Plant vs Zombies

So it goes without saying that my video game addiction covers the whole gambit; I love my consoles and my hard core PC games, but I also like to chill occasionally with a nice little flash type game. I recently played my way through Plants vs Zombies and I thought I'd give a quick rundown of it.

It's a reasonably simple game to play, you've got to protect your house from hordes of zombies and all you have to help you is your gardening skills. You start out with your basic attack plant, the peashooter, a pod like plant that actually shoots peas, and build your way through a series of offensive and defensive plants, facing an ever growing and evolving horde of zombies. Completing each level gives you a new plant and you can buy upgrades from your neighbor Crazy Dave. Additionally, the game takes you through several scenarios that require different tactics, for instance eventually the zombies try to come over your roof, requiring you to first put down pots for your plants then plant your weapons for the coming attack.

That's the game in a nutshell, you 'buy' each plant that you put in the ground with sunlight. The sunlight comes from the sky but you need to plant sunflowers that produce it as well in order to have enough light to keep planting; this also requires you to guard these plants as they have no offensive or defensive capability. Gets a bit more tricky at night when there is no natural sunlight.

The zombies themselves range from your standard shambler to ones in full football gear up to some driving Zamboni's, or Zombonis as they are called in the game; to make things worse, after they Zomboni has laid down a sheet of ice and killed all your plants, a bobsled with 4 zombies comes shooting down the path.. The zombies have varying attacks and speeds so you can't use the same offense or defense on every level. This gets a little tricky as time goes on and they only let you take so many seeds in to each confrontation, you have to pick carefully sometimes. I personally enjoyed the Michael Jackson zombie whose dancing summoned 4 zombies from the ground every minute or so.

The difficulty level is medium at best, there were only two times during the regular campaign that they broke completely through my defenses and ate my brain. I kind of liked that though, a little bit of challenge but not enough to frustrate you,it's a nice break. Plus some of the mini-games get a bit tougher, such as the Survival mode opened up by finishing the campaign.

It's available through Steam right now for 10 bucks, and worth the price if you're looking for a quick time killer. I started it last Thursday and I'm still hacking away at it every free moment I get.