Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare Preview

Popcap doesn’t shy away from its influences for Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. In fact, they almost went out of their way to highlight them, as they talked about the various elements of the game.

Whilst we were initially introduced to the plant side of the fight it was announced at Gamescom that there would be a PvP mode, allowing players to hop into the role of the Zombies and try and take down all the plant-life they could find. So, it’s now a fully fledged multiplayer game, with up to 24 players in a pitched battle, although the game still has a 4 player co-op mode and 2 player split-screen.

In order to go up against those darned plants, you’ll take control of a few of the more special zombie enemies. These are the Soldier, who is your basic grunt; the All-Star, lending a lot of firepower; the Engineer, who’s good for getting stuck right in very quickly and interacting with the level; and the Scientist, who is a tech-based character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgQ7CoxZo7o

Together they form a fairly diverse team, but the inspirations are clear. Popcap made no bones about using Team Fortress 2’s Heavy as an inspiration for the All-Star, and they will have certainly looked to Battlefield 3, Killzone 2, and other class-based multiplayer games to find the right mixture.

What’s nice is that the two sides are still quite different, with plants able to lay down their own roots in order to gain more powerful attacks, whilst zombies have specific attacks which are able to counter this. The All-Star, for example, can charge and barrel into plants, uprooting them and stunning them for a while, as will the Engineer’s grenades.

Each character has three of these abilities and, as you’d expect, they can be customised and switched out for others in the full game. What I was shown was just an example of what’s to come, but demonstrates a level of competence in taking all of these inspirations and twisting them to the PvZ universe.

This all lives within a sort of meta-game on two levels. As players duke it out across otherwise idyllic neighbourhoods, lesser plants and zombies will also roam and have their own unique purposes.

Looking on from above, we also have another player, tip tapping away as they see the overall battle unfolding beneath them. This is Boss Mode.

It sees Crazy Dave on one side going up against the evil Zombie Scientist, in a mode which – and PopCap simply came out and said this too – was heavily inspired by Battlefield 2142’s Commander Mode. From here they can give their team access to radar, drop supply crates, summon the aforementioned NPC plants and zombies and, of course, provide direct fire support.

It’s a nice twist, but one that’s exclusive to the Xbox One, via Kinect or SmartGlass. Naturally, this feels like it’s borne out of the same deal which means that PvZ Garden Warfare is a timed Xbox One exclusive, and maybe a little bit forced as a consequence, but it’s a nice touch either way and enabled by the Kinect being bundled with every console.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v2kJ-Djb5Q

As is the ability to take down the enemy commander from the ground. Crazy Dave and the Zombie Scientist both float visibly above the battlefield, and you are able to shoot at their vehicles from the ground. Take them down, and the position will be up for grabs for everyone on the team.

The exact details of how people will be queueing for the spot, whether they’ll be able to play as a ground trooper whilst in the queue and so forth aren’t quite clear as yet, but hopefully it will mean that people get their shot at the top job every once in a while and still stay close to the action.

One final point revolves around the decision to go for a full retail release, rather than borrowing the free to play model of PvZ2. They decided instead to go for a model which would allow them to give each player all of the content from the get-go. Staying away from the paywall – which by all accounts was very well managed and metered in PvZ2 – it keeps the community together as a whole, without splitting them apart with disparate content and micro-transactions.

I’ve kept mentioning it, but the most refreshing things here was how open and unashamed of their inspirations and sources Popcap was. Their first foray into a 3D game world borrows heavily from many sources, but in doing so they are being smart and adapting everything they borrow to fit their own individual creation.