Game Review - Plant vs Zombies 2

“It’s about time”, these titular words echoed everywhere with the launch of the sequel to this much beloved casual gaming classic. PvZ had the perfect blend of humour, memorable characters, and a brisk level of strategy to it. After playing PopCap’s PvZ 2 for several hours, you begin to see what the title really means: the app takes you on a trip through time and space into three whole new worlds full of zombies. PvZ needed to be bought, PvZ 2 on the other hand, is free-to-play albeit more akin to a freemium model.
The first game was all about simplicity, it moved along at its own pace with new items and power-ups introduced gradually, and your decisions determined how chaotic or easy it will be to sweep through any given level. The sequel though, kind of throws the simplicity out the window. It’s not to say that the game is now a full blown RTS but it is a bit more cluttered than a casual gamer would like it to be. After every level you encounter new gameplay mechanics; it somewhat takes away the focus from the plants as you have to juggle a lot of things simultaneously as you progress further. There is also a board-game like map to navigate outside of the levels themselves and to acquire some plants you’ll need to unlock doors within that world using randomly stumbled upon keys in random levels.
The three new worlds you encounter are: at first Ancient Egypt, then using stars gained from completing the story missions you head onto 1679 Pirate Sea, followed by 1850 Wild West. Each level has a simple art design and is really easy on the eye. There are also power-ups which when fed to your plants give them special abilities for a short duration, and also three touch gestured power-ups which range from flinging the zombies right from your screen, to pinching their heads off or just zapping them into ashes with chain lightning. It certainly adds an extra fun element to the whole mix. Get it now in the iTunes App Store. It’s certainly worth the download as it serves up countless hours of addictive zombie killing fun.