There are no experience points to be earned in the traditional sense. More than that, the process of leveling up each class is frequently counter-intuitive to competitive shooter play. It’s easiest to look at Garden Warfare as a family-friendly alternative to Battlefield. There’s just not enough content to stem off a sense of tedium as you play the same maps and matches again and again. There’s a real thrill that comes from unlocking a new character variant – which tweaks an existing class to look and play just a little differently so the slow-firing standard Peashooter might be joined by one that boasts a higher fire-rate – but it takes so long to get to that point. There are eight in all, though Gardens & Graveyards – by far the most elaborate mode in Garden Warfare – has only three. You’ve got to survive all 10 waves – the last of which is brutal on the Normal difficulty, even with four players – to get enough payout to merit the time investment.Īll of this would be easier to accept if there were more maps. There’s also Garden Ops, the wave-based, co-op survival mode, but it’s too much challenge for too little reward. Gardens & Graveyards, a point capture mode in the vein of Battlefield’s Rush where zombies capture gardens to open up more of the map until a final goal is reached, is lucrative, but only if it ends in a fight over the final location. Team Vanquish, which is essentially a friendlier way of saying Team Deathmatch, doesn’t carry any large rewards. You simply don’t earn many coins from the various match types. The pacing for unlocks – which come almost entirely from purchased sticker packs – is a real problem, however. There’s an addictive quality to tearing open new packs and seeing what goodies you got it’s very similar to other EA games, like Mass Effect 3‘s Galaxy at War co-op mode, or any EA Sports title’s Ultimate Team mode.
As you play Garden Warfare‘s three modes – two competitive multiplayer, one co-op wave-based survival – you earn coins that can be spent on an assortment of “Sticker Packs,” which unlock character variants, class-specific weapon upgrades, and Plant/Zombie summons for the game’s two objective-driven modes. The classes differentiate even further as you dig deeper into the game. The Plants favor finesse the zombies run with the horde. Both also have melee-capable bruisers, but it’s stealth versus tank in the war between Plants and Zombies. robo-zombie head!), but one is a sniper and the other favors demolitions. Both factions have a class capable of deploying an attack drone (garlic vs. Plant and Zombie healers leans toward rearguard and front line duty, respectively. This asymmetric structure carries across all four of each faction’s classes. Both have an explosive to shake things up with, but the Zombie’s Rocket Jump leans more toward vertical play, whereas the Plant’s Hyper ability is all about speed. The Foot Soldier carries a lower-damage machine gun as its primary weapon. The Peashooter makes up for a slow rate of fire with explosive peapod bullets that do splash damage. Even each faction’s basic infantry units – Peashooter for the Plants, Foot Soldier for the Zombies – don’t really match up. No two classes are the same in Garden Warfare.
PopCap goes a step further when it comes to soldier classes though, with an asymmetrical class layout that establishes a stronger factional identity than most shooters typically possess. It’s easiest to look at Garden Warfare as a family-friendly alternative to Battlefield, as both the scope of the action and the emphasis on multi-class team play falls right in line with the DICE shooter. The individual pieces are at least promising. Given PopCap’s proximity to the Battlefield developer, you’d expect the third-person shooting action in Plants Vs. There’s competitive and cooperative content, but this isn’t something to pick up if you’re looking for a robust single player experience. And yes, let’s be clear up front: this game is a multiplayer-only proposition. The game does have its share of standout elements, but uneven design too often works against the competitive team vs. PopCap is also a member of the Electronic Arts family, meaning it can carve out kid-friendly shooty shooty in the mold of Battlefield, relying on DICE both for input and for its increasingly ubiquitous Frostbite 3 engine. PopCap Games’ colorful fictional universe already boasts a diverse cast from the series’ mobile appearances, and the contentious struggle between smiling plants and their natural enemy, the groaning zombie, makes as much sense in a shooter as it does in a lane-based strategy game. Zombies is a fascinating proposition as a shooter. Level progression system often discourages team-friendly play Poorly paced dispersal of currency for sticker packs
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