitive Gatling guns. Zombies 2 of merely being an expansion pack in all but name, but it does have at least one big new idea in the shape of plant food. On the zombie side the new themes have inspired everything from a sheriff that’s able to jump over plants to barrel-rolling pirates that can take out a whole line of plants. Naturally there are also plenty of new characters, including the zombie-punching Bonk Choy that’s only good at close quarters and the Lightning Reed that can chain attacks between rows. In the Egyptian levels tombstones block your path and in the cowboy stages you can grow plants on mine carts and shunt them about the screen. In the pirate levels, for example, the number of rows is reduced and gaps open up between your ship and the zombies’. As you might gather from the subtitle there’s a vague time-travelling theme to the sequel, although is just an excuse to have pirate, ancient Egyptian, and cowboy themes.Įach one is more than just a cosmetic change though, as the rules and layouts are subtlety altered in each. The sequel simply takes that approach to its extreme with an even greater number of ways to play the same level and a much wider range of not just plants and zombies but level settings and power-ups. What makes them both so enjoyable though is the effortless charm of their visuals and the endless variations PopCap manages to tease from such an apparently simple idea. But the truth is the original wasn’t terribly innovative in the first place and there are no major rethinks for the sequel either. The resource needed to grow new plants is sunlight, with little sun icons appearing onscreen – or generated by sunflowers – for you to click on and collect as the carnage unfolds. Naturally the plants are the ones providing the defence, with the action simplified from many similar games so that by default the zombies enter from the right side of the screen and slow amble towards the plants on the other side, along one of a number of horizontal strips. Zombies is a Tower Defense game, that unlikely offspring of real-time strategy games where the enemies are mobile but you’re only able to set-up static defences to defeat them. When you do finally get to play the game you’ll find the basics largely unchanged from the ultra-successful original.
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