Saturday Casual Gaming 302: Merge Flowers vs Zombies

In Which I May Have Been Duped

If, like me, you've been a PC gamer most of your life, you've likely come across a game called Plants Vs Zombies, a strategic tower defense game by PopCap. If you've played it, you'll know it's both ridiculous and addictive, so imagine if you saw something that had a shockingly similar name but a slightly different gameplay style on Google Play for free? You'd probably check it out, right?

Well, I did.

I legit thought it was an offshoot for about... five minutes.

Similar style to Plants vs Zombies, too...

Within a few minutes, I realized that, despite the cosmetic similarities, and the fact that both games have you defending your home from hordes of the undead using only horticulture, they're not actually from the same company.

For one, Crazy Dave never shows up, and he's maybe the best part of Plants Vs Zombies, so I was very disappoint.

Still, Merge Flowers vs Zombies is a pretty decent game, and it's forgiving enough that I can play it distracted.

It's also bananas

You have a lawn with limited space. You know how to instantly crossbreed two plants to make a new kind of plant. You have a ton of ads to watch for bonuses and extra plants.

Yeah, this game is basically just a blatant cash-grab. As fun as it is, it has a new ad for you to watch every five seconds (maximum!) and you can't get too far too quickly without sinking in hours watching the same six ads over and over and over and over and over.... and over again.

You can ignore the ads, of course, and just wait for new plants to auto-spawn, but that takes a lot longer than watching a 15-30 second ad.

It's merge-style gameplay, so you drag and drop a plant on top of its double (if you have one) on your board to upgrade it to the next level of plant. Different plants have different abilities (massive damage, freezing, slowing, poison, etc). The more merges you make the more damage your plants do, and so on and so forth. It's an incredibly basic game with no surprises.

The lack of surprises is this game's strength - you don't have to do some clever combination of things to unlock the next part of the game, it's straightforward and tells you what you need to do to win from the very beginning. When you fail a level, you still get a (small) reward for trying. There are drones carrying extra plants that you can click on and watch an ad to get those plants on your grid (they seem to buffer, so if you're out of room but want the extra plants, go for it). The hordes of zombies are consistent and simple.

Basically, this is an excellent waiting-room or airport game - something to play if you've got time but need your attention elsewhere.

As a standalone "I want to play video games" kind of game, however, it's not quite like Plants vs Zombies, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC