It should be said, I firmly believe you can make a multiplayer game out of a lot of things; almost anything. Most games really do offer the potential for some great cooperative and/or competitive modes for friends and strangers to all play together. There’s a lot more flexibility in most games’ design than people give them credit for, and that there is genuinely an audience for off-shoots like Dead Space 2: Outbreak and Bioshock 2: Fall of Rapture. Some of them still staying active long after everyone assumed they’d died out.

Now you may be wondering “why open with that statement?” Well, the game I’m about to review seems to be trying very hard to prove me wrong, and I gotta give it credit for putting such effort into trying to make me eat my words. Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare takes the perfectly decent idea of making a multiplayer tower-defense third person shooter spin-off of a series known for its tower defense gameplay that hooked millions… and crushes it in favor of being a cheaply made port of a badly executed game. As someone who’s played a fair amount of buggy, imbalanced, and otherwise troubled multiplayer games, it’s even more depressing seeing a title with so little passion to go along with lackluster performance.

The idea is simple — take the zombies and plants, put their abilities in the context of a third person shooter, make them asymmetric teams in the game’s competitive modes, let them spawn NPC zombies and plants who help them in battle, and give a plants-only coop mode cutely named Garden Ops. Instead what we have here is little more than a teachable moment about multiplayer games, and how to not do them. It’s like the Alpha Protocol of online games.

Teams are awkwardly balanced at best. The plants somehow are the only side with a melee character (the zombies must not want to get their decaying hands dirty), the only side with a healer, and the only side with a sniper. Zombies are all medium to short range guns and other odd abilities. You may have noticed this means while the plants have an at least mildly well-rounded line-up, zombies are almost all offensive-based. That’s because this game was designed for co-op first, and competitive multiplayer second, even if the co-op is the most undernourished mode in the game. Despite trying to rip modes from Battlefield and Call of Duty (more on that in a minute), Popcap clearly didn’t know how to balance two very different teams, nor did they know how to design game modes for them. Zombies generally have the advantage in traditional team deathmatch (excuse me, Team “Vanquish”) because they are built for direct combat whilst the plants are built for holding positions and staying in tight formation. So any mode where Plants aren’t on the defensive puts them at a disadvantage. You can’t even argue that Plants can camp since, just like in Battlefield, there’s a “Boss Mode” where you take a commander role and support your team. This includes an airstrike that can kill multiple enemies in a fairly large radius, that recharged frequently enough that in the Domination inspired control points mode, I was able to clear multiple zones and at least send my enemies running from the objective as bombs dropped around them.

The sides just don’t even fit. You’d think the Scientist Zombie would be a longer range support class, maybe the zombie medic even. Instead, he’s shotgun and given an ability to teleport so he can get in close for the kill. The Construction Worker zombie on the other hand is actually the demolitions expert, and the only character with some kind of sprint function, using his jackhammer, which goes on for so long it gives him an increase in speed over other classes. The Soldier Zombie is built like a fairly traditional rifleman class, but inexplicably has a rocket jump ability for getting to vantage points, despite having a relatively sporadic starting weapon. Also, by giving him a rocket jump, you open up the possibility of him exploiting vantage points since he’s the only one who can get there.

There’s a reason Team Fortress 2 gave several classes the ability to explosion jump besides their Soldier class — it kept things balanced and meant that you could still take advantage of certain sections of the level even if you weren’t playing the original class it was intended for. This also mean the maps had to be balanced to deal with new classes like the Demo Man and Engineer reaching those vantage points, but that’s a reality of any multiplayer game. You don’t just throw attributes around casually. Some of the combinations don’t even make sense. Why does the Jock Zombie have the ability to spawn pieces of cover yet have fits the role of the rocket launcher/minigun? Why doesn’t the Construction Worker deploy cover? Why not give the Jock Zombie a sprint ability that makes him go melee-only while using it? The entire class system seems to have been put together over the course of a week before they started implementing sub-classes.

Speaking of which — you do not design literally dozens of sub-classes when each team is already so awkwardly balanced. Some just change stats but others drastically shift playstyle. A Plasma Pea Pod has a charge attack instead of its regular means of firing, with a full charge producing a timed explosive. The Crossbow Soldier Zombie fires off grenades and is more agile. Instead of just taking some of these ideas to make classes that fill the gaping holes in each side, Popcap forces them onto pre-existing classes. Once again, they should have taken note from Valve’s famous hat simulator. The reason there are various builds in Team Fortress 2 is not because Valve planned every class to be rebuilt a thousand different ways. Instead, the weapon unlock and swapping was gradually included after careful initial balancing and each new item was merely a new option, not a brand new subclass. So if you preferred a two-barrel shotgun with kickback instead of a six-buck clip shotgun for your Scout, you could do that but it otherwise didn’t change who you were playing as. There were pros and cons for swapping your gear, but it didn’t require playing a completely different version of the character. You can’t do that in Garden Warfare. The Plasma Pea Pod might have the fire rate you want or it has more health, but if you don’t want any other aspect of it, you’re out of luck.

