Plants vs. Zombies (video game)

Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ for short) is a tower defense video game developed and published by PopCap Games for Microsoft Windows and macOS on May 5, 2009.

Gameplay
The game involves a homeowner Crazy Dave using a variety of different plants to prevent an army of zombies from entering their house and "eating their brains".

Why You'll Want Zombies On Your Lawn

 * 1) Despite being a game where the player is meant to fight zombies, the weapon used are plants, and while it sounds funny, it works really well and makes the game stand out from other zombie games such as Resident Evil or The Last Of Us by the goofy and light-hearted nature, as with the jokes from Crazy Dave and a lot of funny moments overall.
 * 2) Puzzle, Survival, and the Minigames all add very entertaining alternate modes of play to the fairly-basic Adventure mode.
 * 3) Like Angry Birds, the graphics are colorful and impressively cartoon-like for 2009 standards.
 * 4) Fluent, responsive and easy-to-learn controls.
 * 5) You can get 40 plants in Adventure mode and 9 from Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies, resulting in almost 50 plants in total.
 * 6) Fun and addictive mini games, such as Wall-nut Bowling or ZomBotany.
 * 7) Plenty of interesting puzzles you solve, such as Vasebreaker and I, Zombie.
 * 8) This game introduced Crazy Dave, the deuteragonist and most likable video game character through the PvZ universe because of his wackiness.
 * 9) Unique lane-based tower defense in defending the lawn from aggressive zombies.
 * 10) You can fight Dr. Egdar Zomboss, the main villain of the PvZ universe, who is a very unique boss since he has a wide variety of attacks, so you never know how he'll attack next unlike other bosses that stick with the same formula repeatedly.
 * 11) 50 levels are divided into 5 lawn defenses in 3 locations of the house and Day or Night.
 * 12) While simple, the gameplay is funny and enjoyable.
 * 13) There's a Zen garden, where you can take care plants by watering or anything for their needs so that they are happy to live, and in exchange they give you money which varies from only 10c to a diamond, worth 1000 coins.
 * 14) Once you beat a certain amount of levels, you can unlock a suburban almanac that lets you read about both plants you have and zombies you encountered.
 * 15) Challenging game achievements, which gives you something to do when you beat the game.
 * 16) The game has a good ending where the zombies stop trying to eat your brains after you defeat Dr. Zomboss, and they decide to make a music video with you instead.
 * 17) After beating the game, you get rewarded with a great music video with a catchy song.
 * 18) Lots of plants that can help you in great ways, some good examples are:
 * 19) *The Sunflower gives you sun so you can afford to plant more plants.
 * 20) *The Wall-nut sacrifices itself as a shield so the plants behind it have more time to defeat zombies.
 * 21) *The Snow Pea slows down zombies so it can defeat them without them being able to attack in time.
 * 22) *The Plantern helps you clear fog so you can see zombies hidden by the fog.
 * 23) *The Cherry Bomb explodes zombies so other plants have less to deal with.
 * 24) *The Blover blows away flying enemies and the fog.
 * 25) *The Cabbage Pult lops cabbage at zombies and can throw cabbage over walls, something that is important in the Roof level.
 * 26) *The Jalapeno sets a whole row on fire, instantly burning any zombies in the lane.
 * 27) *The Cattail shoots homing spikes at zombies.
 * 28) Excellent soundtrack composed by Laura Shigihara, who also sung the credits song of Deltarune, with many stand outs such as Braniac Maniac, The Roof, Loonboon and the previously mentioned music video.
 * 29) Along with Angry Birds, it became one of the most recognized mobile games and helped make mobile games popular, and is still being played to this day, and as a matter of fact is one of the most recognized games in general.
 * 30) If a zombie were to get past all your plants, you wouldn't have to worry much since a lawnmower that was hiding behind the plants would be waiting for them and will run that zombie over, along with other zombies in the lane.
 * 31) *However, each lawnmower can only be used once.
 * 32) Sometimes, the game will attempt to change up its formula, as sometimes it will let you pick plants from a conveyor rather than saving up sun to get one, and, as mentioned previously, there's one level where you play bowling with Wall-nuts.
 * 33) Good voice acting.
 * 34) Getting to see all the zombies get defeated one by one is very satisfying.
 * 35) The Nintendo DS/DSiWare ports run surprisingly well, even with hardware limitations.
 * 36) The PS3 and 360 versions have exclusive modes such as co-op mode
 * 37) Physical copies of the PS3 and 360 version comes with the games Heavy Weapon, Peggle and Peggle Nights, and all are great games.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The gameplay can be rather slow, something that is remedied in Plants vs. Zombies 2 or by the use of Cheat Engine.
 * 2) As said above, when you finish the game, a great song will be present, but it is not seen on iOS and Android, it used to be on them, but an update removed the song.
 * 3) There is no horde music in the iOS and Android version of the game.
 * 4) Some of the achievements are pretty difficult to get, Lucky Spin is an example.
 * 5) Some plants have bad features, some examples of this are the sun-shrooms giving you little sun at the start and takes way too long to grow and start giving you regular suns or the Chomper taking its sweet time chewing up zombies (though this could be understandable as not taking time to eat the zombie, The Chomper will be invulnerable but he takes way too long time).
 * 6) Some zombies are pretty annoying, like the infamous Digger zombie who digs to the other side of your lawn and moves backward, Zomboni who crushes plants and can't be frozen, and Bungee zombie, who steals plants.
 * 7) The gameplay can get a bit repetitive since it's mostly just planting the same plants over and over again. This for the following bad qualities to come.
 * 8) Some plants can be a bit overpowered if you have many of them on your lawn, like Puff-shroom (because it's easy to have many of them in your lawn), Cattail and Starfruit for example. This removes a lot of difficulty from the game, which in itself is very easy.
 * 9) If we compare it with its sequel, the game is incredibly easy and that can get boring over time, especially after getting powerful plants.
 * 10) The PC version didn't age well graphically and the game runs on low resolution 800x600 (despite at the time there are higher monitor resolution like 1280x1024 or 1280x720/1366x768/other widescreen resolutions) scaling up to the highest supported monitor resolution, causing pixelated graphics (unless 3D Acceleration was disabled). It's also cause some weird performance issues (due to using DirectDraw 7) when running on newer version of Windows (such as Windows 8 and later) unless unofficial patch is installed.

Reception
The game received a positive response from critics, and was nominated for multiple Interactive Achievement Awards, alongside receiving praise for its musical score. A sequel, Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, was released on August 15, 2013 for mobile platforms.

Trivia

 * There is a not so well known version for J2ME.
 * The dancing zombie had an original design that resembled Michael Jackson who passed away the same year this game was released. It was changed in 2010.
 * This game became Pop Game's most popular video game series in the 2010's, and included a sequel and several spin-offs.
 * The Cob Cannon is the only plant that requires more than one square of the lawn grid to place it.

Videos
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