Monday, October 08, 2018

#OpinionatedOctober - Plants vs. Zombies 2

October 8
Plants Vs. Zombies 2
Mobile Game

Do you ever have those games that you're not sure you even like and yet you're still playing them for some reason? Yeah, most mobile games end up like that for me, and PvZ2 is no different. I loved the first full Plants Vs. Zombies game, but this second one designed specifically for mobile devices is just a microtransaction hellscape, like you'd expect. There's a ton of super useful plants from the original game you can't get without paying $5 _each_ for them, and it's ridiculous. The game itself also gets to a point where you actually just can't beat it without "leveling up" plants which takes forever if you don't spend cash. So far I've managed not to spend any money on it, but it's been difficult, at this point I basically can only play the daily special level because everything else is too hard.

That's how they keep me playing incidentally, the daily special level. And this really poorly implemented PvP thing called "Battlez" that for some reason I've gotten sucked into actually trying to be vaguely competitive in. The daily levels are fine, they're usually relatively easy and kind of fun. Battlez are the same map for a week at a time, and they're often so hard that the only reason you're not losing is there's no real "losing" in Battlez, you just play for two minutes and whoever has the higher score wins. The level I played today was ridiculous, I can't figure out how in the world you're supposed to really get anywhere with it, and even if you can't get your brains eaten, it gets really disheartening to be losing so badly but you can't quit because you'll lose your rank on the leaderboard.

If you haven't played PvZ2, then don't. Don't bother downloading it. It also runs like junk on all my mobile devices, but I can't make it work on my Android emulator so that I can actually play it in a way that's more enjoyable.

Two detached thumbs way down.