Having gotten bored of every other game, and with WoW’s Chinese servers temporarily gone, I was bored out of my mind. Into this gap stepped Plants vs. Zombies — a plain but adorable, simple but fun single-player game — and it was a real eye-opener. The art is just so kawaii.
At its core this game is a plant TD — a horde of terrifying zombies crawling out of nearby graveyards intends to take over your house and eat your brains. Oh yeah, eat… eat brains. To fight off these undead, the defending side — that is, the player — can plant all sorts of cute yet powerful plants outside the house to resist the invasion.
The classic plants include: Sunflower: produces sunlight, which you use to plant more plants; Wall-nut: a frontline tank with high defense and no attack; Cherry Bomb: a one-time self-destruct with area damage, hoho, very handy in emergencies, and later on you get the Jalapeno; Peashooter: cheap damage output; Chomper: swallows a zombie one square ahead in one bite, but then needs a while to digest…
Depending on the time and the battle location, there are more and more battle conditions, making it increasingly difficult. Night and day determine which plants are active — at night there’s no natural sunlight. The pond in the backyard requires you to plant Lily Pads before you can put land plants there. At night the pond can also fog up or rain, and sometimes the sky goes completely dark so you can only see the battlefield by lightning flashes. The sloped terrain of the roof requires a Peashooter catapult to hit enemies up high, and so on.
Besides combat, the game also has money-making and development elements, plus extra minigames. Later on the game unlocks a lot of puzzle games and minigames; playing the minigames earns you more coins, and coins buy items. Common items include extra seed slots — which increase the variety of plants you can bring into each battle — and upgraded versions of various plants. These items all improve your odds in battle. Haha.
The most important thing is that this game’s characters are adorable — even the scary-looking zombies are comical. Some of the game’s story bits are hilarious too, like the guy who sells you goods being a lunatic; and the zombies will even pretend to be your mom writing you a letter telling you to open the door, and so on.
After you kill the Boss in the main storyline, all the plants and zombies even throw a party together at your house and sing a song in chorus.
Play this game in your spare time and you definitely won’t be disappointed.
Downloads and some resources, here
August 14 update: there’s a download on verycd now, the detail page is at: here, plus a lot of great tactical discussion.
Chinese-patched ed2k download link: 植物大战僵尸-汉化版-Plants.vs.Zombies.7z