Right then, let’s have a proper look at Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, because this is one of those games that sounds like an absolutely dreadful idea until you actually play it. Take Plants vs Zombies, a tower defence game about strategically placing vegetables in your front garden, and turn it into a third person multiplayer shooter. It’s the sort of pitch that should have been laughed out of the meeting room. Instead, PopCap somehow made it work.
The important word there, though, is somehow. Garden Warfare is charming, funny and often extremely enjoyable, but it isn’t the perfectly balanced shooter its colourful presentation might suggest. Underneath the dancing zombies and talking plants is a fairly conventional class based multiplayer game, complete with some questionable progression, uneven classes and the occasional match where you wonder whether the opposing team has been assembled by a military recruitment office.
What makes it interesting is how successfully it disguises those conventional foundations.
The Shooting Is Better Than It Has Any Right To Be
The basic shooting feels surprisingly solid. Weapons have readable recoil, the hit feedback is generally satisfying and each class has a distinct enough weapon to prevent everything from blending into the same generic assault rifle with a different skin.
The Peashooter, for instance, is essentially the game’s straightforward assault class. Its pea cannon is satisfying to use, its movement is good and its abilities give it enough options to escape trouble. The Sunflower provides healing and sustained fire, making it genuinely useful to a competent team rather than simply being the person everyone expects to stand behind them holding a metaphorical first aid kit.
Then you’ve got the Chomper, which is where things become considerably stranger.
The Chomper is designed around close range attacks and ambushes, including the infamous ability to swallow enemies from behind. It’s a brilliant idea conceptually, but its effectiveness depends heavily on positioning and enemy awareness. Against distracted players, it’s horrifying. Against players who know what they’re doing, getting close enough to eat somebody can feel like trying to mug a tank with a teaspoon.
The zombies have equally distinct roles. The Soldier is the reliable general purpose class, the Engineer specialises in mobility and area control, the Scientist combines close range firepower with healing, and the All Star is essentially a walking heavy weapons platform who has apparently decided that subtlety is for cowards.
This variety is one of the game’s greatest strengths. Each class changes the way you approach the battlefield.
The weakness is balance.
Some variants and abilities are plainly more useful than others, and certain classes become considerably more effective when controlled by experienced players. The game doesn’t always feel like twelve equally viable tools being put against each other. Sometimes it feels like somebody has brought a hammer, somebody else has brought a screwdriver, and the third person has brought an actual hammer.
Still, the asymmetry gives the game personality, and personality is something Garden Warfare has in enormous quantities.
Garden & Graveyards Is The Main Event
The game’s standout mode is Garden & Graveyards, which takes the familiar attack and defend structure of games like Battlefield and Team Fortress 2 and gives it a Plants vs Zombies makeover.
The plants defend a series of gardens while the zombies attack. Capture a garden and the battle moves forward. Reach the final objective and the zombies win; stop them and the plants do.
Simple.
It works because the objectives naturally create moments of chaos. Teams are forced towards particular locations, producing firefights around doorways, courtyards and narrow approaches. A well positioned Engineer can create problems for the plants, while a good Sunflower can keep an entire defensive position alive considerably longer than it has any right to remain alive.
The final objectives are particularly effective because they create a sense of escalation. You’ve spent the match fighting over gardens, and suddenly the entire team is throwing everything they’ve got into one final push.
The problem is that objective modes can become horribly one sided.
A coordinated team can roll through inexperienced defenders, while a strong defensive position can make attacking feel almost pointless. This isn’t unique to Garden Warfare, but the relatively small player populations in older versions of the game can make team imbalance more noticeable.
Suburbination is more straightforward. Teams fight over three capture points, with control of multiple areas increasing the team’s score. It’s perfectly serviceable and can produce some excellent battles, but it doesn’t have the same identity as Garden & Graveyards.
Team Vanquish, meanwhile, strips away the objectives and turns the game into a traditional team deathmatch. It’s useful when you simply want to shoot things, but it also exposes how conventional Garden Warfare can be underneath its eccentric presentation.
The Maps Do A Lot Of Heavy Lifting
The maps are generally well designed, particularly because they understand what the classes need.
There are open areas where ranged characters can dominate, enclosed spaces that favour close range classes and routes that allow players to flank rather than simply running directly towards the objective like they’ve forgotten where the front door is.
The environmental design is also excellent.
PopCap doesn’t simply take a normal military shooter map and replace the soldiers with vegetables. The environments actually feel like Plants vs Zombies. Suburban streets become battlefields, gardens become strategic objectives and ordinary household objects become part of the absurdity.
That visual coherence matters because it gives the game an identity that many multiplayer shooters desperately lack.
There are, however, moments where the maps can feel restrictive. Certain chokepoints become obvious targets, and once a team has established a strong position, breaking it can be difficult. Some battles therefore become less about tactical movement and more about repeatedly throwing yourself into the same defensive wall and hoping eventually somebody forgets to reload.
It Looks Brilliant Without Taking Itself Seriously
Visually, Garden Warfare has aged surprisingly well.
