Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted
Sun pays for plants, and plants hold the lanes. Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted rebuilds PopCap's 2009 lane-based tower defense game in widescreen HD without changing that loop, then adds local two-player modes and new Adventure variants around it.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Every level is a small puzzle with a fixed budget: a limited number of seed slots, a slow trickle of sun and several lanes to cover. Which zombie types turn up in a stage decides which packets deserve a slot, and that choice shapes how the whole level plays out.
- Cloudy Day and Rest in Peace give returning players a harder route through Adventure.
- A speed-up button pushes the game to as much as 2.5x for slow waves; high contrast and slower game speeds are there for players who need the opposite.
Story and Lore
Zombies are coming for the brains of whoever lives in the house, and the lawn is all that stands between them. The player is that resident. The speaking role goes to Crazy Dave, the next-door neighbor with a cooking pot on his head. His dialogue arrives as on-screen text in a gibberish of his own, he introduces the mini-games and bonus levels, and once his car keys turn up he runs a shop from the car itself.
Adventure Mode moves the siege from the front lawn through the backyard and its swimming pool up to the roof. The last fight is a night battle against Dr. Zomboss, the leader of the zombies, who operates from a giant Zombot machine. During that level a Bungee Zombie carries Dave off, just before he can reveal the boss's weakness.
Replanted adds a layer of franchise history that the 2009 release did not have. The Almanac now includes an Art and Concept Library with development and pre-production art, part of it created after the original game came out.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Sun is the only currency inside a level. It falls from the sky on daytime stages and comes from sun-producing plants such as the sunflower, and every seed packet has a sun cost plus a recharge delay before the next copy can be planted. Zombies walk down the lanes toward the house, and a lawn mower parked at the end of each lane works as a last line of defense. Adventure is made of fifty levels in five stages, and each stage rewrites the planting rules:
- Day is the plain front lawn, five lanes wide.
- Graves appear on the lawn at Night, and mushroom plants cost less.
- The Pool stage moves to the backyard and adds a sixth lane; two lanes are water, and land plants can stand there only on a Lily Pad.
- Fog hides the right side of the screen until a Plantern lights it up or a Blover blows it away.
- On the Roof, every plant needs a Flower Pot to stand on.
Coins from defeated zombies are spent in Crazy Dave's shop on upgrade plants and extra seed slots. Outside Adventure, the mini-games unlock as the campaign advances and bend the rules in different ways: Wall-Nut Bowling rolls nuts down the lanes, and ZomBotany swaps in plant-zombie hybrids. Puzzle mode holds Vasebreaker, where vases hide plants, zombies or sun, and I, Zombie, which hands the zombie side to the player. Survival is measured in flags, five for a normal round and ten for a hard one, and Endless versions of several stages were added after launch. The Tree of Wisdom, grown in the Zen Garden, also carries Replanted's toggles for visual options.
The new modes sit inside Adventure. Cloudy Day levels let storm clouds block sun production and put sun plants to sleep; while the clouds are out, seed packets cost less and recharge faster, and sun has to be banked ahead of time. Rest in Peace is an optional one-life toggle: a lost level sends the run back to the start. Bonus Levels are off-linear mini-games modeled on the Limbo page of the 2009 PC build, and a level selector allows any Adventure level to be replayed.
In co-op two players share a lawn and each plants from a selection of their own, and in versus one player plants while the other controls the zombies.
Plants and Zombies
Replanted keeps the original roster of 49 plants, Imitater included, which falls into a handful of jobs:
- Sunflower and its upgrade, Twin Sunflower, pay for everything else; Sun-shroom yields less sun but earlier.
- Shooters start at the Peashooter and Repeater and extend to the Snow Pea, which slows zombies, and the Cactus, which hits air and ground targets.
- Cherry Bomb blasts the zombies around it, Jalapeno clears a full lane and Potato Mine has to arm before it detonates.
- Cabbage-pult, Kernel-pult and Melon-pult lob produce at the lanes, and two Kernel-pults can be upgraded into the Cob Cannon.
- Walls and tools: Wall-nut, Tall-nut and Pumpkin soak up damage, Garlic diverts zombies into other lanes, Magnet-shroom pulls metal gear off them, and Hypno-shroom turns one zombie against its own side.
Eight of the plants are upgrades, Gatling Pea and Winter Melon among them. The zombies number 26 types, five per stage plus Dr. Zomboss. Daytime lawns feature the Flag Zombie, Conehead, Pole Vaulting and Buckethead Zombies; at night the Newspaper, Screen Door, Football and Dancing Zombies take over, the last of them with a Backup Dancer. The Pool adds Ducky Tube, Snorkel and Dolphin Rider Zombies along with the Zomboni and the Zombie Bobsled Team. Fog is home to Jack-in-the-Box, Balloon, Digger, Pogo and Yeti Zombies, and the Roof brings in the Bungee, Ladder and Catapult Zombies, the Gargantuar and the Imp.
Editions
Replanted ships as a single standard release.