Plants vs Zombies HD review

In recent years, Zombie films have gone through something of a renaissance and accordingly, there’s been a plethora of games to coincide with this surge in popularity.

One of which is the rather bizarrely named Plants Vs. Zombies HD, which originally came out to great acclaim on the iPhone, but has now finally arrived on Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad.

So how does Plants Vs. Zombies HD measure up on the iPad’s bigger and better screen?

Well, for those not familiar with the Plants Vs. Zombies franchise, the basic premise is this: you are tasked with defending your home from waves of zombies.

To protect your home, you must grow projectile spewing plants to subdue and eventually destroy the waves of zombies. Obviously, the more plants you grow, the better your chances are of completing the level.

However, to grow plants, you have to first plant sunflowers, which after a short period of time yield little suns that earn you 25 points. You have to build up your arsenal of projectile spewing plants gradually – and each killer plant costs 100 points.

On the first level, you have one strip of grass in your garden, so you can only grow one sunflower.

Obviously, this limits the amount of killer plants you can grow, but seeing as the zombies – for some reason – only like to walk on grass, it doesn’t really matter and the first level is an absolute breeze.

As the levels progress, your garden grows in size from one strip to five strips. Once your garden is five strips deep, you have, potentially, 5 rows of zombies to deal with at anyone time – however, there numbers pick up drastically as you progress.

Therefore, planting as many sunflowers as you can is vital in the early stages so you can quickly acquire the points to grow at least five rows of killer plants to protect your home.

As you progress through the game you acquire new tools and weapons, such as walnuts, which can be used to hold off the zombies for a minute or so and exploding cherries, which can destroy three zombies at once – all of which become intrinsically useful as the number of zombies increase.

You enemies, the zombies, come in a variety of styles: standard slow moving zombies, some with armour, such as a traffic cone or a bucket, or fast moving ones that can leap over obstacles and really become a pain.

Once the number of zombies start to increase, Plants Vs Zombies becomes a game of space and time management.

If the Zombies break through your plants, you have one last line of defence – a lawnmower, which will dispatch the intruding Zombie immediately.

However, once it has gone, you’d better get some killer plants to replace it or you’ll be left wide-open.

On first impressions, we weren’t immediately taken with the game, which is essentially a tower defence-style game with a twist.

However, after a few goes, we really started to enjoy it. The graphics are very sharp and the animation, particularly of the zombies, is top-notch.

At the beginning, you may find the game play a little remedial as it starts off very simple. This doesn’t last for long though and before you know it you’ll completely immersed in the game – and believe us, once it starts getting harder, it really doesn’t let up.

There’s also enough diversification in the gameplay to keep you interested over a long period of time – such as walnut bowling.

Couple this with the cool graphics and animation, and you have yourself a decent game.

With Plants Vs Zombies HD, we started out as cynics but were eventually converted by the game’s charm – it has everything you could ever want from a tower defence game.

And as an added bonus, it runs a lot smoother and looks a hell of a lot better on the iPad.

If you have an iPad, make sure you check this game out.

Plants vs. Zombies info

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Platform: iPad

Category: Games & Entertainment

Price: $9.99

Publisher: PopCap Games

Website/Demo: PopCap Games

Download Plants Vs Zombies for iPad from