The Frostbite engine gives the game considerably more visual fidelity than its premise would suggest, but PopCap wisely avoids making everything photorealistic. Characters have exaggerated proportions, expressive animations and ridiculous weapons.
The plants look like plants. The zombies look like zombies. More importantly, they look like Plants vs Zombies characters.
The attention to animation is particularly important. The characters communicate personality even when they’re doing nothing. Zombies stumble, plants react and abilities are accompanied by visual effects that make their purpose immediately understandable.
The audio design follows the same philosophy.
Weapons have suitably exaggerated sounds, character noises are deliberately silly and the soundtrack knows when to get out of the way. The game doesn’t need a dramatic orchestral score telling you that this is the most important battle in human history. It’s a fight between a sunflower and a zombie wearing a traffic cone.
And somehow that’s enough.
The Sticker Pack System Is Where Things Get Complicated
Progression revolves around earning coins and spending them on sticker packs.
These packs contain character variants, abilities, weapons and cosmetic items. It’s essentially a randomised unlock system, and while it fits the game’s playful presentation, it can also be frustrating.
The problem isn’t that random rewards exist. It’s that you have limited control over what you’re actually working towards.
You might desperately want an ability for a class you enjoy and instead receive a collection of cosmetic items or pieces for something you rarely play. There’s a pleasant sense of anticipation when opening a pack, but there’s also a grind underneath it.
The system was particularly interesting for its original era because it sits somewhere between traditional unlocks and modern loot box design. It isn’t necessarily exploitative in the way later games would become, but it established a progression philosophy that would become increasingly common across multiplayer gaming.
The saving grace is that the game itself remains playable without obsessively chasing every unlock. The progression enhances the experience rather than completely holding it hostage.
Customisation Has More Personality Than Depth
Character variants are one of the game’s better ideas.
You don’t simply unlock a new skin. Variants can alter how a class behaves, changing weapons or damage characteristics and encouraging you to experiment with familiar characters.
The downside is that not every variant feels equally meaningful. Some are genuine alternatives, while others can feel like minor statistical adjustments dressed up as major discoveries.
Cosmetic customisation is similarly entertaining but not particularly deep. The sheer ridiculousness of some accessories is the point. You can make characters look increasingly stupid, which is entirely appropriate.
Technical Performance And Multiplayer
Performance varies depending on platform and version, but the game was generally competent technically. Its environments are reasonably detailed and there is a lot happening during larger battles without the entire thing collapsing into digital soup.
The bigger issue with a game like this is connectivity.
Garden Warfare lives and dies by its multiplayer population. A good connection and populated server can make it genuinely brilliant. A poor connection, uneven teams or an ageing player base can make the same game considerably less enjoyable.
And that’s the awkward reality of reviewing an older multiplayer game: part of the experience belongs to the game, while another part belongs to everyone else who happens to be online.
There are bugs and oddities, as you’d expect. Characters occasionally behave strangely, animations can look ridiculous even when they’re meant to be serious and the physics occasionally remind you that you’re playing a game about sentient plants fighting undead humans.
But most of these problems are amusing rather than destructive.
So, Is It Actually Good?
Yes.
But not because it reinvented the shooter.
Garden Warfare is good because it understands that a multiplayer shooter doesn’t necessarily need to be miserable to be competitive. It doesn’t bury its personality under military jargon, or insist that every weapon needs a backstory. It takes familiar multiplayer mechanics and gives them an absurd setting, then trusts the setting to carry some of the weight.
That doesn’t mean the game is flawless.
The class balance can be uneven. Some modes are considerably better than others. Objective matches can become one sided. The progression system can be frustrating, particularly when you’re chasing particular unlocks. And beneath all the colourful nonsense, the fundamental shooting mechanics aren’t revolutionary.
But originality isn’t always about inventing a new mechanic. Sometimes it’s about putting familiar mechanics somewhere they shouldn’t logically work and discovering that they fit perfectly.
That’s Garden Warfare
It’s a shooter where a sunflower can heal you, a cactus can snipe you, a zombie can ride a tiny jackhammer and somebody can run into battle dressed as a football player carrying an enormous cannon.
The joke should have worn thin.
It doesn’t.
That is probably the game’s greatest achievement. Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare takes a ridiculous concept seriously enough to make it mechanically competent, but never so seriously that it forgets why the whole thing is ridiculous in the first place.
It isn’t the deepest multiplayer shooter of its generation, nor is it the most balanced. Its progression could be better, its modes aren’t equally compelling and some matches can descend into repetitive objective based warfare.
But when everything clicks, the game has a quality that is surprisingly difficult to manufacture: it feels like people actually had fun making it.
And you can feel that while playing it.
For all its conventional foundations, Garden Warfare remains distinctive because it doesn’t spend its time trying to convince you that shooting other players is important.
It’s just a load of plants and zombies having an absolutely ridiculous scrap in somebody’s back garden.
Sometimes, that’s plenty.
Verdict: 8 / 10
Like these articles? Read other game reviews here.
