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Plants vs. Zombies (PC)
by alf_fly
The internet has a way of making things so popular that you end up hating them. Zombies, for instance, are the sub-culture reference du jour. Things versus Other Things - no, I don't care whether a pirate could beat a ninja. And tower defence games, which are this season's match-three puzzler, ubiquitous and increasingly boring. So ... Popcap, in a typically contrary move, decide to make a tower defence game called Plants Vs Zombies. And it's brilliant. It even contains a bonus match-three puzzler. Curse them!
So, the zombies are coming to your house with the sole intention of eating your brains, and all that stands between them and your tasty head-meat is a grass lawn and anything you can plant on it. Thankfully you have at your disposal a host of ferocious flowers and vicious vegetables, from Peashooters to Cherry Bombs. The battle is on.
Zombies march across the lawn in six rows, lurching inexorably from the right of the screen to the left. Your lawn is helpfully checkered, and in any given square you can grow one of your pugnacious plants. Peashooters spit peas at the zombies, potato mines explode when stood on. Chompers are essentially Venus Zombietraps, and can swallow a zombie whole but take a while to digest it, leaving the plant vulnerable. So why not protect it behind a tough Wallnut or a zombie-flattening Squash?
There are different types of zombies, too - some have figured out how to wear traffic cones or buckets on their heads for protection. Some use screen doors as riot shields. Pole-vaulting zombies can jump your first line of defence. And there are dancing zombies who moonwalk across the screen in familiar red-and-black suits, summoning back-up dancers as they go. Later on in the game some of them figure out how to use bungie ropes to attack you from above.
The aim, then, is to place your flowers tactically to see off the various zombie types. To plant a flower you'll need to collect sunlight, which acts as a currency for buying plants, and is randomly generated onscreen. You can also plant Sunflowers which generate sunlight for you, and clicking around the screen to collect sunlight adds a frenetic twist to the tactical gameplay. And although Plants Vs Zombies is welcoming, the systems are well polished and do allow for a surprising amount of tactical depth.
There's a lot to this game. Once you've defended your front lawn you'll have to take to the rear of the house, where your yard is dominated by a swimming pool, necessitating new tactics to overcome new varieties of zombies. Then it's up to the roof, where plants need to be placed in pots which themselves can be destroyed by zombies. Along the way there are numerous minigames, all based on the core gameplay but all with their own unique and genuinely imaginative twists. You might find yourself bowling Wallnuts at advancing zombies, or breaking open barrels to reveal either plants or the undead. There are even versions of other Popcap games like Bejewelled and Insaniquarium, just with added brain-eating and cabbages.
The graphics are lovely. They're certainly not technically advanced, but they're colourful and wonderfully animated, packed full of humour and personality. The little touches are excellent, from the disgusted expression as a zombie chomps down on a garlic plant to the single tear in the eye of a stoic Tallnut as its munched by the undead. The sound too is excellent, with great music and vocal samples.
Popcap have a special talent for taking ideas that shouldn't really work, sprinkling them with fun dust and polishing them until they gleam. That's what they've done here; they've taken a genre that was in danger of overfamiliarity and rejuvenated it, adding a healthy dash of humour along the way. With the host of unlockable bonus content and a core idea that's just plain fun, Plants Vs Zombies is yet another great addition to Popcap's excellent catalogue and a game well worth playing.
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Trackmania Nations Forever (PC)
by hungry_animal
The first thing to note about this game is its price. Its free!!! For all you racing game loving fans download it now, after all, all it costs is time. Moving on, the game itself is excellent. It's tracks arent traditional but more exciting with the tracks having loops and extraordinary loops. With the game you can play by yourself, ... another person at the same computer (party mode) and online with countless racers. The single player mode has a perfect difficulty curve with over 50 tracks which are all divided into seperate colours to illustrate their difficulty. As a nice add on, your also given a single player ranking so you can see how you have done in comparison to the rest of thwe world.
Online the game is extremely addictive with you constanly striving to beat the best. The graphics are excellent and beat many commercial games whereas the sound is average, after all it is just a racing game so theres the average engine rrrr sound here and there. With excellent handling and gameplay the game is a must for ths who want something new for free.
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Plants vs. Zombies (PC)
by Surprising_Ape
Plants vs Zombies is a cheerfully animated game by Popcap in which you attempt to protect your house from hordes of the restless dead. By gardening at them.
At first glance the bulk of the game is Adventure Mode: 50 levels of increasing difficulty across three different environments, including natural conditions such as ... night-time and fog.
When in this mode you use plants such as the sunflower to literally generate pieces of sun which you collect and use to buy other plants. You then deposit your new plants on the left of the screen; the zombies appear from the right and shamble toward your array of deadly greenery until dispatched.
The wide variety of plants available and the steady learning curve mean that Popcap has released yet another well-balanced, addictive game. The game isn't without its flaws, and experienced gamers may find Adventure Mode a little too easy, but it's generally both fun and strangely compelling - I found myself playing a little more at times simply because I knew I could finish the next level in a few minutes and be guaranteed a little reward in the form of a new plant or additional item.
Adventure Mode should take around seven or eight hours to complete. However, this is not the end - as you progress through Adventure Mode, several minigames are unlocked. Furthermore, after you finish Adventure Mode a large number of other puzzles and minigames are then made available, theoretically giving you hours of further play time.
The balance here seemed a little off to me, though - I was expecting from other reviews to receive a steady stream of unlockable content as I played, but instead unlocked very little until I had completed Adventure Mode - so if you don't think you'll be able to manage 50 levels of essentially the same three locations over and over, you may not get your money's worth.
(You can also play through Adventure Mode again, the game this time restricting the plants you can use for each level for an additional challenge. I can't see myself ever doing this, but it is a welcome option for somebody who just cannot get enough plant/zombie action.)
Earlier I said PvS 'theoretically' gives you hours of additional play - I say this because the majority of these games are not interesting enough to stand by themselves for very long, but they certainly add value when considered as part of the overall package (some of them are simplified clones of other Popcap games - Beghouled being a variant of Bejewelled, for instance).
I have to admit that I would not pay the full £15 price the official Popcap site charges for this game. However, if you happen to use Valve's Steam service, Plants vs Zombies is available for £6.99. This seems more than reasonable for more gameplay than you'll find in most big-budget titles these days.
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