I’m a fan of tower defense games. They are so deceptively simple in concept yet capable of being incredibly deep in strategy and tactics when well made. My latest addiction is Popcap’s Planets vs Zombies. Specifically the iPhone version.
The game was originally released for PC and Mac back in May of 2009 and I was a big fan of the demo. However do to a variety of reasons I wasn’t willing at the time to spend the $20 the full game costs. Now however its out for iPhone at a very reasonable $2.99. So I went ahead and downloaded it and so far I’m having a blast. The iPhone version is a complete port of the PC version, no extras are included as far as I can tell but all the modes and levels of the original are present.
As I said the game is essentially a tower defense game. In this case the tower is a normal suburban home and the playing field is the front yard. Your defenders are a variety of mutant plants and your enemy is a never ending horde of zombies. It’s all done with a great deal of humor and depicted with very nicely animated cartoon like graphics. The touch screen subs in for the mouse incredibly well, although at times it’s possible for your fingers to get in the way of the action.
Your arsenal of mutant plants includes pea shooting weeds, exploding potatoes, zombie eating Venus fly traps, and a variety of other killer vegetables. My favorite are probably the cherry bombs with their angry scowls right before they explode and wipe out any zombies in the area. You also have to contend with a day and night cycle with different plants for each, and several levels in a pool that add aquatic plants to your army. The zombies have just as much variety; the first waves usually being normal shuffling hordes. However you’ll soon find yourself facing zombies in makeshift armor with buckets and road cones on their heads or screen door shields. As the levels progress football players will start rushing trough defenses and pole-vaulters will jump them. Eventually even a thriller inspired dancing zombie will moonwalk across the field and start summoning up extra hordes.
The mix of levels and the addition of various modes including walnut bowling gives the game lots of variety, and the addition of various achievements gives a little extra drive for replayability and trying different tactics and techniques. If you’re a fan of this style of game I highly recommend either version. The iPhone version does of course have the benefit of being significantly cheaper. Now if you don’t mind I have ore zombies to squish.