It’s surprising that Plants Vs. Zombies hasn’t attracted more imitators. The charming and intuitive strategy game helped make a name for PopCap and spawned a massive franchise including merch, comic books, and interestingly, more competitive team shooters than strategy games. But while it lends itself to comparisons to tower-defense games, its key mechanics are still basically singular to PvZ itself. Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted brings a nicely modernized facelift to the original game, and while this remaster offers only a few new frills, the game itself is still one of a kind.
For those new to the series, or who have only played the Garden Warfare spin-offs, the core idea of Plants Vs. Zombies is deceptively simple. You’re the owner of a house beset by a zombie apocalypse, and your only defense is an army of living plants. You collect sunlight to power your seeds, which you plant across five horizontal rows as zombies approach from the right side. You can plant Sunflowers to generate extra sunlight, and you’re constantly juggling priorities as zombies approach from the other lanes. If they reach your plants, they’ll chomp down on them and you’ll have to replant them, so it’s best to keep them from reaching that far at all. As the game continues, it constantly adds new wrinkles, like nighttime levels where you have less access to sunlight and need to rely on fungi, or a pool where you need to plant lilypads for your other offensive plants to sit on. This is alongside a steady stream of new zombie types that demand different configurations of plant defenses.
And the zombies themselves, in this case, are far from threatening. They’re goofy and often even kind of cute, with cartoonish affectations like a propeller hat or a disco outfit to signify which type of zombie they are. A zombie with a cone or metal bucket on its head will take more hits before you can knock the cone off and finish it off, a football zombie has heavy defense and also charges more quickly at you, and so on.
It’s a warm, inviting concept that belies its sometimes-tense action, as you juggle multiple priorities to defend your house. If the zombies make it past your defenses–and past a one-time emergency lawnmower defense at the edge of your lawn, they eat your brains and you’ll have to restart the level. Guiding you through all this is Crazy Dave, a series mainstay as the wild end-times kook who turned out to be exactly right. He can sell you new seed packets or other upgrades like additional slots for plants. Some of Crazy Dave’s humor hasn’t aged particularly well–it’s not offensive, just a little cringey “epic bacon”-flavored writing. But it’s not enough to detract from the overall experience.
This Replanted remaster gives the game an HD facelift, so your pea shooters and sunflowers have never looked better. The characters’ appearances are just how you remember them if you played the original, but they look noticeably better than the original game, which wasn’t designed for modern displays. That makes the facelift look nice, but not as impressive (or risky) as a full remake with new art. The one spot that the remaster feels underbaked is the campaign ending, which treats fans to an adorable little diddy from a sunflower with choreographed zombie dances. But rather than remaster the music video, it looks as if this version just took the original video file and stuck it in a small window inside an image of a TV screen, making it blurry and hard to see.
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For PvZ veterans, the original campaign is homey and comfortable, but never terribly challenging. I played through the original several times, and it struck me on this replay that once you have your strategies locked, you can mostly brute-force with a handful of reliable plants, only swapping out a spot or two for specialized skills that you may need. That means I left about half of my seed packets untouched. Likely partly as a result of that, the campaign felt a little overlong, with lots of stages that could be solved essentially the same way. I’d imagine this won’t be a problem for new players, though.
For players who do have a lot of PvZ experience under their belt, though, there are a few new challenges to tackle. A new Cloudy Day Mode severely limits your sunlight and intermittently makes your sunflowers fall asleep, so you have to be much more tactical about your build to fend off the zombies. And a new Rest In Peace permadeath mode challenges you to make it through the entire campaign without dying once, and with only one randomly placed lawnmower per stage. Plus there are a wealth of special modes like puzzle or the Zen Garden to keep you occupied, including a co-op and PvP mode. Most of these modes unlock as you progress through the campaign, though, so you’ll need to finish it to really see everything it has to offer.
Additionally, there are a handful of fun Easter eggs for both new and returning Plants Vs. Zombies fans. You can toggle visual options like retro zombies and pea shooters. And one particular Easter egg elicited a laugh from me, though I’d rather not spoil it.
Plants Vs. Zombies is a beloved classic, and Replanted shows that it’s for good reason. The classic gameplay is still just as engaging, and the new modes will keep seasoned gardeners on their toes. While a few aspects of this remaster feel a little low-effort, it’s just nice to have the classic game back and playable in a modern context. Now that it’s easy to do, I expect I’ll keep tending to my garden.
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