Alright. This game is amazing. Godlike progression, good balancing, fun and interesting new plants, a serviceable costume system, refreshing zombies to play around (looking at you, statue), and a very faithful implementation of old mechanics that isn't afraid to put new stuff on the table. Just great all around; in fact, I might've, uhhh, gotten addicted for a bit? I beat the entire first world in one sitting, back when I started.
Still, I have a few small gripes so far, and a single major one (haven't beaten it all yet):
- The graphics can be really cool and charismatic in some areas (namely, in the Sunflower's redesign and the general vibes of both the Potato Mine and the Buckethead), but I feel like the game could do with a small amount of extra shading and muted colors —it just feels a bit TOO bright and cheery sometimes, which can be jarring when some of the older zombies and stage layouts make comebacks—.
- Also, the spritework is very competent and consistent in what it's trying to do, but MAN, can the animations be flip-floppy. Sometimes, they're great, and convey everything the need to, with a few having really cool VFX associated to them!... but other times... other times, I swear, I've had beef jerky less stiff... looking at you, Imp, Cherry Bomb and Peashooter... looking at you.
- The shop feels a bit unbalanced, entirely due to the fact you can buy extra seed slots for an extremely high price. Due to seed slots probably being the single most important limitation for the player, and thus, the prospect of expanding them being awesome, there's far too much incentive to spend on ABSOLUTELY NONE of the actually interesting stuff for AGES, like plants and costumes, rather than the straightforward, powerful and extremely costly seed slot. It would be cool if there was some other way to get that kind of upgrades, rather than cash, as they really monopolize the whole shop unless you go out of your way to get what you know SHOULD be more fun. Players are like kids, new plants are like veggies, and seed slots are straight up McDonalds. One of them is more appealing thanh the other, but that doesn't mean it's good for the kids' health; you should probably introduce a way to make sure they actively choose to eat their veggies WITHOUT taking away the ocassional Big Mac.
- The game almost always runs SMOOTH AS BUTTER, with the typical lag spikes you might expect from some other games being essentially nonexistent here. However, despite this, it is with *Performance* that one of my few, yet biggest criticisms of this game arises: the game can be unstable. What do I mean by this? Well:
> Initially, you won't notice anything! everything's going smoothly, you beat a few levels, unlock a few plants, but when you start getting to some of the spicier stages, and the zombies and on-screen entities start stacking on top of one another, you'll begin to notice something: "Why are the shadows blipping in and out? Why is all the text also doing that? a layering issue? not loading properly?" You might notice a few lag spikes here and there, maybe the audio cuts out for a split second, nothing major.
And then shit hits the fan.
The game freezes. BADLY. you can move your mouse, but nothing works. If you're smart, you'll try to close the window by now. "But what about all the PROGRESS YOU MADE?", you ask yourself, so you keep it open.
Then the audio cuts out. Nothing works, not even alt+F4, surprisingly (though that may be my own computer's incompetence, as it's got like 15 years in the bag already).
Then the screen tears. Welcome to the beautiful land of Fuckety-Fucked tm.
From then on, hang tight and watch the fireworks, as your display proceeds to multiply, fragment and overlap, for some reason. This is actually pretty funny, right up until you notice everything's crashed, all your progress has been lost, and your computer has been bricked from anywhere between 2 to 10 minutes.
So, uh, yeah, great game all around, PLEASEFORTHELOVEOFDAVEKEEPATITBUDDY, but please look into that resource usage (?) bug.
Edit: forgot to mention it, but I actually like how challenging the game can be. It really demands experimentation from the player, and I love that.