Plants vs. Zombies Review

Plants vs. Zombies is indisputably one of the most popular casual games out there. Having been released on PC in 2009, it has made its way to virtually every platform available: iPhone, iPad, PS3, Xbox 360, and Mac. Now it is time for the Nintendo DS, the king of casual gaming, to get its own version. Are you ready to kill some zombies?

If you have never played Plants vs. Zombies before, it is basically a tower defense game where you use plants to defend against a zombie attack. The game takes place in a grid where the zombies move horizontally along five different lines. You have to prevent them from penetrating any of these lines by using defensive plants. These include a huge variety of plants, forty-eight in all, which include your basic shooting type, explosive, blocking, and slowing.

Of course no plant can grow without some sunlight. Thankfully you have sunflowers to provide you with sun periodically, which you then tap and collect. You need to collect a certain amount of sun for each plant type and once a plant is put into the ground, a cool-down period has to lapse before you can plant the same type again. The overall goal is to stop the zombie onslaught from one round to the next.

The types of zombies are extensive as well. With twenty-six zombie types, you will have to strategically place your plants to combat the varying attributes of each zombie. You have a basic zombie that goes down in a few hits, a zombie with a traffic cone on his head to shield him, a pole-vault zombie that can jump over the first plant that he encounters, a zombie reading a newspaper that runs at you as soon as you tear it to shreds, and many more. The developers took a light-hearted, comical approach and it works well.

While you would expect this to be a DSiWare title, PopCap Games went with a retail release, likely to capture the massive install base of the original fat Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite (both of which do not have access to DSiWare). The $20 asking price is about the bare minimum you would expect from a retail release, but it is still asking too much for a $10 PC game that is better on PC anyway. If portability is your main criteria (and you don’t have an iPhone), only then will the Nintendo DS be the way to go.