Silly Zombie Fun!
Plants vs. Zombies Adventures combines strategic puzzle play with simulation to create an undead world that’s a blast to explore. You enter a town that has been overrun by zombies and thus covered in a disgusting pink fog. Starting with one square block, you click around to clean up the mess and select buildings to reconstruct. Crazy Dave, a wild-looking fellow wearing a cooking pot for a hat, serves as your guide. You learn to grow warrior plants in the designated pots so that you can protect your property from new zombie invasions. With the overall goal of purging the town of zombies, you slowly reclaim each parcel by battling the poaching undead. You will grow plants, throw them in Crazy Dave’s RV, and go on a roadtrip to fight zombies in a new location. You eventually work your way across 12 different maps, each filled with multiple levels of zombie-fighting puzzles.
To defeat these silly zombies (they show up wearing barrels, traffic cones, and the like), you need to be constantly growing your army of plants. Each plant has a unique ability to help you fight the zombies. Some, like Sunflowers, provide you sunlight to power the growing of the other species. A pea plant shoots its peas at a steady and consistent pace, which can eventually cause the zombie to fall over and disappear. Walnuts can block the path; so zombies must stop to chew through their tough shell, thus making them vulnerable to projectile attacks. Adding a cherry bomb to your arsenal allows you to take out a bunch of zombies if they are clustered together.
How To Play
You start out with seeds for just a few plants, but as you take Dave’s RV out on raids, you unlock new and stronger botanical combatants. Each seed costs money to plant, and plants vary in the time needed to grow. This is a persistent game so your plants grow even when you are not logged in to Facebook.
As with all other free Facebook games, this game makes money by offering premium currencies that you can purchase, using real money. Within the game you have three currencies: coins, zombiebucks, and gems. The first two can be earned; the latter cannot. You need coins to plant seeds. Coins are earned in a variety of ways, but mostly by fixing or placing buildings around town. Buildings produce coins on an hourly basis. When you defeat a horde of zombies invading a specific place, you earn zombiebucks as well as experience points allowing you to level up. Zombiebucks are needed to purchase buildings and improvements.
The limited premium currency is gems, which quickly disappear as you use them to speed up the growing of plants, provide you with premium plants or give you emergency firepower in a fight. Gems start at 100 for $2.00, but you can also buy 5800 gems for the outlandish amount of $100. You don’t have to purchase the gems; but if you don’t, you will have to wait or rely on your Facebook friends to bail you out of situations.
Campy humor infuses this game, making it hilarious to explore. From the sayings that appear on the loading screen (???giggling uncontrollably,” ???inflating townspeople,” and ???rehearsing action scenes”) to the descriptions of the plants and zombies (a beet ???headbutts zombies into submission”) to the portrayal of the zombies’ defeat (???Face Plant” or ???Leafy Green Justice”), everything in the game is designed to make you smirk.
Fun Strategy Game
But it’s the strategy that keeps players coming back for more of the undead’s shenanigans. This new version of Plants vs. Zombies keeps a lot of what makes the original game special, but adds in some new strategy components and a little socialization. The heart of this game is analyzing how to best use your limited number of plants to combat the constant forward motion of the zombies.
New to this version are combat grounds that constantly change – the action here doesn’t take place in your front yard. Instead you have winding, crisscrossing paths where the zombies can come from multiple starting points and you have to defend multiple things. That’s fun and challenging; plus you have an opportunity to study the battleground before selecting your variety of plants to take into the fight. In this version, you also have a smaller variety and number of plants to use in a given battle, so the strategy of placement is very important. But you have some new tricks up your botanist’s sleeve: spray bottles of Plant Perk (temporarily makes plants more powerful) and ZombieFreeze (stops zombies for a few seconds).
The Bottom Line
If you are a fan of the original Plants vs. Zombies and old enough to be on Facebook (age 13-up), you’ll enjoy this less frenetic but brainier version. It's better than the app Plants vs. Zombies 2. If this is your first foray into plant wrangling, this is a delightful way to get started -- but only if you can stand waiting between planting and fighting or you don’t mind forking over some moola. Unlike the original game where you face horde after horde of zombies in quick succession, this game delivers its zombies in a more deliberate and tactical manner. It is also best to have Facebook friends, who are also playing the game, to help you carpool between the 12 maps (you send a Facebook request and they simply click ???yes”) and to whom you can playfully send zombies to attack.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
