Basics of PvZ

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Plants vs Zombies, if you’re into video games and haven’t been living under a rock for the past 17 years you almost certainly know about it. A tower defense game where plants come to life to protect you from home invading zombies.

You get 5 lanes to defend. Sun drops from the sky and can be produced by certain plants, you use it as your currency for planting and use your buddies in the grass to wipe out wave after wave of the horde, lawnmowers on each lane act as a one time second wind if they get all the way through.

It starts off simple enough but keeps being engaging by introducing new plants and zombies as you progress and different per world limitations that change up the formula, Night stops the sun falling from the sky, the Pool gives you lanes you need lily pads or special aquatic plants to use, Fog limits your visibility, Roof forces you to use plant pots since there’s no soil and you need plants that can shoot at an angle for further back parts of the lane.

Combine that with its endearing presentation style and it was a viral hit, spawning a decently expansive franchise. Despite that, it’s only really the first game and the Garden Warfare spinoffs that most people actually know about.

How many people actually know there’s a Plants vs Zombies 2? Well, I mean, quite a lot, it has a huge number of downloads, but compared to how many people played the original, it’s much less.¹

I think there’s a pretty obvious reason for this, PvZ 1 was all over the place, it was on PC, Mac, the major Mobile platforms, tablets, Xbox 360, PS3, PS Vita, Nintendo DS, meanwhile 2 was kneecapped by being a mobile exclusive game, it’s on iOS and it’s on Android and that’s your lot, so right from the get go they cut out the majority of their audience.

And since it’s a mobile exclusive released in the early 2010s, it followed the trend where the traditional game format where you buy it and you just own it all went in the bin in exchange for the “freemium” model which now dominates mobile gaming, where the game is free on the surface but filled with all sorts of cancerous monetisation schemes that make it an off putting experience.

As if that wasn’t crippling enough, it was also a game that spent a long time in early access, after being soft launched in mid 2013 it took until early 2016 for the final levels of the main adventure mode to release.²

So there were a lot of factors leading towards it getting nowhere near the same level of momentum its predecessor had, but I’m going to stick my neck out a bit here and say I actually think that despite its toxic elements, it’s the better game of the two.

Since the long gone days I played stuff like Minion Rush and Subway Surfers when I was younger, it’s the only mobile game that’s been able to decently hold my interest. I first discovered it while I was on holiday 5 years ago before I dropped it a few hours in, but when I rediscovered it around July this year I got hooked and spent 2 months playing through it in regular sessions, and it was genuinely a lot of fun. In fact if it wasn’t for the freemium schemes, I’d go as far as calling it a model sequel.

Gameplay changes

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Speed

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I think the biggest weakness of the original was its pacing, Plants vs Zombies is sluggish, it runs at a snails pace, and it’s not like you need that time to carefully plan your defence setup because the game is usually very easy, so even though it’s frequently changing up the formula as you progress it can still end up feeling quite dull.

Plants vs Zombies 2 fixes this by making near enough everything about the formula significantly faster. You get double the sun from most drops, which allows you to set up your defence much quicker. Zombie movement, cooldowns, waves and damage are all accelerated, and if that wasn’t enough the game has a speed up button that you can toggle 2x on and off with.

In around an hour I could beat 8 levels in PvZ, in PvZ2 I can do double that.

As part of this changed pace 2 also fixes another problem with the original. The first game had some mechanics that were introduced so late in the game you get little time to play with them before finishing it, like currency, the Zen Garden and Crazy Dave’s Shop. The first 2 of these directly return early into the sequel, and several of the Upgrade Plants from Dave’s shop (like Twin Sunflower) reappear throughout the game as individual plants you can place separately rather than requiring you to place the original first then plant on top of it.

Plant and world variety

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To compensate for the much faster speed there are way more levels, the first game had 5 areas with 10 levels each, the sequel has 11 worlds and between 20-34 levels each, plus a 5 level tutorial.³ And even with the greater level count they manage to keep the gameplay feeling varied.

The game uses a time travel theme to place each world in a different era and region, extensively retheming the backdrop, zombies and soundtrack, each world also introduces its own unique plants and zombie types.

Even though a bunch of the plants were duds that I quickly forgot about or thought were just outright crap, most of them were useful and each world had plants that were staples I kept frequently picking.

