Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition

Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition is the complete version of the lawn defense classic, and it still holds up because every decision is so small and so readable. A shambling zombie walks in from the street on the right, your house is on the left, and between them sit five or six rows of grass waiting for seeds. You pick which plants to bring, collect the sun that falls from the sky, and drop your defenders one tile at a time. When a zombie reaches the far left of its row, a lawn mower fires once to clear it. If a second one gets through the same row, the zombies eat your brains and the level is over.

Sun Is Your Only Currency

Everything in the game costs sun. A Sunflower costs 50 and slowly produces more, a Peashooter costs 100, a Wall-nut costs 50 and simply soaks up bites, and a Cherry Bomb costs 150 and wipes out a three-by-three square. Sun drops from the sky during daytime levels, and you click each glowing coin before it fades. The first lesson every new player learns is that a wall of shooters with no sunflowers behind them collapses by the third wave. Two full columns of sunflowers on the left side, planted early while the first zombies are still slow and alone, pay for everything that comes after.

Each plant also has a recharge timer on its seed packet. You cannot spam Cherry Bombs or Potato Mines, so the real puzzle is timing: which row is under the most pressure right now, and which packet will be ready in time for the flag wave that the progress bar at the bottom is warning you about.

Adventure Mode: Day, Night, Pool, Fog and Roof

The Adventure campaign is 50 levels long and splits into five areas, each one changing how you have to think.

• Day teaches the basics with Peashooters, Snow Peas, Chompers and Repeaters.
• Night removes falling sun, so cheap mushrooms like the Puff-shroom and Sun-shroom take over. Gravestones pop up on the lawn and zombies can rise from them.
• Pool adds two water lanes in the middle where only Lily Pads, Tangle Kelp and aquatic plants can go, and snorkel and dolphin-riding zombies attack through them.
• Fog hides the right half of the lawn. Plantern and Blover clear the view, and you will meet the jack-in-the-box zombie and the balloon zombie that floats over everything.
• Roof is sloped, so straight shooters miss. Lobbed plants like the Cabbage-pult, Kernel-pult and Melon-pult become your backbone, and every plant sits in a Flower Pot.

The adventure ends on the roof against Dr. Zomboss in his giant robot. Bring Ice-shrooms to freeze the fireballs and Jalapenos to melt the ice balls, and keep enough Melon-pults on the board to grind down the boss's health between attacks.

Zombies Worth Learning by Name

Half the fun is learning what each zombie does. Conehead and Buckethead zombies are just tougher walkers. The Pole Vaulting Zombie leaps over the first plant it meets, so a cheap Wall-nut in front of your shooters wastes its jump. The Newspaper Zombie gets angry and fast when you shred its paper. The Football Zombie charges hard and needs a Squash or a Chomper, while the Digger Zombie tunnels under the lawn and attacks from the left, which is exactly why a Split Pea that fires backwards is worth a slot. The giant Gargantuar throws an Imp over your front line and takes a Cherry Bomb plus a lot of firepower to stop.

Mini-Games, Puzzle Mode and Survival

Once the main story is done, the extra modes keep the game going for weeks. Mini-games remix the rules: Wall-nut Bowling turns nuts into bowling balls, Zombiquarium makes you feed zombies to farm sun, and Whack a Zombie hands you a mallet. Puzzle mode has two sets, Vasebreaker, where you smash vases that can hide plants or zombies, and I, Zombie, where you play the other side and place zombies to eat pre-planted brains. Survival stages run several flags in a row on the same lawn, so you get to choose new seeds between rounds and build a defense that has to last.

Crazy Dave, Coins and the Zen Garden

Your neighbor Crazy Dave wears a saucepan on his head and runs a shop out of his car trunk. Coins that zombies drop buy extra seed slots, the Pool Cleaner and Roof Cleaner, upgrade plants like the Gatling Pea and Winter Melon, and the rake that hits the first zombie in a row. The Zen Garden unlocks during the adventure and lets you water and grow the plants you collect, which in turn sell for coins. It is a calm side hobby between hard levels.

Tips for a Cleaner Defense

• Keep the front two columns for cheap blockers and the back for producers. Shooters belong in the middle.
• Do not panic-buy damage when one row looks bad. A Wall-nut in that row usually buys enough time for the next packet to recharge.
• On the pool levels, cover the water lanes early. They tend to be left empty until a snorkel zombie walks straight through.
• Before a "huge wave" message, keep 150 sun in reserve for an emergency Cherry Bomb or Jalapeno.
• On the roof, lobbed plants ignore the slope. Peashooters do not.

Controls

Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition is played entirely with the mouse. Click a seed packet at the top, then click a lawn tile to plant it. Click falling sun and dropped coins to collect them, and use the shovel in the corner to dig up a plant you no longer need. The menu button pauses the level.

If you like defending a path against waves, try Bloons Tower Defense 6 next. Its towers and upgrade paths are deeper, but the planning loop will feel familiar after a few lawns.