Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is a fun game that continues the humor seen in past Plants vs. Zombies games. The game focuses mainly on online multiplayer with many competitive modes and one co-op mode. Exclusive to the Xbox one is the ability to have local split-screen of just two people, and what is called “Boss mode.”
The only co-op mode, Garden Ops, lets up to four people online play as the plant classes to protect their garden from ten waves of zombies, with the fifth and tenth waves being boss waves. The enemies that appear on these boss waves are determined by a slot-machine system. The competitive modes are “Team Vanquish” and “Gardens and Graveyards” which are like team deathmatch modes, and Battlefield’s rush mode respectively. The competitive modes have two types each. One type allows any unlocked character/class variants and weapons, while the other mode, listed as classic, restricts these to just default classes and weapons.
In order to rank up your characters and overall level, you have to complete challenges given to your characters. To unlock other classes and weapon upgrades, you have to buy sticker packs with coins earned in-game. To give an idea, playing Garden Ops on solo (changing from public access to private) earned me over 1000 coins for winning all ten waves, Team Vanquish usually gave one or two thousand, and Gardens and Graveyards gave anywhere from one thousand to over ten thousand depending on how my team and I did, so buying the most expensive pack at 40,000 coins doesn’t take long.
My family and I are huge fans of the first Plants vs Zombies game, and that is the main reason I got this game. I understand that there are limitations to some things, but ending up with max of two on split-screen disappointed me.
At the time of writing this article, Garden Warfare is still a fun little game that I will continue to play when I take a break from other games. The game is worth the price for those that like third-person shooters, and enjoy the humor that comes with the Plants vs. Zombies games. I look forward to seeing expansion packs or additional content and future updates.
