So back in 2009 the original Plants vs Zombies had released. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a tower defense game where you use plants to defend yourself against Dr Zomboss and his horde of goofy zombies. The game was a giant hit, selling a ton of copies and getting great reviews.

Fast forward 5 years and EA released the topic of today’s viewer requested game review: Plants vs Zombies, Garden Warfare. If you’ve watched my review of the 3rd game in the series, Battle for Neighborhville, then you probably know what to expect: a third person shooter with lots of multiplayer modes and customization that brings a whole new way to enjoy Plants vs Zombies.

I hadn’t given the game a shot until back at Playstation Experience on December 6th of 2014, when Peter Moore was on stage announcing that Need for Speed: Most Wanted on Vita, Mirror’s Edge on PS3, and Garden Warfare were available to download for free. Being the cheapskate I am, I was more than happy to turn on all 3 consoles and get to downloading. Turns out I didn’t like 2 of those 3 games (I thought Mirror’s Edge was crap that made me barfy from watching it, sorry) and you can take a wild guess at which one got a lot of hours put into it.

Having uninstalled it a few years back to save hard drive space for games like Catlateral Damage and Surgeon Simulator, and also because I already had Garden Warfare 2 day one, I went ahead and popped it back in to see what’s changed and if I’d still enjoy it like I do Battle for Neighborville. I also wanted to see if it still had any sort of online population left. And you know what? I actually kinda like it more in some ways. Now before you poop on me for saying that, let me explain so you’ll at least have the right context. Ya savages.

I’m not a big “hub” guy. Like having the central location where you have to walk around to get everywhere? I’ve never needed that to feel more immersed and half the time I’m too stupid to figure out where I’m going. I’m just being honest. I can understand why people would like it, though, but personally I’m fine just flipping through a couple menus to hop into a match. So the fact that Garden Warfare 1 doesn’t have that doesn’t feel like something is missing, where Garden Warfare 2 and Battle for Neighborville have both got it to varying degrees.

So you’ve got your main menu where you can hop into Garden Ops, then you’ve got your mulitplayer menu for playing online matches, your character menus that lets you customize your 8 classes to your liking with all sorts of hilarious gear, and then you can buy stickers and view the sticker book. Also a side note – if you don’t have either playstation plus or xbox live, you’re not even allowed to cycle through menus. It’ll just tell you to buy the online sub for your console and kick you to each one’s respective purchase screen. Which realistically if you’re trying to play a game where 80% of it is online then you should have one regardless, but it’s still a little weird to not even be able to look at characters you’ve purchased if your sub has lapsed.

I actually liked getting sticker packs despite hating loot boxes and microtransactions in general. Filling out the stickerbook and getting hints at what I was missing was fun to do and kept me playing.

And speaking of characters – holy cow do I love the different customizable classes in this. So compared to the next couple games in the series you’re only at 4 classes in this one, but there’s lots of different versions of them and they not only look different but play differently as well. You want to make your zombie soldier shoot fire arrows instead of his machine gun? You just have to unlock it. How about making your scientist shoot gold coins or change his teleport? Done. This is something I sorely miss in Battle for Neighborville that’s only partially covered by the perks system in it, and I hope that they’re going to add it eventually because as much as I’ve played that game, it ain’t there. Also worth mentioning – I totally forgot that there were Chee-tos themed costumes in this game, so if you ever wanted your zombie or chomper to look like a crazy Chest Cheetah, then your dreams have come true. It’s all the fun of Cheetos without the orange-stained fingertips and whatever’s in them we don’t know about that’ll probably give us cancer in 30 years.

Your multiplayer modes are your typical team deathmatch and king of the hill versions, along with gnome bomb and also one like capture the flag where you’re trying to pilfer tacos. Let me tell you how surprised I was that over 5 years later, I was able to hop into online matches almost immediately. Now they weren’t fully populated matches, but there were enough people that I still had fun. Also the ending animations are really cute and have a ton of personality.

Another thing I miss that didn’t carry over into Neighborville is the stickerbook. I actually liked getting sticker packs despite hating loot boxes and microtransactions in general. Filling out the stickerbook and getting hints at what I was missing was fun to do and kept me playing.

So yeah, Battle for Neighborville definitely has more content and I can spend hours in the single player zones, but Garden Warfare does have some elements to it that didn’t carry over that I miss like the weapon changes and stickers. Put those in and Neighborville would be the most complete and fun experience in the series.