Plants VS Zombies
This series of video games is unique in many ways. They are liked by millions of users around the world. On this web page, we are telling our dear readers about this game, its features, gameplay, history, fun & interesting facts, which are to everyone’s amusement. And we hope that our visitors will have tons of great hours spent playing our free online games — not only the games that we’re describing on this particular web page but also other wonderful and exciting pieces on other pages, thousands of which we have to everyone’s interest. And since our list of freely playable games is being actively replenished on a weekly basis, we highly encourage everyone to return to our gaming pages to explore novelties.Description of the game and its gaming activity
The series of games here is composed of freemium games. They are of the tower defense genre. The core gameplay is focused on various kinds of plants, which act as turrets defending the castle (house) from the hordes of ongoing zombies, which progress in waves & increase in difficulty. The particularity of this game, which makes it quite different from other tower defense ones, is that the enemies go towards the house a gamer is defending not in one line or route but in 5 or 6 lanes at the same time or alternatively. Although there are tower defense games, which may feature a branched route of enemy progression, the route is always one (although it may change depending on the level). Here, the route is always divided into 5 or 6 lanes, which do not connect or cross & which ongoing zombies cannot change even if they wanted to circle around the obstacles (turrets). Here, zombies are not allowed to change lanes (although they can spawn helping zombies in adjacent lanes) and this makes this game so different and unique, which had highly contributed to its popularity. The same as its amusing graphic implementation and sound design.
There are 26 kinds of zombies, who attack the house inside levels. Not all kinds of zombies are present within one level at the same time. And there are 49 kinds of plants, which also do not live all simultaneously within each level.
The premises of the game are the garden divided into lanes, which, in their turn, are divided into cells, where a gamer has to plant plants-turrets. On the left side of the garden, there is a house, which a gamer protects by all means, to which zombies shan’t reach. If they do, the level must be restarted to be passed again, this time successfully. From the right side of the gaming field, there come zombies, whose sole purpose is to reach the house to destruct it. A gamer initially has predefined sets of plants, which he or she can place into individual cells on all available lanes within each level, which must act as protectors against the progressing zombies. Since, as we’ve already mentioned, there are many kinds of both zombies & plants, one must choose wisely, which kind of protective plant one wants to use on each lane. Some of them can be absolutely pointless because they are useless against certain kinds of zombies and vice versa.
When any zombie reaches the house, there is the ‘final line of defense’, which in this game is featured as lawnmowers. They are a very powerful weapon against the zombies, acting as one-time protectors for each lane. So, they start up and begin to crash all the zombies, which are present at this lane at this point in time & kill ‘em all as they move from left to right. But since each lane is equipped with only one lawnmower, a gamer cannot reactive them for this lane again in this level. So, if zombies eventually reach the house again, there will be no lawnmower anymore to save the house, which means, a gamer loses and must restart the level to try better next time.
As the gaming progress goes on, the gamer opens new features, which are kinds of plants, kinds of zombies, tools to better control the in-game garden & upgrades to existing items.
There is a possibility to buy items in the internal store, as well as earn them during the in-level battles. That is especially true for the internal currency, which is called the Sun, which is a thing that’s collected on the battlefield, bought in the store (mostly, for real currency) & can be successfully grown using special kinds of flowers.
The flowers hit the approaching enemy through different damaging effects, which are inherent to their specific kind. Some of them may have more than one type of skill. The most relevant skills are spitting on the zombies with seeds, hitting them, crushing them & simply creating an obstacle, which takes time to demolish. The player’s goal is to closely monitor the readiness of new flowers that they need to plant on the lanes to create an effective defense strategy. The readiness meter is shown on the display.
This game (and all its continuations) is made with a relatively slow pace to make it effectively interesting for both hardcore gamers and casual gamers. Thus, if a gamer feels that most other tower defense games out there are too quick or tough for their natural reaction and they feel more frustrated than interested while playing this or that game, then Plants VS Zombies will be a wonderful alternative for them. The same, if anyone wants the hardness of the game to be bigger, he or she shall just keep playing more senior levels and trying other modes, which are harder than usual and offer a more complicated set of zombies and plants to deal with.
To bring the required diversity and cater to the interests of wider audiences, the developers of the game introduced several gaming modes:
• Zombatar
• Zen Garden
• Survival
• Puzzle
• Adventure
• Mini games.
Let’s talk about these below in detail.
1. Zombatar.
Although the first version of the game featured ready-made zombies, the Zombatar extra mode made it possible to be even more entertained by creating a unique zombie — it will work instead of a regular zombie in the game. A player has access to select their skin, hair, apparel, hat, accessories & extra items.
2. Zen Garden.
This is an absolutely no-stress mode, where a gamer simply stores their flowers that were unlocked during the previous gameplay. A gamer actually acts here as a gardener, watering & fertilizing their plants, repelling the insects away. Here, no zombies are attacking, so nobody will be stressed about their appearance & actions. To give people the incentive to play this mode, the happy plants will generate coins once in a while (which are used to buy items in the store).
