Game Reviews

When Plants vs. Zombies [App Store] was originally announced on April 1st last year, PC gamers everywhere (myself included) were unsure if Popcap's newly revealed game was part of an elaborate April Fool's Day hoax or not. A little more than a month later, the game was released and not only saw universal acclaim from the gaming media resulting in an 88 on Metacritic, but also earned the title of Popcap's fastest selling game of all time.

In Plants vs. Zombies, Popcap takes the standard tower defense formula and greatly simplifies it. Instead of a path to build towers along, you drop seeds in your yard which then grow in to plants that have various offensive or defensive capabilities. The yard is organized in a grid, and zombies move straight across the row they spawn on, munching (or in some cases jumping or flying over) anything that they come in contact with.A gauge on the top of the screen shows how close you are to the end of the level, with flags indicating when big waves of zombies are going to come. When you clear a stage, you're often awarded with the seeds of one more of the nearly 50 included plants. This seemingly constant progression does a great job of keeping you interested, as it always seems like you have a new toy to play with. To shake things up even more, mini game levels are mixed in, including a bowling game of sorts, a whack-a-mole game with zombies, and others.Originally designed to be played with a mouse, Popcap did an excellent job of porting Plants vs. Zombies to the iPhone. The resource required to build your defenses is sunlight, and in the PC version feverishly moving your mouse around to click on the small suns falling from the top of the screen got tiring (especially when playing on a laptop with a touchpad). On the iPhone, the sunlight mechanic is also in place, but seems to work so much better when you only have to tap the falling suns to collect them.