Ancient Egypt has Iceberg Lettuce, a free plant that acts as a mine which freezes the zombie that sets it off, Twin Sunflower which, I don’t really have to explain, and one of the 2 GOATs of the game for me, Bonk Choy, who makes up for his narrow range with fast, damaging attacks that can hit things behind him as well as in front.

Pirate Seas has Snapdragon and the Threepeater which attack across the 3 lanes that surround them, in close range for high damage and far range for low damage respectively. As well as the incredibly powerful Cherry Bomb which will instakill the vast majority of enemies in a surrounding radius.

Wild West introduces the second GOAT, the Lightning Reed, a fast firing long range attacker that can chain its hits across nearby zombies, Frostbite Caves has Chard Guard, a defensive plant who can repeatedly fling zombies backwards to stall their advance, Lost City has the red stinger which changes from offense to defence depending on how far it is from your house, AKEE which fires bouncing artillery, Stalia which slows zombies hit in its radius. 

I could go on picking favourites, but I think you get the idea. Only the last 2 worlds had plants I lacked interest in, the ones in Big Wave Beach were mostly great but I didn’t really use them outside their world, while the Modern Day ones were from a group called shadow plants that needed to be boosted by their initial plant, the Nightshade, to have any use, and generally just still didn’t feel much good after that.

The plants all fit into what I’d say are 4 basic categories, sun generation, offense, defence and support, but each world comes up with ways to vary up how they play that part, so it genuinely felt like each world was giving me more tools to change up my playstyle.

Each plant also has its own plant food effect. Plant food is a resource you rarely get from dead enemies which you can then spend on a plant for a special attack or utility, and it’s really fun getting brief game changing enhancements or upgrades.

And like the original game, each area starting from the second one also has its own main gimmick.

The Pirate Seas has ocean columns at the end of some lanes which you and the zombies can’t normally use, instead they only appear on those lanes through ambushes where they fly or swing into the nearest ground columns, giving you narrower ground to cover in their lanes. Wild West has tracks and minecarts, you can’t plant on the tracks but you can move the carts, allowing you to cover multiple lanes with a single plant.

Frostbite Caves has lane switching arrows that will push the zombies up or down, making some lanes much more vulnerable than others, plants can also be frozen which forces you to use heat themed plants to break them out to avoid your defence being sabotaged.

The Lost City has sun tiles that produce sun if a plant sits on them, massively increasing the potential sun you can make. The Far Future has power tiles with different shapes and colours, if you activate plant food on a plant on one tile it’ll pass on to all of the other tiles that share its shape.

Dark Ages stops sun dropping from the sky like in the original’s night levels, slowing down your production and pushing you to either use more sun producers or cheaper plants.

The Neon Mixtape Tour has the soundtrack constantly changing genre, with zombies themed around those different genres that get a boost when theirs is playing, routinely changing up who the biggest threat on the grid is.

Jurassic Marsh introduces dinosaurs who will spawn zombies into the map and rapidly push them towards you, but they can be charmed into leaving the zombies alone or punting them off of the lawn for you instead.

Big Wave Beach introduces water tiles that you need lily pads or aqua plants for like the original’s pool levels, but as a twist the water tiles aren’t confined to a select few lanes, instead all lanes get covered by tides of water that bob in and out. Aqua plants will die out when the tide goes out, regular plants without lilies will die when it comes in, forcing you to think two steps ahead.

Modern Day introduces portals which spit out zombies from another time zone onto a certain spot, pushing you to focus on that lane, and reintroduces several of the earlier gimmicks for good measure.⁴

Extra mechanics and modes

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But since a major mechanics change every hour or hour and a half isn’t really enough for a game that’s roughly 20 hours long the game also uses mutators every few levels, these can be small things like extra objectives, environmental modifiers and fail states and major mechanical shifts like Conveyor Belt levels, levels where some or all of your plants are pre-assigned rather than you getting a free choice, Last Stand levels where you get a huge batch of sun to spend all at the start and further sun production is blocked, turn based levels where you place a plant per wave, and little minigames or puzzles.⁵

It makes for a huge amount of variety where it feels like every few levels you’re getting something new, and it kept me really engaged. I was playing routinely every day, often in long stints where “just one more level” turned into 3 or 4 hours of play. And since I had literally hundreds of levels to get through, it did genuinely feel like I was going on a pretty big journey. 

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a sizeable chunk of bonus modes on a daily or weekly rotation.