3. Survival.
This is the mode, which tests the gamer’s ability to withstand the hordes of zombies given all their previous achievements. This mode is effectively unlocked as an in-game achievement after the Adventure mode is passed in full. Here, one can choose an easy, hard, or endless defense mode. In the first and second, a gamer’s given a chance to withstand the predefined number of zombie hordes (and this gives them a varying number of flags should they succeed). In the endless mode, the number of waves is limitless and one shall simply run for their life for as long as they physically can. Hence, the number of received flags is potentially limitless as well. In practice, though, anything ends sooner or later. The entire survival mode is split into 11 types of levels for a gamer to select.
4. Puzzle.
Here, a player has two sub-modes; the ‘Vase Breaker’ and ‘I, Zombie’. In the first, a person’s given a number of vases, which one shall crack in order to find out, what’s inside: a zombie or a flower. The goal is to overcome zombies with the given power of flowers. In the second, one acts like a zombie and attacks the house — for the sake of the victory of zombies.
5. Adventure.
This is the basic gaming line. One starts off simple and, as the hardness of levels goes up, so the player’s abilities, turrets & enemies improve in their strength. A player also unlocks new items & features. And as one progresses the mainline, new modes of games also unlock. The premises of the game feature five stages: regular day, night, roof, fog & pool. All of them offer distinctive features and capabilities, as well as limitations. For instance, the in-game Sun currency cannot be generated by day flowers during the night.
6. Mini-games.
This mode features over 20 mini-games, each revolving around the counteraction of the turrets vs enemies, this way or another.
There are also achievements, which one unlocks as one progresses the game — they mark one’s gaming success. Over 20 achievements exist available for every gamer.
Most gaming modes offer in-game money for their completion and re-completion (although the seniority of the awards for the initial completion and all following ones differs).
History of the development of the game
The designer of the game George Fan started to release games designed by him in 2001. His first popular among masses game called Insaniquarium (brought to release that year) later was an inspiration to create Plants VS Zombies. That game features a water tank filled with kinds of fishes, which a gamer had to grow stronger and protect from invading aliens. Other pieces of inspiration for George were:
• Arcade game ‘Tapper’ of 1983, featuring a bartender who has to serve clients on time
• Warcraft III computer game of 2002, released by Blizzard (particularly, episodes, where players had to protect their tower from ongoing enemies)
• Card game ‘Magic: The Gathering’ of 1993, where people had to collect cards and beat their opponents online based on the power of those cards. This game was in turn inspired by the insanely popular Dungeons & Dragons, which also inspired hundreds of other games and pieces of pop culture around the world, including Warcraft
• A film of 1960 ‘Swiss Family Robinson’, where a family was shipwrecked on a small inhabitable island and had to survive there; at some point, they had an encounter with pirates to protect their home from them.
All these pieces brought the creator to the idea. Plants were taken because nobody used them as protagonists in such games at that time. And zombies were taken, well, because they were a popular topic and a creator came up with a very nice design, which seemed amazing to him (and seems so to many millions of daily gamers around the globe).
Interesting and fun facts connected to the game and its development
1. The author of the game wanted to create a continuation of his moderately successful Insaniquarium. The main idea was to pile up the fish tanks one above the other and when the enemy crushes the upper ones, the defense in the lower ones should have made it stop at some point. This ‘stacking’ idea later transformed into 5 or 6 lanes of ongoing zombies.
2. The early idea for the name of the game was the ‘Lawn of the Dead’, as a pun to a very well-known horror zombie movie by G. Romero ‘Dawn of the Dead’, which was on a particular rise in popularity back then. The author actually tried to persuade Romero to allow him to use this name, which was closely similar to his brainchild but Romero did not give his consent. George even recorded and sent Romero a video, where he was dressed as a zombie character of his game and acted like a coder for this game, searching for bugs and eliminating them. But even that did not touch the heart of the creator of zombie movies. Later George tried to play on the similarity of the sounds of names with other movies or games, such as ‘Residential Evil’ but settled down with the name that we know today, which is not controversial, yet sounds recognizable.
3. George Fan was fired along with other 50 people from the PopCap Games gaming studio, where he worked on the creation of the series of games that we consider here after it was bought by Electronic Arts in 2011. EA wanted to focus on other kinds of games after the acquisition and significantly monetize the game of George, which found his disagreement. Although George said later that his firing was not connected to view discrepancies with the new management. Who knows…
4. The ‘Bad Guy’ song by Billie Eilish (2019) is based on the music and sounds of this game, being inspired by them.
Freely playable games on our website
Anyone interested in this exciting game and all its continuations can always play them for free on our web server. We are collecting a large gaming base of all directions, particularly, this one. So, we invite people from all over the world to enjoy a fascinating pastime together with their favorite characters.