A fall from grace - a review of the game

When I first heard about this game coming out I was super excited, being a fan of plants vz zombies since I was a kid, and really enjoying the first and second garden warfare, honestly the best shooter games I’ve played to date. So when EA and Popcap announced Plants vz zombies: battle for neighborville I was stoked, waiting for the game to come out, and today it finally came out, super excited when I got home from work I got settled in and was ready to play the game. And let me tell you, I was worried recently with ea and their bad track record, sadly it continues with this game. Now I won’t say it’s a complete failure, the game does somethings right which I will list in a pros and * list. I also want to point out that I tried to stay spoiler free because I wanted the game to be a surprise at launch.

Pros

• abilities that we’re changed and character changes.

while messing around with the game I realized that they changed some of the abilities of the plants and zombies both, while I was a little skeptical at first, this is actually a spot which this game shines, with the addition of the sprint feature, the movement abilities got messed with a little for the better. First off the pea shooter now has the ability to jump higher, just like the variation of hyper from gw2, and can now float in the air. The cactus can now fly upward and slightly glide to get to tactical spots, replacing the wall nut barrier that people used to get to higher heights anyway, deadbeard gains a similarly ability where he can launch a anchor to send him to farther away places. Other then that they changed how some abilities worked(ex. The stun grenade that the engineer has) for the better so that they work better then the previous entries.

• Maps and Hub worlds

The first thing I noticed after playing the game for awhile is that the hub worlds and different maps look very nice, they’re very vibrant with color and feel big, which is always a plus. Giddy park feels fun to mess around with and the other hub areas feel nice to explore and get those chest or other secrets such as golden gnomes. the multiplayer maps feel very good with the flow of the points and the choke points feel placed in good spots. not really much more to say sadly, other then good job.

sadly that's the end of the pros so on to the *

*

• Control of the Characters

Now before I said that the ability to sprint is a good addition to the game, But, adding a slippery feeling to sprint and turning is not the way you should make the game feel, you have some form of drag when you turn, like you're on butter, and it feels terrible. other then that, the movement is super slow, and your sprint speed is about the same speed of the movement in GW2 but a little faster, unless you were to equip the speed upgrade, then its about the same. the movement also feels clunky, which is not something you want in a shooter game of all types of games.

• The power scale

From all the multiplayer I played, the zombies will outclass the plants every time, they're severely stronger then the plants, making every game I played a sweep always. this isn't about out skilling the other player online, this is just overpowered. the engineers stun creates other stun nodes that can stack stun on you to make you unable to do anything for up to 3 seconds in some cases, Super brains and the space cadet are really strong too, being able to get in and kill super fast, Plants don't have that much to brag about, with the removal of the back stab mechanic that the chomp had, you cant really flank anymore with the character, and other nerfs such as the fire rate of said chomp, and the sun flowers damage and fire rate getting killed practically( 9 damage head shots up close in GW2 compared to 7 damage head shots) makes the game feel super unbalanced and anti-fun if you get plants.

• Very Buggy

Now you would think this was obvious with a game coming out fresh, its bound to have bugs, and you're right, I don't really care about these types of things and will understand for a new game, but, this game has been playable for a month at least before the official launch, plenty of time to fix these bugs, sadly they didn't

• Split Screen Nightmare

So me and my brother wanted to play the game in split screen, which I had to look up because unlike GW2, there is no area to go to and enable it, you have to hold square on another controller to even do it, poor design choice but what ever, and the nightmare doesn't end there. as soon as split screen was enabled, the frame rate deiced it wanted to go off itself and drop to about 5 fps, I'm playing on a console so this shouldn't be a issue, at least it wasn't with Garden Warfare 2, which rarely to never dropped frames on ps4, it makes the game unplayable to play in split screen which is very upsetting.

• Variants of classes

I see this going around a lot on the forums, the removal of variants is a big sour spot for this game, if not the biggest sour spot. I understand some of the variants being op in GW2(ex. Twilight/unicorn Chomp, and the Z7 imp) but they could simply remove them from the game. i don't understand the design choice here, it makes the game stale, you can only get to account level 1000 in BfN which doesn't take long, compare this to GW2s 5455, its not even about this, the game will become stale fast, with no flavor to add to this I can only pray they add these sooner then later, without the big pay for variants.

• Variants of abilities

Now this is a very similar point to the one with the classes, why not put these back in the game, it can sometimes be fun not knowing what you're opponents are going to be using and it also makes the game stale adding no diversity at all.

I feel very sad about this game, and that should be how anyone feels when they're excited about a product which the previous installments were A+, I don't see this game getting any better down the line and that's scary, to see a game fall so hard is bad and will become stale like a loaf of bread left out over night, i would not get this game if you're someone who is looking around the forums for stuff like this, just get GW2 or if you already have it, keep playing the amazing game, i've seen the player base go back up recently so that says a lot about BfN.

Final review is a 3.5 out of 10, very disappointing, back to GW2.