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Review: Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Simply put, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is a better MOBA than the likes of SMITE could ever hope to be.

PopCap’s newest retains the franchise’s amazing sense of humour and elevates the rewarding combat that surprised most of us when the original Garden Warfare first came on the scene. This iteration of the tower defence game-cum-shooter starts players off in an area called the Backyard Battleground – a quasi-open world that also serves as a replacement for most menu systems. From here, players can swap from Plant to Zombie, initiate quests, earn coins and enter into solo and multiplayer battles. There’s a surprising amount of single-player content available, with myriad quest lines that help you better understand the game and the players within it. Each new character – and there are a lot – gets its own quest line to shed light on its skills and variants.

Oh, variants. There are lots of them — 100+ in fact, each with their own special attributes and weapons. On the Zombies side, I took a quick liking to Super Brainz, a Superman-style hero. His base character is cool enough on its own, complete with a lazer blast, fists of fury, a hadouken, super kick and spinning attack. His alternates are equally as cool; there are Cosmic, Electric and Toxic variants, all waiting to be unlocked through sticker packs.

Sticker packs can be purchased with real-world cash or in-game coins (which, thankfully, are fairly plentiful and easy to earn) and contain consumables, vanity items and can unlock new characters. You might find you’ve already unlocked some characters’ variants; an import feature will let you take most unlocked characters from Garden Warfare and use them immediately within Garden Warfare 2. You can check out all new character classes – moving the game from 8 to 14 in total – above.

I’ve also included the above trailer because it gives a better picture of Garden Warfare 2’s overall story than the game ever does. I’ve played for countless hours, and really didn’t clue into the fact that the Zombies “won”, or that Rose was from the past and Citron, the future. That’s one big problem that’s never overcome – there’s a lot going on in matches and in the Backyard Battleground at all times to the point that it’s easily overwhelming. Case in point: I wasn’t aware that I could hit left trigger with the melee-focused Super Brainz to fire off a hand-lazer until the trailer told me.

Thankfully, actual gameplay is ace. Aside from solo quests, you can also hit up “multiplayer” matches with bots, or actually delve into the mode alongside other, real players. You can also elect to fight alongside a mate thanks to split-screen play. For 100+ characters, everything seems quite balanced and fair, especially as you gain more experience. The Chomper remains a right ass, able to sneak up behind you for an easy one-hit kill — but when there’s some space and you’ve got time to check your surroundings, it’s quite easy to counter its stupid burrow move. If it can’t pull it off, it’ll emerge from the ground and be left defenceless so you can score an easy kill yourself.

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Garden Warfare 2 is a third-person shooter at heart, but could easily qualify as a MOBA in that each character is fully reliant on his or her own specials. As the player, it’s really up to you to decide how to chain those, when to use them and how to manage their cooldowns. The gameplay loop is relatively small, but it’s fun, rewarding as hell and will definitely keep you coming back for more. The iconic PvZ humour and absurdity only bolsters that.

Garden Warfare 2’s match types tend to blur together. Turf Takeover is straight up Conquest; you’ll end up playing a majority of your time in this mode, if my experience with random playlists is any indicator. Team Vanquish is a standard deathmatch, while Vanquish Confirmed takes the Star Wars: Battlefront approach of collecting tokens after you’ve killed an opponent. While other modes like Suburbination and Gnome Bomb change things up a bit, it’s hard to shake that feeling that you’ve just been there or done that. Both single-player quests and the returning Garden Ops modes are basically condensed versions of Turf Takeover, so switching from single- to multi-player doesn’t really help matters. Online matches that I participated in were all on Australian-localised servers, so ping and lag weren’t an issue.

In the end, Garden Warfare 2 is a pretty decent package, with character variety, balance and humour in equal measures. It’s a complex shooter for those who like class-base offerings as much as it is an approachable title for more casual players. Hell, those who’re into games like SMITE will appreciate it on a different level than the shooter folk. The result is a tight little game that would suit most.

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 was reviewed using a promotional code on Xbox One, as provided by the publisher.

 

Review: Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2
8.5 out of 10

The good

  • Casual, fun multiplayer for some, class-based, strategic MP for others.
  • Awesome, balanced variety of characters and weaponry.
  • Classic PvZ humour.

The bad

  • Game modes are pretty samey.
  • A lack of a real main menu sometimes makes things overwhelming.

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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.