Arena has you play a competition where you can’t be killed but have to race against the clock to run up the score by killing as many zombies as possible, competing with the run of another player.

Penny’s Pursuit lets you play a campaign of levels up to a boss with adjustable difficulty, Thymed Events have a similar rotating event that lasts a few weeks with its own theme and special rewards.

Plant Nursery gives you a set of levels that teach you about your main plants and reward you with large amounts of seed packets to upgrade them, Plant of the Week introduces you to new Premium Plants and lets you earn their seeds (more on both of those later), and Piñata Party gives you a unique daily level with random rewards at the end.

Event Quests also pop up from time to time to introduce new mechanics and plants. Oh, and there’s Vasebreaker, um, yeah I didn’t care about Vasebreaker.

I didn’t really care about Penny’s Pursuit, Plant of the Week or the Thymed stuff either, but the other modes were both fun and a useful opportunity to accelerate my progress through the game.

Of course, being on mobile also helped since I can play on the go or while I’m lying down rather than fixed at my desk.

As I was playing I was genuinely kind of baffled that the game never saw a wider release, if it had been out on PCs and consoles with the same kind of reach the original did it could’ve been a massive success.

But then I suppose that naturally leads us into talking about the monetisation, which does kind of answer that question for me.

Utterly cancerous monetisation schemes

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Microtransactions

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The game has lots of corrupt incentives to try and get you to spend real world money. Coins and the game’s other main currency, gems, can be bought in bundles with real money, and although they can be earned in-game through pickups and as rewards for completing little tasks, they’re usually gained incredibly slowly, especially with the Gems.

Every level has 3 powerups you get to use, freezing zombies (or burning them when in Frostbite Caves), flinging them away, and zapping them with electricity, and they all have expensive coin costs. I only really ever used the zapping, but this notably changes the balancing of the game, for better and worse.

The zap allows you to zap zombies anywhere on the screen and rapidly kill them, so if a zombie happens to have slipped through all your defences and is right there about to kill you, you can stop them even when you have no plants to do the job. That can be useful, I was genuinely grateful for it at times since it stopped me having to redo several minutes of defence because of a few basic mistakes or surprise zombie ambushes, but it also does cheapen the difficulty.

Although you get Plant Food naturally throughout each level by killing enemies and the game gives you enough of it that you get a lot of uses, you can also just straight up buy it as well for 1000 coins a pop to use it as much as you like. If you get a lot of coins you can just spam Plant Food and the power ups during most levels to make the game near impossible to lose, making this pay to win in the purest form.

You can also rank up plants now which improves various stats like damage, cooldowns and sun cost. I will say, this has been unpopular among a lot of people, not so much for me. I quite like that you can make your plants stronger over time which helps keep their value as you head into more difficult worlds, but again this is another mechanic that turns into pay to win. Ranking up plants is normally done with seed packets that give you a certain number of seeds per packet, allowing a level up once you get enough, you usually get seeds through Piñatas, which are basically lootboxes you get every few levels.

I got seeds regularly enough that I upgraded lots of plants throughout my playthrough, sometimes up to several levels, but you can also buy Piñatas and on top of that, you can directly buy seeds with coins, gems, or through watching ads, and you can also just straight up pay real world money to get enough seeds to instantly jump to the next plant level. Max level plants are absurdly powerful which reduces the challenge of most of the game to a very low level.

Premium Plants and Play Caps

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And as if that isn’t bad enough, it gets even worse.

You unlock loads of plants naturally through progression, but the game also includes “Premium Plants”, some of these you unlock by getting rare seed packets, some cost large amounts of gems, and others you flat out can’t get through in-game resources and need to pay real world money for, each one of these costs around the same as the base price of the entire PC version of PvZ 1.

Of course, Plant Nursery and Plant of the Week do help with this quite a bit, but since they’re only on a roughly weekly rotation, their major boosts are limited opportunities.

Then there’s the caps in most modes, all game modes except Adventure and the bonus Vasebreaker minigame are arbitrarily limited to try to tempt you into purchases.

Piñata Party can only be played once per day unless you pay Gems for a rerun. Event Quests can only be played once no matter what to stop you farming them for their rewards, while some of them act as tutorials, most of them also serve as ads for Premium Plants, so they’re limited to stop you getting too much of a free taste.

Penny’s Pursuit, Thymed Events, Plant Nursery and Plant of the Week all use a “Fuel” or “Energy” currency you have to use to play, that slowly recharges every few minutes but can be instantly refilled with Gems or sometimes coins.

