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ABANDONED: Plants vs. Zombies 2
Jun. 21st, 2019 10:38 pmYouTube threw some "Is it possible to clear X in Plants vs. Zombies without doing Y?" videos in my related sidebar, which I watched out of curiosity. That kind of got me into a "Hey I remember playing PvZ, I really enjoyed it" kind of mood, and I considered replaying it. But then I remembered, oh, right, there's a sequel I never tried! If I'm going to get back into that franchise, maybe it'd be a better idea to do the new stuff.
Spoilers: It was not a better idea.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 is, on the surface, Plants vs. Zombies but more. More Plants! More Zombies! Even more vs., probably! In theory, this should be fantastic, and exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, EA.
By which I mean, PvZ2 is literally what you would expect if you take PvZ1 and make it aggressively Free to Play. The difficulty is cranked to the point where it almost doesn't seem possible to clear a stage just by planting plants and letting them take care of it anymore, and I'm still in the first zone, but oh hey that's fine did you know that you the player basically get Gil Toss? 950 coins at any time to just manually Fruit Ninja away as many zombies as you can hit in five seconds. Good news is that it's not like you really had anything better to do with those coins, since all the new plants and seeds and level-ups (plants have levels now) instead take other freemium currencies like Gems and/or just enter your credit card number right here and cut the middleman. Get seedlings that sprout in 5-10 hours for miniscule rewards (usually more coins or something like that) but of course you can pay to make them sprout faster. Daily missions, they're impossible but you can try again if you watch an ad first. Etc.
This game is whalebait, is what I'm saying.
I did and do still like PvZ1, which is saying something because I normally detest Tower Defense as a genre so strongly that I used to have it blacklisted when going through my Steam Discovery Queue. PvZ1 is charming enough that even I enjoyed it, despite that bias. PvZ2, by contrast, is what happens when EA takes that franchise, kills it, then digs it back up from the grave and sends it shambling after me to mindlessly devour my wallet, like some sort of... of... hmm, if only we had a clever simile here.
I try to stay positive in my game reviews because there's more enough AVGN/Zero Punctuation shit out there already, but I just... playing this just felt icky. I can't put a wholesome spin on such an unwholesome experience. I'm sorry.
Spoilers: It was not a better idea.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 is, on the surface, Plants vs. Zombies but more. More Plants! More Zombies! Even more vs., probably! In theory, this should be fantastic, and exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, EA.
By which I mean, PvZ2 is literally what you would expect if you take PvZ1 and make it aggressively Free to Play. The difficulty is cranked to the point where it almost doesn't seem possible to clear a stage just by planting plants and letting them take care of it anymore, and I'm still in the first zone, but oh hey that's fine did you know that you the player basically get Gil Toss? 950 coins at any time to just manually Fruit Ninja away as many zombies as you can hit in five seconds. Good news is that it's not like you really had anything better to do with those coins, since all the new plants and seeds and level-ups (plants have levels now) instead take other freemium currencies like Gems and/or just enter your credit card number right here and cut the middleman. Get seedlings that sprout in 5-10 hours for miniscule rewards (usually more coins or something like that) but of course you can pay to make them sprout faster. Daily missions, they're impossible but you can try again if you watch an ad first. Etc.
This game is whalebait, is what I'm saying.
I did and do still like PvZ1, which is saying something because I normally detest Tower Defense as a genre so strongly that I used to have it blacklisted when going through my Steam Discovery Queue. PvZ1 is charming enough that even I enjoyed it, despite that bias. PvZ2, by contrast, is what happens when EA takes that franchise, kills it, then digs it back up from the grave and sends it shambling after me to mindlessly devour my wallet, like some sort of... of... hmm, if only we had a clever simile here.
I try to stay positive in my game reviews because there's more enough AVGN/Zero Punctuation shit out there already, but I just... playing this just felt icky. I can't put a wholesome spin on such an unwholesome experience. I'm sorry.