Plants vs. Zombies 2: Microtransaction Edition

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is the hardest game to review I’ve ever come across, but gosh darn it, I’m going to try. As a bit of background information, I played a lot of the original Plants vs. Zombies. It’s one of my favorite mobile games, though it does become very easy once you get your method down. So let’s dive in and take a look.

Plot

There are zombies and they want two things: to smash plants and eat your brains. Also you’re traveling through time because reasons.

Presentation

Plants vs. Zombies 2 looks really good. The animations and the character models all look a little bit better than they did in the first game. The only complaint I have is that everything feels a little smaller than they were before (on the iPhone, at least). It could be that with all the new buttons along the edge, there wasn’t as much space for the planting grid. This isn’t as big a deal if you have a larger screen, especially if you’re playing on a tablet.

Gameplay

The basic gameplay should be familiar to anyone who has played Plants vs. Zombies before. Zombies come from the right side of the screen and you have to plant plants to stop them.

There are a few new gameplay mechanics in Plants vs. Zombies 2. The first is plant food. Plant food can be used to initiate a special ability with whatever plant you put  it on. For example, if you put plant food on a pea shooter, it will fire a bunch of peas down the lane it’s on, killing whatever is in front of it (depending on how strong the zombies are). You get plant food by killing zombies that glow green. You can also get plant food by paying 1000 coins.

The second new mechanic are the new player powers. You can activate these powers by paying a certain number of coins (each power costs a different amount). Upon activation, you will have a certain amount of time to use your new power. The powers available will allow you to electrocute enemies, fling them off the screen, or pinch their heads off.

My Thoughts

I am incredibly torn on my opinion of this game. For every thing I like about it, there is something that really bugs me. Let’s start with the good things.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is really fun to play. The levels are a bit more challenging than the first game. Each level has unique gimmick to mix up your strategy. For example, in the ancient Egypt levels, there are stele’s that jut out from the ground. You can’t plant on them and they will block incoming projectiles until they take enough damage to destroy them. In the pirate stages, some of the lanes have no wooden planks for the zombies to walk across, so they will swing across the gap, giving you less time to deal with them.

I also like the plant food mechanic. It adds another tool to your arsenal in tough situations. There are also a lot of cool new game modes, like a challenge tower in the Egypt level. You only have the sunflower, pea shooter, and walnut, but you get to choose a bonus from three random bonuses before each level. It’s really fun to see how far up you can go. You can also replay most of the previous levels in each world with different restrictions to mix things up.

Then there are the things I don’t like.

First and foremost is the amount of microtransactions built into the game. This isn’t a good place to get into my opinion on microtransactions in detail, but suffice to say, I think microtransactions are a good thing if you do them correctly. I don’t think Plants vs. Zombies 2 does it correctly.

Six plants are only available if you pay money for them ($20 in total if you want them all). Not the in-game coin currency, but actual money. Five of those plants are plants from the first game. I wouldn’t mind so much if I could unlock them by playing the game, but they are locked away unless I pay.

I don’t mind paying for games that I like, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. I gladly paid for the extra game modes in the first game because Popcap gave me the option of acquiring them by playing the game. They also gave you the chance to try out each game type before you bought it so you would know if you wanted it. If they changed this aspect of Plants vs. Zombies 2, I would give it an 8/10, but as is I have to give it a 6/10. Check it out if you enjoyed the first, but don’t buy the locked plants. EA doesn’t deserve the money they charge for them.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is available right now for free for iOS. The game will eventually make its way to Android and PC but is currently not available.