INTRODUCTION
Plants Vs Zombies was in many ways a game that can only come out in 2008. Any earlier and it’d likely just be another dime a dozen flash game on some now defunct website you gotta find mirrored on www.definitelynotgonnagiveyouavirussoenjoythisfungame.com. Any later and it’s a free to play game littered with one dimensional skitterbox design shilled by B-tier YouTubers desperately convincing themselves Manscaped ad revenue and their obsession with Brie Larson will make their degree in digital media studies worth it. No, Plants Vs Zombies had to come out the same year as Julia & Julia to be what it is.

WE’RE COMING!
The game essence is that of a rather simple tower defense game with a surprising amount of depth under the surface. You have 5 lanes of grass that are entryways to your home (base) and you have to use your plants (weapons and tools) to defend it from zombies (enemies) while managing your energy to grow plants (sun). This defensive process can take several different forms and require different considerations that need to be mixed and matched depending on your circumstances. In short, Every plant type in your garden composition is a lever you must pull at the precise time. Is the zombie horde coming at your base composed of a bunch of digging zombies? Better use the David Cronenberg pea plant that shoots backwards in your garden composition . Are the zombies in the opposing army tanky? Gonna need to have some instant kill plants like the cherry bomb or chili pepper on hand. Fog in the area inhibiting your strategic view? Blow it away with the clover plant. I could go on and on but surely you see my point by now. The game has a shitload of flexibility with room for player expression without overwhelming its core demographic of casual players. One of my favorite anecdotes about this actually comes from my middle school years where I used to exchange tips with a teacher up the hall from my language arts class that hadn’t touched a controller since the NES. It bears mentioning this is a conversation that probably wouldn’t have been possible without the intuitive touch controls of the IOS releases. These controls made the game inviting to less experienced players while also making the gameplay ceiling higher by allowing for quicker on the fly reactions. Thus allowing the dev team to throw complex zombie configurations like the Zomboss fight and endless levels at the player by the late game regardless of skill level.

WE’RE GOING BOWLING!
The mingames of Plants Vs Zombies are pretty emblematic of a strength of this dev team to build a simple easy to understand formula and subvert it in basically any way they can imagine to give the player a shitload of varied gameplay to experience when going for 100% completion(even pulling from other Popcap titles at times for inspiration). From the more reflex focused walnut bowling to testing the players improvisation skills with the random convey belt levels George Fan’s team did an excellent job ringing out every angle they could out of this premise to the point this almost feels like the video game equivalent of lean gimmick set piece action movies like “Speed”, “Crank”, and “Hardcore Henry”.

I use “gimmick” purely as a term of endearment to the style of craftsmanship as I think it has its place.

ZOMBIES ON YOUR LAWN
Popcap games tend to be very “function over form” games in terms of presentation. This is to say they prioritize communicating a gameplay concept to the player or a decent frame rate performance over visual flourishes. This is a long way of saying the game’s enemy designs do an excellent job of articulating how they work to a new player. As a case study I’ll highlight the pole vault zombie. In 2008 there was a summer olympics games so the idea of pole vaulting would’ve naturally been in the public zeitgeist even if someone wasn’t a sports fanatic. Thus, when a player is first exposed to this enemy they are likely to infer the enemies ability to skip a tile and plan accordingly with plant formations. Sound design follows a similar train of thought with zombies sounds being used to signal a wave is coming soon so the player has a few seconds to rebuild their plant flanks or collect any sun or cash laying around the garden.

CONCLUSION
Plants vs Zombies is probably one of the best smartphone centric games ever released due to its intuitive controls and kirbyism like design philosophy. While I think the “free” to play aspects of the smartphone side of the industry often incorrectly paint deeper experiences as an impossibility for the sector. I believe this game shows that it is largely more a consequence of late stage capitalism optimizing everything into a grindset treadmill than an intrinsic quality of the platform.

Consider this post less a "review" than a "first impression" or "time capsule" of sorts of the 0.1.2 PC release of this game. At the time of writing this little spiel this weird mashup of BOTW world traversal, Pokemon Legends: Arceus style creature collecting, and survival/automation games like Factorio or Ark: Survival Evolved has gone viral and lit up the charts like its Woodstock. Is it worth the hype? Well my answer here is complicated and colored by my own (lack of) experience with the survival genre.
THE FIRST ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: EARLY ACCESS
First off I wanna address the reality of this being an early access title. Which is to say there three realities I can't ignore in this write up:
1) The game is in an incomplete state and all the "jank" and design imprecision that comes with that. This is to say several mechanics don't quite "click" as well as I'd like them to. The game's version of creature catching just isn't as satisfying as its Pokemon generation 8 equivalent for example. Often its not really obvious if I have damaged the creatures enough for them to not deflect the ball and I have even had the balls pass through the enemy models at points when engaging in close combat....which is an issue when your opening weapons choices are likely to be a club, repuposing a pick ax or torch for combat, or making a spear AKA close combat weapons. This means the players first exposure to catching is going to be through janky close quarters throws and that even putting aside the long range weapons being put front in center in trailers and such. Its a rough first impression to say the least.

