14 DAY TRIAL // PopCap never ceases to amaze. The company, specialized in creating videogames featuring simple and clear mechanisms, like the much talked about Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle, but engaging the player for a huge amount of hours, has released a new videogame, called Plants vs. Zombies, which can be played on the PC or the Mac. It costs 16 Euro at the moment.
The publisher and developer is offering a demo for the game that takes up only 26 MB of hard drive space, while showing gamers most of what the title has to offer.
There are five different game modes that players can try. The most important is the Adventure mode, which offers 50 levels that must be beaten. The main idea is to beat back an invasion of zombies that can only move from the right side of the screen to the left side by using an arsenal of plants that can take on various roles, from shooters to walls, which are placed by the player.
There are 26 types of zombies, from the early slow moving ones to more specialized types that can wreak havoc in the defensive garden that the player lays out. The game also has a collection aspect, which allows players to get power ups and coins that can be used to buy things like snails. Other games modes are: Mini-Games, Puzzle, Survival and Zen Garden.
Plants vs. Zombies is basically tower defense with a theme, but works quite nicely. After all, even casual players must have heard about Left 4 Dead from Valve, which also chronicles a zombie apocalypse employing the mechanics of the shooter, or about the Nazi Zombie mode that is part of the Treyarch created Call of Duty: World at War. More casual players might not be interested in the violence and complex gameplay of those games but they will surely enjoy the more down to Earth and easy to understand Zombie vs. Plants from PopCap.