It took me a few days to wrap my head around the thought of PopCap Games spinning the Plants vs. Zombies franchise off into a multiplayer shooter. How do you take a casual 2D tower defense game and morph it into a fully 3D third-person action game? That can’t possibly work, can it?
Turns out, the idea’s so crazy it might just work after all. As I’ve read and watched more about Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, the more I’ve started to see the light: This is a pretty genius idea.
The game appears to strike a great balance between the modern multiplayer shooter design of games like Battlefield and Call of Duty and PvZ‘s quirky brand of humor and tower defense, with Frostbite 3 tech adding a gorgeous next-gen sparkle to the familiar suburban world populated by undead brain eaters and botanical armies. Players will be able to choose their faction and class in “Gardens vs. Graveyards” 24-player competitive modes or team up in a 4-player online co-op mode to fend off zombie attackers across more than 10 unique maps. Hundreds of items will also offer robust character customization options.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will be out in spring 2014 on Xbox One and Xbox 360. The game will be exclusive to Xbox consoles at launch, but don’t worry, releases are planned for PC and other platforms down the road.
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Oh, my god this could be fun. It’s great to see the franchise, um, sprouting in some new directions.
ARConklin I know, right? When I first saw the reveal, my first thought was: “Does every franchise really need to turn into a multiplayer shooter?” But watching the dev diary really won me over. The game looks like it really does a great job of maintaining the look and feel of a PvZ game, only from a different point of view.
VGBMatt ARConklin The Dev Diary definitely makes me think this game will be fun