Review: Plants vs. Zombies Adventures

Fans of Plants Vs. Zombies reunite! We’ve all been on the edge of our seats waiting for the next installment. Well ladies and gentlemen, plant your peashooters, grab your sunshine and let’s hit the road because the Plants Vs. Zombies Adventures Facebook game is now available to play!

Overview

Popcap games has gifted us their latest game PvZ Adventures. It’s a free to play Facebook social game and while most tend to see Facebook games as spammy, simple point & click time consumers, Adventures still stands to be an impressive game that will change your mind about that! Plants V. Zombies Adventures combines the same game that we love (strategically pitting weaponized plants on your lawn to defend your home from the zombie horde) with those fun town building aspects of most Facebook games. You still have the same great flow of planting plants and defending your yard against waves of zombies, but with the addition of living in a town with other people that need protecting as well. You’re given a plot of land, a bit of money and pots to start growing your arsenal. Ultimately you will take a road trip out and defeat zombies, PVZ style! When out on the road fighting zombies, your goal is to also protect your town and reclaim neighbors yards back from the zombies.

Gameplay

You start off in a town called the Boonies. Our silly friend Crazy Dave is now back and he’s giving you helpful advice on how to make it through the horde. There are two modes of gameplay; Your town and the Road. while you take down zombies with plants that you’ve grown back home. On the road you pack up your camper and play through levels of zombie waves PvZ style. You will unlock new plants, gain Zombucks and find useful items for Jed & other people around town that will help you advance through the story. At home you grow plants in your yard to use in battle, interact with others in town, and organize your yard with plants to defend against surprise zombie attacks. As you progress through the game, you can unlock more areas in your town. This game has some new plants and you also get to meet new characters along the way.

With every battle you are using plants that you’ve grown. That being said, you will most likely need to head back home to grow more plants after battle to add to your arsenal. Plant growth time varies from 1 minute, up to 30 minutes. We’ll just come back later for those darling cheerybombs! Plant Pesticides and ZombiFreeze are one of the coolest features of this PvZ game! You can spray these on plants to extend range and armor for a short period of time, or use them on Zombies to freeze them in their tracks. This comes in handy during rough battles when you are limited on plants to use. If you run out of a certain plant during battle you have the option of buying another one using Gems. There are 3 PvZ currencies; Zombucks, Coins and Gems. You gain coins from collecting from your buildings around town, Zombucks are given from defeating zombie waves, and Gems can only be bought using real money (you start out with 100 so use them wisely). Gems and are used to buy more advanced items such as more pots to grow plants and neat items for your backyard.

Overall 4.5/5

While this game isn’t quite Plants vs. Zombies 2, it’s still addicting as ever! I had early access to the PvZ Adventures beta for at least a week now. After EA “surprisingly” pulled the plug on it’s SimCity Social FB game (which I had been avidly playing), they offered fans Early Access into this beta. For the 8 hours I’ve put collectively into playing this game, it’s been highly enjoyable. Another successful installment into the Plants v. Zombies franchise. The only thing that annoys me with any facebook game is that there is a wait factor involved. When you run out of coins, you can’t plant anymore plants. So if you have no more plants, you can’t battle zombies on the road. So ultimately, you have to wait at least an hour for your houses to generate it’s next batch of income. Minor issue but it definitely keeps players coming back for more! Check out the game for yourself on Facebook.

PopCap is currently working on Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time which is expected to release later in June. Click here to check out the hilarious teaser trailer for the game!

Kittie is a writer for Girl Gamer Vogue. For more from Kittie, check out her Twitter, Etsy & YouTube.