Arena requires its own resource called Gauntlets, which cost Gems but can also be earned as rewards, this is especially impactful since Arena is a competitive mode and the more chances you have to play the higher you can climb the leaderboard, you get a free play every few hours, but since it’s pay to play more, it’s pay to win even more blatantly.

Then of course, there’s something you can only really get away with in mobile games, even now, the ads. You can watch them several times a day to get gems or coins or get other bonuses, and every so often when you’re moving between menus or something along those lines it’ll just shove one in your face, you don’t get any rewards for those of course, it’s just about making them money.

It’s an insanely greedy model, but the sad thing is, a lot of the time greed pays. The vast majority of people won’t engage with this stuff, they won’t pay to win, they won’t engage with microtransactions and they’ll get what they get out of the game for free, providing little value to EA besides being one of millions of people they can use as captive audiences for digital ad space.

But a model like this doesn’t need widespread buy in, it just needs a good few whales who will spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even higher amounts (I really don’t want to think about it) dedicating themselves to unlocking everything, being clownishly overpowered and rising to the top of the pile through running up their bank cards rather than skill. And I’ve seen how rapidly people climb those Arena leaderboards, even 13, nearly 14 years later, the money is rolling in.

So even though PvZ2 has far less reach than the original, it doesn’t matter, it’s worth far far more to its owners. Someone buys most versions of PvZ 1, they pay a flat fee of a few quid and that’s it, a whale splurging on the sequel’s microtransactions can be worth several orders of magnitude more than that for years.

Still solid

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Ultimately though, it must be said, this model doesn’t ruin the game, at least in my opinion. As long as you play with WiFi off you can play Adventure adless (you can’t do that with the other modes because they require an online connection) and the big trick I found was playing Arena semi often.

The rewards from Arena tournament participation massively speed up the pace you can earn coins and more importantly, Gems, to get some of those really useful Premium Plants. They also give you yet another currency, Mints.

Mints are quite unique, they’re exclusive to Arena and you can only get them by actually playing the mode (or rarely as quest rewards), it’s one of the few cases where flashing your credit card won’t get you to the front of the line (at least directly). And with these Mints you can buy the special Mint plants.

Once you’ve got a Mint plant, you can use it for free in levels, it doesn’t cost any sun, but it has a very long cooldown so you can only use it maybe once or twice a level, that’s because they’re incredibly powerful. Every plant in the game is grouped into a plant family, and each of those families has a corresponding Mint, when you deploy the Mint, every plant in its family will get an intense permanent or temporary boost.

I got 2 of these throughout my playthrough and they were incredibly useful, the Enlighten-mint gives a huge temporary boost to sun producing plants, which gave me the resources to set up a much bigger defence without going broke, and the Reinforce-mint knocks zombies back then activates the Plant Food effect of every defence plant on the lawn, with enough defensive plants that’s enough to create an impenetrable wall the zombies couldn’t even dream of climbing over.

Difficulty

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More importantly than that, I genuinely didn’t feel like Adventure was being too difficult on purpose to bait me into paying. I used powerups, basically always the zappy one, to avoid having to retry some levels later in the game, but that only started to seriously feel like a necessity in the last few worlds.

The first time I felt that way was in the middle of Jurassic Marsh, where Day 12 had massive hordes of enemies pushed forward by Dinosaurs, including the miniboss level Gargauntuars, with a tight limit of 6 plants I was allowed to lose before failing which blocked the use of many deployable plants like Ice Lettuce, Cherry Bomb or the dino charming Perfume Shroom.

It was the first time I really stopped thinking in terms of strategy and just started thinking “how many coins do I need to spend to beat this?”, but even then it was only a few levels that felt genuinely unfair and held me up long and I still progressed at around 10 levels an hour.

The only bullshit level like it in the next world, Big Wave Beach, was Day 30, an “endangered plants” level where you fail if any of the endangered plants die, those plants in question were the Guacodiles.

Why was this so bullshit you might ask? Well Guacodiles are a pretty generic ranged attacker, until they get hit. When they get hit, by anything, they do a highly damaging rushing charge attack that sends them lunging forward until they go off the screen and despawn. This, for the purposes of an endangered plants level, counts as them being dead.

