![]() Seeing as this is very much the way to announce a mobile game, and very much not the way to announce a PC game, I have little hope. PopCap announced PvZ 3 out of nowhere on Tuesday with the launch of a free pre-alpha test. nope, PvZ 3 is seemingly not even coming to PC. But EA have learned a lot from their years of horrible monetisation, and I'd hoped. The second game is still a mess, with microtransactions making everything grody in that early-2010s EA way. The 2009 original is still a joy, a cheery take on tower defence with pea-spitting plants, bungee-jumping zombies, stoics nuts, a lovely theme song, and just enough strategy to be rewarding without baffling. Zombies 2 and the I've-heard-they're-good-but-they're-not-what-I-want multiplayer Garden Warfare spin-offs, I had hoped EA might return to plain ol' PC PvZ. Ian Arts, you are a monster.Īfter the microtransaction-muddled Plants vs. Nullifying news: but this time it's just a mobile game so who even cares. Zombies 3.īad news: it's free-to-play again, and microtransactions were a blight on PvZ 2. ![]() Hopefully they can turn it around since it's still far from release, but the whole thing is shaping up to be Sonic 4 levels of disappointing.Good news: EA have announced Plants Vs. ![]() The beta asks you to take several surveys as you play, but they ask stupid things like "what kind of furniture do you want to see in the game" and give no real options for actual feedback. It's a real shame to see how boring this game is turning out, especially when they already had a solid foundation for a sequel several years ago. Lastly, there's some uninteresting story progression that's apparently ripped straight out of Homescapes where you give Crazy Dave tickets to help him beautify the town. The game also has a bunch of one-time use power-ups that they clearly want you to blow through and spend currency on, but it's so easy in its current state that I never needed to bother. If there are more grapes than zombies, the leftovers will take up space on empty lawn squares and act as mines. Killing zombies fills a meter, and once it's full some grapes will be launched at the enemies until they're dead. The game is obsessed with the idea of stages being brief puzzles with a specific solution rather than little playgrounds for you to showcase your creativity in.Īs for new mechanics, the only thing here that can be considered "new" and not just a worse version of an existing thing is the Grapes of Wrath, which are just as lame and automated as the rest of the game. Levels are shockingly short and always feel like they're over just as they got started, so you rarely ever get to enjoy that satisfying feeling of having a big symmetrical arsenal of plants on your side of the field. Sun production is painfully slow but the zombies show up very quickly, which means that you have little time to prepare a strategy and pretty much just fly by the seat of your pants reacting to whatever zombie has just appeared. Instead you're given a set loadout of plants before each level, and often some are already planted for you to give you even less choice. Just like that, the main appeal of PvZ is immediately gone. The gameplay structure is back to being like the first game, but you can no longer pick your plants. Visually, the more saturated colors and cel shaded 3D models attempting to replicate a 2D style do fit the PvZ vibe better than the previous version, but that's pretty much where the improvements end. It had its flaws, but at least it was trying something interesting with plenty of time to get even better.ĭespite being pretty good, I guess they didn't like how it was turning out so they went back to the drawing board, and after such a long time I was interested to check out what changes they made. It utilized a vertical view to suit the mobile format better and sped up the gameplay by making sun production automatic, focusing more on intelligent placement of your plants with an additional strategic focus as levels had a second phase where you could move your plants around and upgrade them with tacos to prepare for an even more brutal wave of zombies. I played the soft launch in 2020 and even though it was very different from the previous two games, I enjoyed it as its own new thing. It had a pre-alpha in 2019, soft launched in 2020, got scrapped so the devs could completely overhaul the game, came back in late 2021 with a new direction, and has since then had a couple of brief open betas in specific regions with the most recent being this month. ![]() Heck, most people probably don't know the game even exists. Zombies 3 has been in development hell for a ridiculously long time. ![]()
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