The Battle For The Backyards Of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Plants vs. Zombies’ transformation from a phone friendly tower defence puzzler into a class-based online multiplayer shooter was nothing short of a revelation. That PopCap could so effortlessly turn their hand to an entirely different form of gaming – albeit with the help and ample resources of EA backing them – was exceptional. Of course, there’s always room for improvement and expansion, and Garden Warfare 2 looks to be doing just that.

The biggest and most noticeable difference is right in front of your nose as you load up the game. There’s no boring, plain menu system anymore, but you’re sent straight to the Backyard Battleground, a hub area with a base for the plants on one side, a base for the zombies on the other, and No Man’s Land in the middle.

Able to freely switch between the two sides and the various plants and zombies, you can visit each base whenever you want. It’s here that you get to the rest of the game, so you can pop to a noticeboard to check in for daily missions and objectives, visit Crazy Dave, Dr. Zomboss or a handful of other characters to get going on a specific mission chain, dive deep into your play stats for each of the characters and, of course, head off to take part in the co-operative and competitive multiplayer game modes. But Backyard Battleground is more than just a glorified menu, though, it’s a sandbox for you to mess about in.

Venture out from the safety of your base and into No Man’s Land, and there’s a nice bit of exploring to do. Head off to the sides and you can visit a small slice of Zomburbia – what Suburbia was renamed after the zombies won the war depicted in the first Garden Warfare – or you can head into the extensive sewer network below and take on the cute little assault course, trying to set the best record and beat your friends.

Right slap bang in the middle, though, there’s a flag pole for you to try and capture and hold, as wave after wave of enemies come at you and you try to fend them off. It’s a very simple set up, with just a few pots for either defensive plants or zombie robots to be planted in, as a mixture of ordinary grunts and AI playing as the same plants and zombies available to you attack. That’s right, both sides now have minions that march towards the objective and emplacements which can help to defend them.

For a much sterner test of your skills, you can even wander into the enemy base and try to take on the much, much tougher enemies. It’s an ideal place to try out the abilities of whichever plant or zombie character you’re playing as, but also lets you earn XP in the process – thankfully, progression is a much simpler XP-based system in GW2.

It’s a battle that you don’t have to tackle alone, though. Other players can jump into your game world and play on either side of the battle, with a party of up to four. Even if you’re on your own, crates will drop in filled with AI characters to fight alongside you, in addition to the regular grunts. That’s something that’s now true of the co-op game as well, where friendly AI can also come to fight alongside you in Garden Ops – dubbed Solo Ops – so you’ll never have to play alone. Or online, as it happens. You can play Garden Warfare 2 without an internet connection!

Since you’re able to hot swap between the four characters on your team in Solo Ops, that’ll be an ideal way to test out the ability of the new plants and zombies. It’s quite fascinating to see that, while both sides still manage to feel distinct, some of the new characters help to level the playing field a little, so that both sides are well suited to both attack and defence.

Captain Deadbeard, for example, has a gun with a pretty hefty zoom on it and a remote control robot parrot that can take to the skies, making him comparable to the Cactus from the original game. Kernel Corn, meanwhile, fills the heavy support role of the zombie All-Star, with a Shuck Shot that’s comparable to the explosive Imp Punt attack.

Even then, there are differences, so that Kernel Corn will leap in a forward arc, shooting anything he passes over, instead of the Sprint Tackle shoulder charge, and some other additions are much more unique. The Imp is a stubby little zombie, who’s terribly weak up close and personal, but bide your time and eventually you get access to the Z-Mech, giving you much more powerful weapons and attacks for a short period of time. Rose, meanwhile, is well suited to dealing with hordes of weak enemies, able to suspend enemies in the air and, quite hilariously, turn them into goats.

There’s an almost endless charm to the colourful and wacky world that PopCap have created, and these new characters only add to that. That’s especially true when you consider all of the variants and the customisations, which put a different spin on the abilities of each plant or zombie character. Even the existing class characters are getting new variations.

Really that seems to be Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 down to a tee. The original game proved that there was something to this mash-up, and now PopCap get to build upon that. In some places, it’s as simple as adding a handful of new characters, but elsewhere you have clever ideas like Backyard Battleground, a hub world that gets you right into the game as soon as you want to start playing.