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Plants vs. Zombies has been my latest addiction, thanks to a coworker who let me try it out on his shiny new iPad. I promptly bought and downloaded it to my iPod Touch and beat it within a week.
In Plants vs. Zombies, your goal is to protect your home from waves of zombie attacks by planting pea-shooting plants and other varieties in your lawn as defense. Each level brings on new zombies and new plants, as well as new environmental challenges. It's a casual game with several hours of challenge, humorous story, and fun.
I think Plants vs. Zombies brings up a valid point about casual game design. People tend to think that casual means good = simple rules, short gameplay, no story and bad = complex rules, long-term achievements, and presence of plot. Plants vs. Zombies is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) kind of game, a tower defense game, with tons of rules and many pieces to set on the field. However their approach to RTS is what makes all the difference.
For one, in terms of duration of play, game sessions don't last more than 10 minutes. The entire game can last a few hours but the adventure gameplay is broken down in to distinctive levels, with clear indication of when the end will arrive to each wave.
There is also a constant stream of achievements to be had, not just including the trophies in the main menus page (which I am now trying to achieve). Each time you beat a level, you are given a gift, either a note from the zombies or a new type of plant to use. Sometimes it's just money to spend in the game store too. Planting sunflowers gifts you sun, which you need to plant more plants. Some zombies give you coins if you kill them. That happy achievement bug in your head lights up at all this stimulus.
I think what Plants vs. Zombies does best is the gradual education to its game rules. It combines achievement with rule sets. Each time you beat a level, if gives you new rules as a reward. There's the new zombie you have to face, the new environment, and the new plant in your arsenal. It's a complex list of elements that the designers event felt the need to add an almanac in the game. But even so, because of the gradual introduction of these elements, casual players have no problems retaining all that information.
So after all that adventure gameplay? There's an endless survival mode, which is more typical to the RTS games than the adventure mode. By this point, the casual player is familiar with all the rules so such a long-term Tower Defense game is perfectly okay.
Plants vs Zombies is an RTS game for casual players, and I think this is a good example that casual games need not be simple straightforward games and that casual players can deal with complexity as long as the learning process is simple and fluid.