So you have to make sure absolutely nothing ever touches them to keep them from killing themselves and instantly failing the level. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the game constantly tosses in the fisherman zombie, the fisher zombie’s gimmick is that he sends his hook across and grabs the nearest plant in his lane, pulling it forward. He’s a pain in the arse at the best of times, but usually you have loads of time to deal with him as he slowly drags plants towards him tile by tile.

Of course, with the Guacodile, that’s not how it works, the little bastard will instantly bait the endangered crocs into killing themselves. That plus huge late level swarms made it an absolute nightmare of a level that took me around half an hour of retries all on its own, I only beat it in the end by spamming the Infi-Nut defensive plant and activating its effects with the Mint, which sets up a forcefield across the entire column which along with blocking any zombie progress, also stops the fisher zombie’s hook. Thank you very much to the writers of the Wiki who mentioned that strategy on the level’s page!

Without that mint, I could’ve been ragebaited out of the game for a very long time. The last bullshit level I can think of, which genuinely did ragebait me out of the game for a bit, was Modern Day’s Day 13. Modern Day has 4 “Beghouled” levels, based on a minigame from PvZ1, which itself is based on one of the developer PopCap’s older games, Bejeweled.

It’s pretty simple, it’s a match 3 game, your lawn is full of plants and getting 3 of them together creates a match and replaces them with new plants, you keep finding matches until you win. But to complicate things the zombies are, of course, attacking you, and if they eat a plant, that tile is lost, which gives you less slots for plants to fit in and by extension, less opportunities to make matches, so you’re basically in a battle of attrition against them. Oh, and you don’t have any lawnmowers, so if one of them gets to the end, you’re instantly dead.

Now, I don’t like this mode just because I don’t like a match 3 puzzle and it also just takes way longer than normal levels, but Day 13 takes the absolute piss with this by demanding a whopping 150 matches, which is a lot more than the other levels. It also includes the Newspaper Zombie in the horde, the Newspaper Zombie is a returning zombie from the original game and has a pretty basic mechanic, he slowly trundles forward, but once he takes enough damage, his newspaper is destroyed, making him get really angry and charge forward at speed. In the original game he was a bit of a pushover, but in 2 they really buffed him to make him charge and eat plants way faster. This makes him a massive pain in the arse for this mode.

On top of that, evening the odds is even harder in this mode than it was in the original game. The original Beghouled let you spend sun to do several things, upgrade some of your plants, fill in the holes left by eaten plants, and reshuffle the board, which is especially useful if you’re struggling to find matches with the board you have.

2 changed this so you can only upgrade plants with sun, the other 2 powerups cost coins instead, so unless you’ve built up a big bank of them, you’re shit out of luck.

So I have a genre shift I don’t like that’s less forgiving and incredibly long, yeah, it quickly got on my nerves too much. After repeated fails I basically went on a 2 week hiatus of playing where I only briefly checked in for a few minutes every day to play modes like Arena or the Plant Nurseries. But in the process I ended up with a huge amount of coins that let me keep filling in the holes the zombies were creating and beat the level fairly easily, and the rest of Modern Day turned out to be just fine.

Often it’s just a single zombie type that turns a level from normal to tough because of their design, whether that’s Newspaper Zombie, Fisher Zombie, Mixtape Tour’s Grandpa Zombie whose spin attack can instantly erase a whole circle radius of plants, Lost City’s Tent Zombie who can set up a cycle of infinitely spawning waves that are hard to stop because the zombies block attacks on the tents spawning them, or for Dark Ages, definitely the most annoying bastard in the entire game, the Wizard Zombie who can easily turn any plants ahead of him into defenceless sheep at a rapid speed, forcing instakills, attacks from behind or freezing. Ugh, what a prick.

I don’t know how bad it would’ve been to manage if I’d never gotten the extra bonuses from Arena, probably quite a bit worse, but yeah, in general the game ranges from pretty easy to difficult, but not too cruel, there are only a few of those bullshit levels where their design deliberately exploits certain mechanics to create a total balltwister, though I still don’t believe these were made so difficult just to get you to pay more, Arcade style. I think it’s just the devs didn’t realise how far they’d gone with creating ragebait.

So the game is very much pay to win in the sense that you can pay to skip to the front of the line, but it’s not pay to win in the sense that you’ll be tortured by the gameplay if you don’t pay, you can still get through it mostly painless without ever giving the developers a dime, which is more than you can say for a lot of mobile games which are much more maliciously designed. Arguably the original game on mobile is actually far worse now, originally it was a paid version slop free just like the PC edition, but then it moved to freemium and had the audacity to even gate lawnmowers behind ad watching, and introduced the speed up of 2 as a real world microtransaction.