Instead of looking to one of the biggest and best examples for how to make a solid competitive shooter, it seems Popcap looked to Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer for inspiration. The reason this backfires is that Mass Effect 3‘s co-op was just that — co-op. Everything in this game was designed for a cooperative experience, but then they try to jam the same concepts into a competitive space without compensating for it in the slightest. The progression system is a simplified version of the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer as well, but removes all choice so even that benefit from the system is lost. It’s like they wanted a League of Legends system, but without having to put in the effort to offer that kind of library of characters. Not that they were at all opposed with designing the unlock system like a free to play game, with you unlocking “packs” of stickers that, after collecting five of a certain type, you can unlock a new character. So even just in unlocking the characters, you have no choice over what you are getting. It’s so many bad ideas combined into one solid mixture, it’s almost sickening to look at it in action. Without even getting into the game modes, the game is just not well designed. The balancing of classes is lackluster at best, the subclasses are excessive and frustrating to even unlock, and it all just begs the question of “Why wasn’t this JUST a co-op game?”

Now, if the game modes were at least decent, you could eek out some fun, right? Sometimes you have a game like Batman: Arkham Origins where some dumb mechanics are outweighed by a fantastic game mode (or modes) that make it worth playing online. I played every mode in Garden Warfare, and I never found that in the competitive modes. Team Vanquish is Team Deathmatch. Team Vanquish Confirmed is Kill Confirmed from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Gardens and Graveyards is Rush from Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Suburbination is Domination from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Gnome Bomb is Obliteration from Battlefield 4. Classic (which is a really ill-chosen name) is a variant for certain modes, but all it means is that you can’t use your unlocks other than basic level-ups. If you think it sounds like at least they were cherry-picking good modes from good games, you’d be right. It seemed like they’d built the game for multiple styles of play. Except, save for Gardens and Graveyards, the gameplay never really changes. Almost every mode turns into a chaotic shoot out that makes Call of Duty look like a graceful ballet. Teammates rarely try to coordinate at all, most maps are pulling double duty for both  competitive and cooperative modes so as a result they never really gel for either type of play, and sporadically, in some modes, you can spawn turret plants and NPC zombies at predefined locations.

The only mode that really seems to have been built with the series IP in mind was Gardens and Graveyards, which while bluntly taking notes from Battlefield, at least emphasizes spawning the NPC zombies and turret plants. There’s the slighest hint of an attack/defend style of play that might have helped make the asymmetric teams feel a bit more balanced as each team then fits into their roles better. Plants hold points and defend while zombies attack. the maps even have something of a more focused flow to them, and the goals require teamwork on both sides. If there’s one mode that you could argue even vaguely hints at the possibility of a good Plants vs. Zombies shooter, this is it, but it is not enough and it still is plagued by issues in the game’s balance and design. It’s just as hastily put together as the rest of the game, but it at least has a small amount of heart in it, which is more than I can say for most of the game.

The game’s cooperative mode Garden Ops does slightly better, but that’s purely by virtue of the designers having clearly wanting it to be their star mode. If the rest of the game had a few hours put into it, by proportion, the co-op mode had at least two days worth of designing. Garden Ops has you and up to four random strangers (because if you’re subjecting your friends to this game, you are a bad friend and should feel bad) can combine forces to repeatedly shoot the same zombies over and over again in different locales with slightly different positions to defend. Sometimes you’ll be defending a courtyard area with low cover. Sometimes you’ll be defending a courtyard area with high cover. Sometimes you’ll be defending a large courtyard area when things really get shaken up. The level design is highly uninspired even by zombie shooter standards; even if the actual level assets themselves do have some amount of effort put into them.

The game has atrociously dumb AI that can would sometimes spaz out and start running into walls or just standing still for several seconds before actually responding, but at least there are decent shooting mechanics and numbers of enemies, right? Wrong, in fact the game’s shooting is below average (decent button placement for a port but the aiming feels like you’re using a 360 controller even while using a mouse and keyboard), and enemies come in waves of dozens. Yes, this is a horde mode co-op game, where enemies come in waves, of DOZENS. As if every other failure of the game wasn’t underwhelming enough. To try and compensate for this particular oversight, they give every zombie obnoxiously large health bars for a co-op mode, and have the zombie classes from the competitive mode come in as “hero zombies” and “boss zombies” that can take even more damage and are really the only sort of threat the game can throw at you.

