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Ever heard of a little game called Bejeweled? A legendary little time-sink that pretty much started an onslaught of switch-two-to-connect-three-games. Well, the folks who made that – PopCap have released their newest “big” game, with the very promising title Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ). I heard the reviews (for example, on Rev3:s Co-Op) and I have to be perfectly honest – I didn’t have high hopes. PvZ is a kind of weird mix between a tower defense and a real-time strategy game, neither one being a genre I particularly enjoy…

But you can download the game (both Mac and PC!) for free from PopCap:s website, and play it for 60 minutes for free – which I did. Sixty minutes later I grabbed my credit card and paid the twenty American bucks for it… It’s not that it’s that good, but much like Bejeweled – it’s addictive.

So what’s it all about, then? Well, zombies are attacking your house and you need to defend yourself. With plants! It feels a bit like some strange form of collectible card game, as you have different kinds of plants to use. In the beginning you only have two kinds, but for (almost) every level you complete you acquire a new kind of plant to use, each with a special ability. There are different kinds of zombies as well, and some plants are better equipped to handle some zombies.

The in-game currency is sun, which you collect from the sky (during day-time levels) and from sunflowers, which you need to plant. The more sunflowers you have, the more sun you acquire, but every sunflower takes up a spot from an attacking flower, such as a pea-shooter, which naturally shoots peas at zombies. And of course, zombies don’t like peas, but you all knew that? There are potato mines, which explode in a big SPUDOW! There are, in total, 42 different kinds of plants to unlock and try, but you are only allowed a limited amount of them for each level. At the start of the level, you get to see the yard and what kinds of zombies will be attacking you, and then you have to choose six kinds of plants to use in your defense (more slots are available to purchase later on in the game), so you might have to choose between using those Cherry bombs or Wall-nuts…

The zombies all walk in a straight line towards the house. Normal garden-variety zombies walk slowly, Cone-head zombies have found traffic cones to put on their heads offering a little better protection, pole-vaulting zombies carry poles to leap over the first plant they encounter, newspaper zombies carry a paper which gets destroyed from a few shots of a pea-shooter. When this happens, they get really, really mad because they were very close to finishing their Sudoku puzzle – so they start running. All in all there are 26 different kinds of zombies… If a zombie-dude reaches a plant alive (well, dead, but not… uhm… dead again) they start munching on the plant eating it up. If they reach the house you lose the game. There is a last line of defense, being the lawnmower but that’s a one-time savior…

So the game feels like a card-game, plays like a real-time strategy game and works like a tower defense game. Why do I like it then? Unlike most RTS:s the whole game is on screen all the time, so you don’t have to scroll around like you’re high on ultra-caffeine all the time. The levels are short so there’s always time for “one more level”, and the humor – ah, the humor. When you click the “HELP“-button in the main menu, you get a hand-written note which says: “When the zombies arrive, just sit back and do nothing to win the game. (Written by the zombies)“. Your friendly next-door neighbor Crazy-Dave shows up in between levels with a pot on his head (latest in haute-couture!) to ramble on about nothing at all.

Go ahead, download the freebie trial game, I dare you!