The difficulty does have problems beyond that though, the game just straight up lies to you in the menu by presenting it as if the worlds get progressively more difficult in a linear order, they don’t.

In my experience most of the worlds were easy, the 3rd world: Wild West was a little difficult, the 5th world Lost City was a bit more difficult than that, then the 7th and 8th: The Dark Ages and Mixtape Tour. The final 3 worlds are definitely the hardest, but still not linearly from there, World 9: Jurassic Marsh, is definitely the hardest of the bunch, Modern Day at 11 is the easiest of the 3, then World 10 Big Wave Beach sits between the two, at least that’s my experience.

The difficulty also isn’t consistent within worlds either. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, a bit of variation in difficulty is good for a game, but PvZ2 is just all over the place, there doesn’t seem to be really any logic in it. All the boss fights which cap off the worlds were easy in my experience when you’d kind of expect them to be some of the toughest parts, while the actual hard levels are sometimes early in the worlds, sometimes late, sometimes in the middle.

It doesn’t sabotage the progression or anything, but it can make the gameplay feel a bit messy. Still, it’s better than the first game where pretty much everything was a flat “easy”.

Conclusion

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The game’s other big sin though is the ending, for such a long game you’d expect something decent, the original game gave you a whole music video (in most versions anyway), while I was on my journey I genuinely expected a proper ending or something, but nah.

Throughout the game you get these little dialogues from Crazy Dave, his robot car Penny and arch villain Dr Zomboss, and the game just finishes with one of those then kicks you back to the world map. And that’s after a recycled boss fight too, every world has a unique boss except the final one, which just randomly picks an earlier one to recycle, it’s such a lame way to wrap up the game. You don’t even get the credits, they’re hidden in the menu and they don’t even credit all the devs anymore, it’s just a copyright notice, that was pretty sour and left the game feeling like it was unfinished.

Which, in a way, it actually is! Extra levels with new dialogue started to be added to Adventure in 2017, but PopCap then stopped the additions and stuck to just working on new Thymed Events, Plants and quality of life improvements, in 2019 they removed these expansions from the world map and converted them into bonus quests you’re offered after finishing the main story, a few years after that they handed off development entirely to another team called Slingshot Studio who maintain it as a live service. They’ve steadily slimmed down the updates over the past few years, now what the game’s life cycle seems to amount to is it getting a few new plants every so often, in a jarring art style that doesn’t match the original game anymore, with Arena seasons to advertise them, and that’s about it.

Meanwhile, the Chinese version of the game has been developed separately from early on in its life by a studio called Talkweb, who have not only added a bunch of extra game bonus modes but also a whole 6 extra Adventure worlds with their own unique styles and mechanics, the Kongfu World, Sky City, Steam Age, Renaissance Age, Heian Age and Underwater World, with a 7th, the Moon BaseZ, in development, bringing the game from 11 worlds to 18. If only they ran the rest of the series as well, though I don’t know if the game really needs hours and hours more of content or just a better ending, 25 hours is more than enough for a game like this if you wrap it up properly!

PopCap meanwhile have moved on to the next sequel in the series, which somehow has managed to have an even worse development cycle. Plants vs Zombies 3 is still in early access after first being soft launched in early 2019, being unfinished after 7 years of release⁶. I don’t really know what the excuse is for this, EA isn’t exactly poor… Oh well.

So, yeah, unless you happen to be Chinese (in which case I’m kind of surprised you’re watching this, but, uh, ni hao!) the future of this series is not looking bright. But even after its slopification I still think Plants vs Zombies 2 is worth checking out, it’s such a feature rich sequel with lots of talent behind it that genuinely doesn’t outstay its welcome despite its long run time, I know it’ll never happen but I’d love if a deslopified version made its way to other platforms so it could get some well deserved appreciation.

There are some unofficial projects with that in mind through modding, including Reflourished on mobile and the PC ported Gardendless, I haven’t played them myself so I can’t speak to their quality, but it’s great to see that people still care about the potential of this niche corner of such a popular franchise.

So to answer my own title question, yes, Plants vs Zombies 2 is underrated, but it’s also not a surprise how it ended up that way.

Footnotes

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