Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare came out this week for Xbox one, 360, and PC. PopCap Games' latest installment of the lovable plants and zombies comes in the form of a third person shooter. The game still keeps the elements of a tower defense game with its Garden Ops mode, where you and three of your friends team up to defend the garden from ten waves of zombies. Each player can select a role to play in this mode. You can choose from four roles. Pea shooter, Chomper, Sunflower, and the Cactus. Each character plays a different role that helps the team. You can choose to have one of each, or you can select whatever character you like. The option is yours on how to play the game. Halfway through the waves you get a boss fight, where the boss fight is determined by a slot machine that the Zomboss uses. Then in the final wave you have a boss battle followed by an escape of the map before the zombies overwhelm you. The game also has two other modes in its Xbox 360 version that are more multiplayer oriented. The "Team Vanquished" mode is a traditional team deathmatch mode where the first team to get 50 kills wins. In this mode the players can select from different roles to play. For the Plants side you have the Pea Shooter, which is your soldier, Chomper, who is a mixture of melee with some sneaky tactics to eat your opponent, Sunflower, which is your medic, and Cactus who is the sniper of the group. For the zombies, the roles are similar but with some tweaks to their abilities. The Foot Soldier pretty much explains itself, he is your standard fighter that uses a machine gun and a RPG, the Engineer who is a mixture of the cactus mechanics, but with a few more tools to combat the Chomper, the scientist, is the medic of the group, and the All-Star zombie is the brute of the group. Most of the zombies have tools to combat all the plants, but they gave each of the zombies a mechanic to be able to escape the Chomper since he is the strongest character in the game.

There is also a "Plants and Graveyard" mode. This is another tower defense game but with other players online where one team defends the garden while another team tries to take all the position. In this mode up to 24 players can play online. This mode is very fun because it opens up the game to use all the mechanics. Players can use power ups to help defend or attack a position, they can plant other plants to help on their defense, and players that plays as zombie can resurrect other zombies from the game to help you attack the garden. Aside from all the power ups, what makes this mode great is that a game can be as quick as 5 minutes if the plant team can defend the first position successfully, or it can go up to about an hour. The team who successfully defends the position or the team that overruns the positions wins.

The game also has tons of upgrades for its characters and weapons, but unlike more traditional shooters, it doesn’t give you the upgrades by just leveling. A combinations of earning coins to buy sticker packs, to get upgrades for weapons and characters. While completing challenges for the different characters unlock different costumes for your favorite character. The cool thing about this is that the packs are random and they have different levels of packs. The higher the cost of the sticker packs the more likely it is that you get more rare cards to boost up your weapons, and characters quicker. The lower tier packs do repeat, but these lower tier are mainly cards to use in Garden Ops, and Plants and Graveyards mode.

The price point for all the three systems are very reasonable and well worth the purchase. The amount of hours that you will dedicate to this game will well cover the price. Overall, Fans of Plants vs Zombies will enjoy this installation of the game. Garden Warfare is a great game with tons of hours of gameplay, a well balanced system, loads of weapons, upgrades, and a price point that won’t break your pocket. Go get this game and go kick some zombie or plant butt!

Score: 4/5

Developer: PopCap Games/EA Price: $29.99 for Xbox 360 Release Date: 2/25/14