Hands-on with Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2

Features

January 18, 2016

Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 - Hands-on Preview

The Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 beta took place this past weekend, and it was filled to the brim with exciting new content, all of which has us eagerly awaiting its full release on February 26th, 2016.

Your first stop during the beta is Backyard Battleground, the hub area players use to select the various game modes and maps, a big departure from the menus of the original Garden Warfare.

The Backyard Battleground is affected by your chosen team, having you navigate Crazy Dave’s tree house if you’re a part of the flora militia, or Dr Zomboss’ mansion courtyard for their brain-munching opponents.

This hub area is also where you’ll invite up to three players to join you, meet up with friends or choose your preferred plant or zombie. Once selected, it’s off to play “Raise the Flag of Power”, a mode hosted by the hub arena itself.

Whether online or off, the mode Raise the Flag of Power mode sees either Crazy Dave or Dr Zomboss sending waves of plants or zombies at you. They increase in difficulty as the level progresses, and it’s up to you to keep them at bay – your flag of power rising as you do.

Fortunately, while the enemies do get tougher over time, you’re granted reinforcements, in the form of AI controlled allies, via crate drops.

From what I can see, Raise the Flag of Power Mode seems to be the best way to grind for XP, as coins and gems are dropped each time your overcome a wave.

These are vital to the player if you wish to purchase new card packs. Much like the original Garden Warfare, card packs contain new cosmetic items and characters.

For those of you unsure about the game at large, staying in the backyard and playing Raise the Flag of Power with a few friends is a great training ground for the PvP games to come.

As the original Garden Warfare was known for its over-the-top characters, expect a wider range of them this time around, and a bunch more besides. In fact, each faction has three new characters, on top of the original character classes which return to Garden Warfare 2.

For the plants, there’s Rose, Citron and Kernel Corn; and Imp, Captain Deadbeard and Super Brainz for the zombies. Each of these new characters sports their own strengths and weakness, as you might imagine.

Rose, for one, has bullets that track enemies as long as your reticule stays on them, but lacks any form of defence. Imp is an extremely weak character at first sight, but he can turn into a mechanical robot – be it a massive traffic cone, robot prawn or the pre-order exclusive Z7-Mech.

Alternatively, Super Brainz is a melee character with a massive health pool and intimidating melee attacks. Citron, on the other hand, is a futuristic orange that can roll into a ball and bash through enemies like a bowling ball through pins.

Each character is great to play with, but some will grab you better than others. Chomper, for example, is my least favourite, but the friends I played through the beta with love him.

For the old dogs, there are multiple forms of each of the old characters. As an example, I unlocked phantom Cactus whose shots did increasingly more damage as my clip’s ammo count decreased.

There is also a new Chomper that can shoot from a distance, as well as a vampire sunflower who refills her health as she deals damage to enemies.

It’s a nice addition, certainly, but the beta showed that quite a few of these character varieties were either underwhelming or seriously overpowered. That’s going to need to be addressed.

When it comes to the game’s main attraction, PvP, Garden Warfare 2 is still over-the-top and an absolute riot.

During the beta, we got a taste of a number of game modes, but Gardens and Graveyards in particular was available throughout the beta period.

The mode gave us a choice of two maps, a theme park that sported attractions dedicated to a number of historically significant periods, all of which were Plants vs. Zombies themed of course.

A second map, took use to the moon, complete with noticeably weaker gravity. That means higher jumps, slightly more fluid-like controls and it offered a nice bit of variety to the whole occasion as a result, forcing players to accommodate for their new environment.

Beyond that, each day of the beta saw a different additional PvP mode: Team Vanquish, Gnome Bomb and Vanquish Confirmed. All of them were entertaining, and we can’t wait to dive into what the retail release has to offer.

Besides the usual PvP, Garden Warfare 2 promises a solid single player or co-op game mode, which was locked during the beta.

We have no idea what we’re in for, and we hope it offers some sort of story experience because the story certainly has a lot of potential.

We know that the game will also offer daily as well as weekly missions, available through a billboard in the hub area.

Daily missions will grant you XP multipliers that stack over time. This means that any XP you earn on certain characters will be multiplied by the amount of missions you have completed.

There seems to be so much more on offer that was not available on the beta, but with just over a month left until the game releases, the beta was a chunk of the game that really showed its class.

I enjoyed every moment of the beta, from the characters to the expansive and creative maps.

I cannot wait for the final release of the game. Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 releases on February 26th, on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.