Plants vs Zombies: Concluded

Popcap have done it again.

After the casual masterpiece that is Peggle, Popcap have released Plants vs Zombies, another attempt to steal all my spare time. And it worked.

Plants vs Zombies is fantastic. The game has rock-solid mechanics, is polished to a massive extent, has a sense of humour ... and taps into a very popular meme, namely zombies. What more does any game need?

Popcap's twist on the classic tower defence genre gives the player an ever increasing amount of plants to defend their house from waves of different types of zombies. Each different type of zombie has it's own distinct personality and skill, from the bog standard brain-eater to the Michael Jackson-esque dancing zombie who resurrects four of his pals with a Thriller-esque pirhouette, and as with the zombies, each plant brings something different to the table.

The game is played out on a 6x6 grid, and the currency used to 'buy' plants is sunlight, which drops from the sky, or can be generated using sunflowers, and mushrooms in later levels. This introduces a new mechanic to the genre, and gives PvZ a unique twist. As well as placing your plants, keeping an eye on any approaching zombies, and collecting any coins dropped, the player must also watch out for sunlight to collect. It's frantic at times, and completely brilliant.

One tiny criticism is difficulty, or lack of. As always, Popcap's learning curve is second to none, but as you play through the game you never get the feeling that a level is close to impossible to complete. In my whole playthrough, I only failed twice (on the very last level), but I guess this is what happens with casual games. Once completed, the game continues to give, with a whole host of new modes and minigames.

Let me repeat myself ... Plants vs Zombies is fantastic, and after reading the credits I can't believe it only took four people to develop. If only all games were like this.