2) The price will likely go up in the future to a full price release. As a $30.00 release? I think this is a good value proposition at that price considering this is effectively a $70.00 modern AAA open world title and the baseline level of polish that entails purchasable at roughly 43% of the total cost. As a full cost game? I think the gameplay loop might be a tad too simplistic for that price point especially when you look at the experiences being offered by many other indie and "AA" devs for less upfront cash.

3) The opening hours of this game can be a bit repetitive currently when you are just building up your wood, stone, blue ore, and yellow ore supplies and building the foundational tools/crafting tables/statues. Lots of walking back and fourth in the starting hillside base since you aren't gonna wanna risk undoing your resource collecting with an ill-advised combat encounter (when playing on default settings). A fact made worse by the very low early game weight limit. Despite my rather negative prose here I actually am of two minds about this setup. On one hand this makes the early game a bit of a slog but on the other it also does a great job of putting you into the shoes of your avatar building out his or her little boom town settlement from literal sticks and stones. This is all to say if this is your first survival game experience you might be in for a rough time if you just wanna jump into the creature collecting aspect but if you stick with it you can be very satisfying to fill out your base and build up a creature army.

THE SECOND ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: THE CREATURE DESIGNS ARE MAYBE PLAGIARIZED
TLDR: Someone on Twitter/X by the name of "Byo" compared the skeletons of the Switch era Pokemon models and several palworld creatures and found them to be eerily similar which may suggest the use of AI as a plagiarism tool given the CEO of PocketPair's very libertarian dudebro persona and pro-AI statements in interviews. To be clear the automation of digital art via AI is something that should be agitated against for several reasons (its a union busting/job killing tool, consolidates more cultural power into the 1%/ruling class, leads to worse art in most cases, etc.) but game development is a multi-disciplinary process. Simply put, is it fair to write off the work of the sound team, game designers, and programmers just because upper management, legal department and the art team screwed up on their ends? This is all to say I can criticize the ethical failings of the game's art team while praising what this game does well and not be contradictory. If anything the fact this team wasn't just a couple hacks doing an Steam asset flip makes the plagiarism accusations more salient and tragic. Had these guys hired a proper art team to their project's scope or hell even just went up to the IP holders of any of these big Pokemon competitors like Namco-Bandai's Digimon or Monster Rancher for the rights to plop in their stock assets and animations into this gameplay system we could be looking at the next big thing on the level of Fortnite or Minecraft. As it currently stands I see this getting blown the fuck out by TPC's lawyers and disappearing by the end of the year. Perhaps resurfacing in a year or two with even uglier looking characters and zero cultural momentum. A tragic fate given the very strong foundations here if the devs could get a chance to polish the early game and catching mechanics.

I am probably among the "easy to please" on the target audience spectrum for this game being a political science major and even I think this is a rather weak showing. Like I won't even make fun of the MS Paint art style much since its a strategy game and frankly I don't play these for the graphics but this really feels like someone took the basic conceit of a character centric strategy game and didn't think through what would be needed to update that crusader kings like premise to a democratic government system outside a very basic common sense application of realism. Like a lot of what you do here is a fine foundation for a prototype of the premise but so much more could be done conceptually. Like interest groups and intra-party poltics (stuff like super delegates or early primary Iowa/South Carolina retail politics endorsements) are such a big impactful thing in US politics for better or for worse and yet the trust statistic feels too simple to model those dynamics. This isn't the only failure though. Like how the hell isn't there a deal making and or black mail aspect of the game? Henry Clay, Mitch McConnell, New York era FDR, and so many other famous politicians in US history have used the levers of machine politics to get what they want and yet you can't really replicate that dynamic in game. Hell why isn't making a party that can cannibalize one of the big 2 and create a realignment/replacment party an option? Plenty of examples of that happening in US history. This just feels too simplistic for what it aims to do. Also for the amount of turns you can just automate in this game I feel like this could have benefited from a skip to significant week option.

Edit: There is a skip option but its rather hidden on the UI so I missed it at time of writing this review.