It only took a few notes from the Plants vs. Zombies menu music to transport me to a long-forgotten world of sunflowers, pea shooters, and not being able to put the dang game down for one second. First released in 2009, the colorful strategy game was an instant hit, adding to developer PopCap’s enviable lineup of time-wasters like Peggle and Bejeweled. And now it’s been newly remastered so you can relive those days on modern consoles. The updated Plants vs. Zombies, dubbed Replanted, is still a great game that stands the test of time — and it’s also a depressing reminder of just how badly EA fumbled this franchise.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of fighting off the undead using only a garden full of plants, the premise is relatively simple. The zombies are here, and you need to defend your little slice of home. On the right side of the screen is your house, which you need to protect, and on the left, the undead will shamble in to attack. Between the two is a lawn divided into rows. You fend off these hordes using a green thumb, planting flowers in that lawn that each have a unique ability. The pea shooters… shoot peas, making them the basic turrets of your arsenal. There are stomping squashes and walnuts that form protective barriers, along with explosive cherry bombs. At the core of all of this is the humble sunflower; in order to add new plants, you need to harness the sun, which is generated from those smiling flowers.
PvZ is a serious and deep strategy game masquerading as a Sunday morning cartoon. The complexity steadily ramps up, introducing things like pools and nighttime free of sun that force you to adapt new strategies while continuing to give you more fauna that can be utilized as instruments of destruction. The sheer variety means that there’s a lot of potential for creativity and experimentation. Nearly two decades later, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of placing a man-eating plant behind a walnut, where it can munch on unsuspecting zombies. The whole experience is then slathered with charm, from bouncing, cheerful plant life to perhaps the catchiest song in video game history. It was a near-perfect game, and the remaster offers some enhanced visuals, a few new ways to play co-op, and a handful of single-player modes. But not much changed, because it didn’t need to.
Sounds like the perfect recipe for a beloved series, right? EA seemed to have that exact same thought when it acquired PopCap in 2011. But instead of a proper sequel, the publisher expanded the PvZ brand in other ways. There were Facebook spinoffs and a strange shooter series called Garden Warfare, along with plentiful comic books and other merchandise. Plants vs. Zombies 2 did launch in 2013, with a free-to-play mobile iteration that had some interesting ideas but eventually became bogged down by energy timers, microtransactions, and constant updates. It largely played like PvZ, but it lacked the purity of vision that made the original so great. That didn’t matter much to EA, of course, because PvZ 2 did numbers, reaching a much larger — and more lucrative — audience than its predecessor.
But something was lost in the search for more players (and money). While the series became financially successful, the creativity that made it so beloved steadily dwindled. The original PvZ was a hand-crafted, carefully tuned experience with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s the kind of game that you want to revisit through a remaster like this because it’s just that good. The sequels and spinoffs, meanwhile, were mostly watered-down versions of this premise that proved much more disposable. It’s not like I’m anticipating playing a remaster of PvZ2 in a few years. (A third mainline game is currently in soft-launch limbo.)
It’s a sad state of affairs for a concept that once held such promise. And the fact that I really can’t stop playing the remaster — I’ve whispered just one more round to myself multiple times while writing this — drives that point home further. And things don’t look like they’ll be getting better anytime soon. EA is in the midst of going private in a deal worth $55 billion, which will almost certainly necessitate further layoffs and fewer risks. That means focusing even more on big games with big earning potential, instead of cute games that worm their way into your heart. In that way, this remaster is like a time capsule from a simpler, happier time.
Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted launches on October 23rd on the Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
