Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville Review

"Garden Warfare Expanded"

Multiplayer

October 20, 2019 at 6:41pm
By Jason Stettner

This is a multiplayer focused shooter that’s the third entry in the Garden Warfare series. It drops that subtitle in favor of Battle for Neighborville, but that works fine here. In this entry we’re given an expanded world, with more content than ever before.

There’s a more in-depth sort of solo content experience, and more ways to enjoy the multiplayer. The solo type content allows you to visit three large hub areas in order to finish a series of missions.

Despite being more solo in nature you can team up with up to three friends in Weirding Woods, Mount Steep or Neighborville Town Centre. These are alright, featuring some decent length and a fair selection of things to accomplish. If that’s not enough hub wise, there’s a large scale amusement park area you can battle within. You can take on the role of either the plants or zombies factions in this spot for battle. Each of the respective factions also has their own base of operations.

This spot allows you to enter competitive multiplayer, gather new customization options and to generally play around. A friendly sunflower gives you guidance to learn about the place when you first enter it. The multiplayer here is split into multiple modes, some of these are competitive in nature whereas one is cooperative. The coop mode is horde based where you work in a small squad to build little defending helpers depending on your faction.

These little things will assist you in protecting a special position, as will your squad. This is drop-in/drop-out in style. In general, if you want to play with another person there’s two player local splitscreen. The multiplayer features up to twenty four players in lobbies with options of how to play. You can experience large scale objective play, or smaller more intimate vanquishing matches.

There’s a grab bag for objectives as well as minor little events that pop-up over time. There really is a lot to do in this one, greatly expanded in terms of scope in comparison to the previous two Garden Warfare entries. It doesn’t necessarily do anything too wildly new with what’s available, but does deliver more with a greater expansion upon the initial concept.

Gameplay

They really have fine tuned and upgraded this one in multiple ways. The twenty character classes each bring something different to the table with an even split between the plants and zombies teams. Each character has unique abilities, and perk options that can be chosen between. There’s a set amount allowed, and you choose which ones you want to use. You level up the classes, prestige them and then gain access to more perk choices. The characters each have customization options that you can grab from a special in-game coin machine.

It seemed fair for unlocking, yet I do miss the card pack style as I felt I was getting more out of it. They have some funky designs, and the game itself also looks far better than ever before. There’s a sense of maturity to the animated cartoon style the franchise is known for. I loved this look as it bordered on realistic while still retaining that unique look. The combat felt great, and it was neat to use all of the various character abilities as I switched between the classes present.

The maps are well developed, and there’s a good selection of them. They offer multiple lanes for travelling around and neat setups with a sense of verticality. For the most part you’re dealing with objectives along the map, with multiple areas and unique biomes to work within. Sometimes the objectives have you pushing something along, other times you’re capturing a spot and you might even end up shooting a very large structure to destroy it. Other modes are different in their goals, but I play the most of the key large scale battle mode as I find that the most exciting.

The Conclusion

Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville is a great addition to this friendly shooter franchise that expands the scope of the series further than ever before. It brings a number of modes whether you want something competitive, cooperative or perhaps for yourself. There’s an expansion to every element of the experience, and this is a great primer for the Battlefield series.

I’ve always felt it was a nice setup for that. I’ve always enjoyed this Garden Warfare series, and it’s great to see a third release within it. It may have dropped that subtitle, but it really is from that line of games. Play this cooperatively in splitscreen, or online as well. There’s just a lot of content to this and it’s a ton of fun to play.

They really did a good job on this one, feels like a proper release within this franchise. They don’t necessarily change things up too much, but keep on building what makes this so great to play. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience, look forward to seeing it hopefully grow post-launch.

Read our Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair Review
View our Plants vs Zombies Hub

Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by 47

Rating Overall: 8.6