Meanwhile, the plant team’s Cactus can snipe from a distance. How far do you want to be from the fray? If you like getting close and personal, the Zombie Scientist’s goo shotgun will do the trick. The 12-on-12 matches are wonderfully hectic and delightfully diverse, partially because the huge environments (including cartoony towns, suburban neighborhoods, and a castle) are well laid out, and partly because each of the four different plant and zombie heroes have distinct, satisfying playstyles.

But if you can keep your expectations in check, Garden Warfare is still loads of fun.īut I soon forgot all about 'Garden Ops' when I dove into the real meat of the game: 24-player online skirmishes and capture-the-base turf wars where actual players also control the zombies. Though EA has successfully managed to turn PVZ into a bonafide online shooter while retaining much of the series’ charm, it’s not an obsession so much as a casual diversion. Unfortunately, that stickiness isn’t fully present in EA’s attempt to bridge the two genres: Plants vs. It’s arguably that stickiness, playing “just one more round” than you intended to play, that made these games so popular. Zombies hit upon a similarly addictive formula for 2D puzzle games: each time you successfully fend off the waves of zombies trying to reach your house - by placing, say, piranha plants and exploding chili peppers in their path - you unlock new plants and face new zombies which invite you to change up your defenses. They feature incredibly tight feedback loops: nearly every time you kill a enemy or achieve an objective, you get points towards new weapons that kill more efficiently and spectacularly the next time around. These days, big-budget shooting games like Call of Duty and Battlefield are designed to be objects of obsession.

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