Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare burst onto the shooter scene in 2014 showcasing its wonderful characters, colorful gameplay, and fantastic third person mechanics all while maintaining the charm of its tower defense origins. Despite its greatness, Garden Warfare lacked in variety of game modes, providing a somewhat limited experience. Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 remedies that issue with a bountiful, yet time consuming journey, with new, yet familiar content, and six new characters.
Garden Warfare 2 adds new content right away by replacing the traditional menu from its predecessor with an interactive hub world, The Backyard. Searching for chests, hidden rooms, and collectables makes for hours of fun without ever having to go online. The Backyard’s colorful surrounding neighborhoods, albeit fun to explore, lacks in size and gets old with no way to enter buildings.
Each faction has a central base separated by an unclaimed battleground, making up the largest portion of The Backyard. Each base allows players to set up a portal to multiplayer, take off to battle waves of enemies in Garden or Graveyard Ops, view stats, purchase cards from the vending machine, jump into split screen, and customize characters.
Garden Warfare 2 caters to players who prefer to play alone with solo quests. The newly added Solo Ops allows a player to jump into a Garden or Graveyard Ops with three AI controlled teammates that can be switched to and from at will. While Solo Ops remains just as fun as regular Garden or Graveyard Ops, the short single player quests lack substance and variation preventing an immersive story. Whether you’re tasked with defending a certain location or running across the map to kill a certain amount of bad guys, solo quests are repetitive and boring. The final few missions do spice it up with some challenging bosses, but it’s just too late to impact the entire experience.
Progressing through single player unlocks two additional modes, Infinity and the Flag of Power. Infinity takes place in an alternate universe where you use a mech to fight off endless waves of gnomes trying to destabilize time. Raising the Flag of Power initiates a war in The Backyard with endless waves of enemies fighting to dethrone you. These new modes grow tiresome after realizing that they are nothing more than watered down versions of Garden and Graveyard Ops, the definitive tower defense game type carried over from the first Garden Warfare.
Challenges have a new home in Garden Warfare 2 through a frequently updated quest board. Unlike Garden Warfare, where every challenge was tied to individual characters and were used to level up, Garden Warfare 2 rewards coins and stars upon completion. Stars can be used to unlock chests, clear rubble to make room for decorations, and gain access to Infinity. Coins are used to unlock card packs at the vending machine. There are literally thousands of cosmetic items to unlock as well as consumables and character variants. Unfortunately, too few cards come with each pack meaning countless hours of play will be needed in order to achieve everything. This hinders the sense of accomplishment and takes away from the overall experience.
Online multiplayer features fantastic modes such as Gnome Bomb, Team Vanquish, Vanquish Confirmed, and Turf Takeover all returning from Garden Warfare. Turf Takeover tasks one team
to defend its territory from the relentless onslaught of the enemy.
Gnome Bomb acts as the assault game type where each team must grab the
bomb and deliver it to the opposing team’s safe haven. Team Vanquish and
Vanquish confirmed return as Garden Warfare 2’s deathmatch game type. All of these game types are exact replicas from Garden Warfare, only with new maps to play on.
In addition to familiar modes, Garden Warfare 2 suffers from extreme balancing issues. Rose initially overpowered everyone else with her long-range homing shots that dealt loads of damage. She has been nerfed since, which paved a path for both Super Brainz and Imp to be dominate characters on the map.
Although it doesn’t break the game completely, players may grow
frustrated each time they die as a result of being bested by imbalance
issues.
The
heart and soul of Garden Warfare lies in the variety of unique
characters and their abilities. All eight characters from the original
game make an uneventful return with no new abilities. The Engineer is the exception and veterans will notice he now has a turret ability rather than his remote controlled bot. The six new characters in Garden Warfare 2 steal the show this time around, and for good reason. Kernel Corn, Rose, and Citron charge the field as the new members of the plants while Imp, Super Brainz, and Captain Deadbeard stand firm with the Zombies. Each new character brings something new to the battlefield ranging from Super Brainz Turbo Twister, Captain Deadbeard's Canon, and the Imp’s Z-Mech to Rose’s goatify, Kernal Corn’s air strike, and Citron’s EMP. Each character provides a refreshing breath of air to a multiplayer experience dominated by characters from the past by initiating new ways to tackle each game played.
With the total number of characters growing to fourteen, the number of different variations climbs beyond one hundred. This, along with the countless customizable options, makes playing alongside an identical character near impossible. The new leveling system adds to that uniqueness since each individual character variation can be ranked up fifty times while being promoted for every tenth level obtained, much like prestige in Call of Duty. This makes the level cap well over five thousand.
Plants
Vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 provides an excellent experience that
surpasses that of its predecessor. With over a hundred different
characters, countless activities, and endless customization, Garden
Warfare 2 sets a new standard for this franchise. Unfortunately, with the absence of a real story, balancing issues, and time consuming unlockables, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
+ New characters
+ Loads of customization
+ Beautiful Graphics
+ Backyard Battleground
- Online balancing issues
- Lack of substantial single player
- Time consuming unlockables
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