It’s at this moment the game’s Free to Play elements begin to really crop up, especially if you play Garden Ops solo. It’s entirely possible to do so, but only with the turret plants that harken back to the series roots. The problem here is two-fold: 1. THIS ISN’T A FREE TO PLAY GAME! 2. You have to randomly redeem your plants through card packs. You can’t even revive them mid-match if they go down, and regardless, if you use them, they are spent. I didn’t know this during my first match, and spent a fair number of my repeater Pea Pods, foolishly thinking that I was merely limited to a certain number of deployable plants per-round. It is the cheapest pack to unlock new plants, but it’s the principle of the d*** thing. This game retails for $39.99 USD for PC, and yet players are required to grind  like its a free to play game. In fact, why isn’t this just a free to play game? Even if you just released it free on PC like Gotham City Imposters, at least then you’d be being honest with your player base. During my time playing the game, the player pool on PC was so small due to the price tag that most of the players I met in previous matches would appear again in different modes, like we were all a herd of buffalo trying to find some nourishment in a deserted wasteland. The absurd lack of music in most modes didn’t help in this regard either, leaving battles without any sense of life.

That’s assuming the game didn’t glitch up on me, to be clear. Despite having ported the game to every major platform other than the Wii-U, the PC port has basic bugs that you’d expect in a beta build. The inability to select the Change Class button; other buttons not responding properly as well; environmental glitching, incredibly long load times even for your own character model to appear, texture pop-in; server matchmaking sending me and only two other players into a match of Gnome Bomb; long server connecting times; notable, choppy as h*** lag; and more. The game is full of a galore of technical issues on top of being little more than a soulless cash-in on an idea that actually could have easily been decent. The variety of zombies and plants left plenty of room for class variety and varied combat roles, the universe is whacky enough to support all sorts of game times, and the developer should be more than experienced enough to know and understand the importance of proper balancing. This could have been a fantastic game, and maybe some day someone will look at it the idea and give it the proper time and effort it needs, but Popcap certainly didn’t. Maybe EA rushed them to get it out in time for the Xbox One launch window, maybe Popcap’s designers have never played a good competitive shooter before — I don’t know, all I can do is tell you to stay away from this game.

As I said at the beginning of this review, Garden Warfare is a teachable moment. It’s not that you shouldn’t try to take your IP into new genres  and directions, or that you shouldn’t shake up the formula. No, what should be learned from this is actually understanding what you are actually doing with a given genre in the multiplayer space. By looking purely to games like Mass Effect 3, the competitive elements suffered. By failing to even implement basic features like AI and optimize for numerous enemies on screen, the co-op elements suffered. By failing to properly port the game to PC and designing it like a free to play title, the entire game suffered. By charging forty dollars for the game, everyone who took a leap of faith on this title suffered. I truly feel sorry for those who wasted their time with this one, and hope I’ve helped you avoid making a similar mistake. It’s rare that in the same year, I encounter two games of a quality standard so bad I wish I could forget them, but Garden Warfare sits alongside Warface as one of the worst games of 2014. Get out the lawn mower, do what must be done, and never look back.

What Does Your Purchase Net You?

The game is retailing for anywhere between $19.99 to $39.99. There’s no reason you should pay more than maybe $4.99, and even then, you could rent a movie instead. Or just light the dollars on fire — that’d still be a better use than buying this game.

Summary

A truly promising premise is wasted on sub-par execution and a clear lack of creative drive. Despite all its quirky advertising and goofy graphics, Garden Warfare is anything but a happy experience. Approach at your own risk, to both your sanity and wallet.

Moment of Artistry

This may be the first game in a while where there never was one. That’s actually kind of unsettling. It’s just -that- soulless.

Pros

+Some of the models and level assets look decent

+ Gardens and Graveyards at least tries to be a standout mode

Cons

–  Excessive, F2P level grinding

– Numerous bugs and glitches

– Lackluster matchmaking

– Amateurish balancing

– Blatant F2P elements in a non F2P game

– An odd lack of soundtrack

– Unsatisfying gunplay

2/10

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare was developed by Popcap and published by Electronic Arts. It is available on PC (Origin), PS3, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.

This was a review was conducted with a consumer copy of the PC version acquired by the reviewer.