Reseeded is, for the most part, Plants vs Zombies if it were a better game. I'm a bit of a hater of the original PvZ: it's too easy, it fails to meaningfully explore the interesting mechanical systems that it creates, and many hazards pose no threat as long as you bring the appropriate plant. Reseeded mostly succeeds at fixing all of these problems by increasing the difficulty, rebalancing the stats of plants and zombies, and giving several plants new abilities.

When starting this game, you will quickly notice changes to the plants. Some changes are minor balance tweaks that don't alter how you use the plants too much, such as Peashooter costing 125 sun instead of 100, but many changes are drastic and will significantly change the applications of plants. Some of my favorite changes are Tall Nut costing 425 sun but having a colossal amount of health, Lily Pad and Flower Pot costing 75 sun instead of 25 (making losing one actually feel punishing), and Cactus firing extremely high damage bullets with a long reload time. There are a couple of plants that are still usually worthless, but the rebalancing and increased difficulty make many more plants significantly more worthwhile. Zombies with weaknesses also usually feel less trivial thanks to plant rebalances, such as Fume Shroom's cost increasing more than 3x which makes it significantly more difficult to exploit screen door zombies' weakness.

Even though I think that the difficulty in Reseeded is a significant improvement from the original, it is still my main complaint with the game. There are multiple difficulty modes, which is nice and I can see myself replaying this game on hard mode someday, but the difficulty curve within normal mode (and I presume the other modes as well) is terrible. Zone 1 and 2 are very easy and a little boring. Zone 3 and 4 were a little challenging and 5 was rather difficult. I can easily imagine advanced PvZ players thinking that the game is made for novices and getting bored in the first 2 zones, as well as less experienced players giving up in zone 5 because of the sharp difficulty spike. The game would have benefitted greatly from a flatter difficulty curve. I also often found myself wishing that the game had a speed up button, both to speed through the easy levels as well as the early game of hard levels that I would end up having to attempt multiple times.

I was impressed by how much of the side content is changed in this mod. All of the minigames seem much harder than their original counterparts, and I am an especially big fan of the rework done to iZombie, now called iZombotany, which allows you to place the zombotany versions of zombies. There is also a NG+, like in the original game, but this is radically harder than you might expect. In addition to having 2 plants picked for you at the start of each level, there are exponentially more zombies, I'm talking like 30 zombies being sent simultaneously less than a minute into each level. I was able to beat the first 5 levels using strategies that heavily replied on instants and quick reactions, but I gave up on the 6th. The levels felt very punishing, didn't contain the gameplay loop I love PvZ for, and were repetitive, driving me away from this game mode.

Overall I like this game a lot more than Plants vs Zombies, but because of the awkward difficulty curve I find it hard to recommend to many people. It's also a little hard to give Reseeded a star rating because it has a few low lows, but I did enjoy most of the time I spent playing a good amount.

Reviewed on Feb 19, 2024


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