16 years ago, my wife and I holed up and played the original Plants vs. Zombies for days on end. Creator George Fan and his team really hit a homerun with this one, and managed to marry strategy and quirkiness in one of the most fun tower defense games ever made. Now, all these years later, we have a remaster, Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted.
The good news is that the core of the original was mostly untouched. However, there’s a roughness to Replanted that ideally will be shored up as quickly as possible.
PVZ’s Gameplay Loop Is Fantastic
I Joyfully Beat The Game Again
If you’ve never played Plants vs. Zombies before, think of it like a cartoonish tower defense with a ton of style and charm. You play as the plants, and with the help of sunflowers (and other resource-generating plants later on), you’ll pick up sun, which is used as a currency to create offensive and defensive plants. The team at PopCap managed to craft a wonderful, interactive onboarding experience, allowing even complete newcomers to the genre to pick it up in minutes.
In a wave-based format, different zombies will try to enter your home to eat your brains, and it’s your job to drop plants on a grid to stop them. As you progress, plants get more and more complicated, as do the levels and the zombies themselves. PopCap is constantly throwing curveballs your way to keep you on your toes, but it rarely feels cheap and unearned, as the pacing is immaculate.
The reward loop is also critical, as you’re reliably earning more plants to mix up your strategy and dealing with new concepts. You start in a standard backyard battlefield, then will slowly move into night duels (which require the use of mushrooms), a battle for your pool, and even your (somewhat gigantic) rooftop.
Before long, you’ll unlock a shop where you can buy new plants, more slots to place said plants, and even accessories or consumables for extra modes, including a Zen Garden. For a budget game, there’s a ton of content to dig into and discover.
So what’s new in Replanted? The remaster includes a “cloudy day mode,” which limits your access to sunlight (and thus impacts the plants you’ve picked), as well as “rest in peace/RIP” mode, which is a permadeath/hardcore run that unlocks after you clear the campaign. Bonus levels are in as well, which feel like a great way to preserve old content that never actually made it into the full version of the original.
Local co-op and PVP (versus) return, with mixed results. Co-op in particular is very buggy on Xbox, and PVP’s balance is a bit off, so don’t expect a deep experience. No new plants or campaign levels are included.
Small Bugs Add Up
Hopefully, A Patch Is In Order
In my experience playing through Replanted, I encountered several visual and gameplay bugs, some of which impeded progress and temporarily shut down game sessions. Primarily, co-op in general seems to be bugged at the moment. I played through almost the entire campaign with family, and we noticed constant issues after the second player joined in.
For one, a minigame just plain didn’t work properly and stalled out after we’d cleared it and heard the victory music. After quitting the game, returning, and finishing it solo, we could progress properly. Sometimes the game also wouldn’t register that the second player was actually in the game, and their cursor would disappear.
Other visual bugs added up, such as menu screen indicators not registering, and small issues like flames appearing when watering plants in Zen Garden mode. We also experienced a cutscene bug where the background was washed out. Given that I didn’t experience any of these in the original game, seeing them pop up in a remaster over a decade later wasn’t the best feeling.
Plants Vs. Zombies Is A Classic
The Original Game Still Holds Up
Ideally, EA and PopCap clean up some of the bugs and fully preserve this classic for another generation. In fact, after everything is squeaky clean here, it would be fantastic to see EA greenlight a premium remaster of Plants vs. Zombies 2, without the iffy microtransactions and mobile currency schemes.
Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted has some rough edges, but the core gameplay loop still works like a charm 16 years later. It’s a testament to how talented the original team was, and how very little needed to be changed to reintroduce this gem to the world.
- Released
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October 23, 2025
- ESRB
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Everyone / Mild Blood, Fantasy Violence, Simulated Gambling
- Developer(s)
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PopCap Games, The Lost Pixels
- Multiplayer
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Local Multiplayer, Local Co-Op
- Classic PVZ gameplay is still satisfying
- Lots of content for the price
- A few bonuses in Replanted add to the allure
- Many minor bugs that add up
- More could have been done with the visuals and audio
