Here’s what I’m getting at: Consumers of casual games need be more suspicious than ever in this era of frequent and sometimes drastic updates to popular games.Įven the best efforts of reviewers can’t be relied upon to tell the whole story about a particular game – especially when it comes to free-to-play releases in which changes to play often have as much to do with driving revenue as they do enhancing the player’s experience.Īs for Plants vs Zombies 2, it’s still a ton of fun. However, the version of the game consumers ended up experiencing at launch was hard enough that many probably did end up feeling the need to drop a few dollars to progress. I reported that you’d likely never feel compelled to spend cash in Plants vs Zombies 2, but that you had the ability to do so to get quicker access to content that interested you. The changes made between the pre-release and launch versions of the game felt deceitful to me, especially given the franchise’s switch to a free-to-play with in-app purchases business model. It took considerably more time and effort to finish the game without using power-ups the second time through. The overall difficulty had grown slightly, and the number of keys required to unlock new worlds had been ratcheted up.
![plants vs zombies game plants vs zombies game](https://cdn.mobilesyrup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/plants-vs-zombies.jpg)
However, when I played through the consumer version that launched the following week I was dismayed to see that it didn’t match up with the pre-release version I’d reviewed. (I viewed these powers as cheating a means of clearing levels one couldn’t be bothered to beat with plants alone.)
![plants vs zombies game plants vs zombies game](https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/77a4cc72-96d0-11e6-a85f-00163ed833e7/3355536605/plants-v-zombies-screenshot.jpg)
In my review I noted that I finished the entire game without using any of the new special power-ups – like the now-replaced Power Pinch mentioned above – that let you quickly clear the screen of zombies with flicks and slides. I played a version supplied to me by EA for review purposes.
![plants vs zombies game plants vs zombies game](https://pythonawesome.com/content/images/2019/12/demo2.jpg)
My first play-through took place about a week before the game launched in North America last August. Article contentĪnd I’m especially cynical about Plants vs Zombies 2 given my personal history with it. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.