First off, lets get this out of the way:
Gods DAMN you EA! You got another one of the companies I like and forced them into using paywalls and microtransactions! FUCK YOU AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR BLACK-HEARTED MONEY-GRUBBING BULLSHIT PUSHING CEOS! FUCK YOU ALL TO THE DEEPEST DARKEST LAYERS OF HELL!

Alright, now that that's over with, the game itself. Did Popcap still make a good title despite the interference of They-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named?

Well... so far here's how the game went:

The tutorial level was the classic front yard from the first game. At the end of it you find a bottle of hot sauce and, lo-and-behold, your old friend Crazy Dave shows up to claim it. He reveals that he still has the taco you found for him... four years ago in 2009... and that he's been waiting all this time for some hot sauce.

... must be a lot of preservatives in that taco.

Anyways, he eats it, proclaims it to be the pinnacle of Mexican cuisine, and then declares he'd like seconds. So what does he do? Why the only logical thing, takes you along in his RV-turned-time-machine and shoots you and himself into the past so he can eat his taco again.

He overshoots a bit, landing in ancient Egypt, where the game gets rolling.

Anyways, here's whats changed since the first game:

- New plants, this goes without saying of course.
-There's a little frozen pea (not a pea shooter, just a pea) that acts as a landmine. When a zombie steps on it, they freeze solid.
- A new plant is some sort of leafy green that punches the hell out of whatever comes close. Its best to have this tucked away behind your wall-nuts as it can't take a lot of punishment on it's own.
- Some sort of boomerang flower that throws it's petals into the oncoming zombies. The petals shoot forwards, then return back to deal two hits each. Slow rate of fire though.
Thats all the ones I've unlocked thus far.

- Plant food. Some zombies will glow green when they appear, kill them and they drop plant food which you can use to power up your plants for a short time. The powerups include:
- Peashooter: Upgrades to a Gattling pea for a few seconds, spitting a gigantic barrage of peas at all enemies infront of it.
- Cabbagepault: Throws several giant cabbages into the air which rain down on the zombies, doing a ton of damage to each (very useful, personal fave).
- Sunflower: Supercharges, the sunflower drops several sun orbs in one go.
- That new punchy-thingy: It shoots it's arms out in all directions, attacking any zombies within one square of itself multiple times.

- Powerups. You can spend coin in game to use the touch screen to do special attacks yourself. There are three different ones.
- Pinch: You pinch a zombie on the screen to pinch their heads right off their shoulders. Crush the enemy with your miiiiiiiiind!
- Swipe-smack: Swipe up to knock zombies into the air, swipe across to send them flying out of the area.
- Thunderfinger: Tap and drag your finger to electrocute zombies. Does a ton of damage and outright destroys weaker ones.
The powerups sound nice, but they cost a lot of coin per use and coins aren't worth as much as they used to be. Probably part of EA's desire to milk money out of this as you can buy them with real coins, and dollars, in their online store.

- Star Challenges. Before you can leave each time period you need to gather stars to unlock star gates. The number of stars for the one I'm on is fifteen and I'm about halfway there. When you get to the gate all the levels you've cleared on the map (oh by the way, there's a map) will gain star challenges. These are basically little trials that, honestly, do add some good challenges to the game. A few examples are:
- Keep the zombies from going past a certain point.
- Don't spend any sun for the first X seconds.
- You can only have up to X plants at a given time.
- Don't lose even a single plant.

- New zombies (c'mon, you saw this coming). Yep, the ranks of the undead swelled again, each time period offering new ones. Some are just redoings of old zombies (the basic zombie for Egypt is a mummy, the cone zombies wear cones with a gold asp decoration, etc) but there are totally new ones as well. The ones I've encountered in Egypt so far are:
- Ra Zombie. This one is a nasty little bugger. He carries a staff with the sun on it and whenever your sunflowers generate sun he'll try to steal it! He raises his staff, the suns turn red, and they get drawn towards him. If you're fast you can grab them before he pulls them in but if they reach him he'll hold them until he dies. When the Ra Zombie goes down all the sun he stole pops out of his body at once.
- Anubis Zombie. Remember those gravestones from the night levels in PvZ1? Well, now they act as wall-nuts for the zombie side. Your cabbage-paults can shoot over them, but peashooters and other plants have to break them down to shoot past them. What does this have to do with this zombie? He makes more of them! During a fight he'll cough up a bone and toss it onto a random square, wherever it lands a gravestone appears.
- Explorer Zombie. Oh good gods I hate these things. They're zombies in explorer outfits carrying burning torches. Why is this bad? Well, you're being guarded by plants, and they have fire, and if Pokemon taught me anything its that fire > plants. If he gets close enough to a plant with that torch then any plant, even wall-nuts, goes up in smoke instantly! This is where those ice-landmine plants come in. Put one in his path and, when it freezes him, the torch goes out. After that he's a normal zombie in fancy dress.
There's others too of course, but those are the big ones that stand out in my mind.

- Permanent upgrades. This one is kinda eh because I feel it takes some of the strategy away, but you can find (or fuck you EA buy from the store) little totems that'll power up your character. They are...
- Sun Totem: Start a battle with a little sun.
- Shovel Totem: When you dig up a plant it'll refund some of it's cost back to you.
- Plant Food Totem: Permanently increases how much plant food you can carry (you start with a cap of three).

So, in summary...

What I like:
- The new plants are creative and compliment the returning ones from the first game well.
- The plant food adds a new layer of strategy to the game. Do you spend it on sunflowers to get more sun quickly? Do you save it for a zombie swarm and use it on a cabbage-pault to take out half of them at once? Do you wait until a big one shows up and power up a peashooter to blow it away?
- The new zombies are neat and add some more fun to the game coming up with strategies to counter them.
- Star Challenges are interesting and some of them take some real planning and skill to get around. I haven't done many yet, but I like what I have seen so far.
- Crazy Dave is still funny.

What I don't like:
- Pay-for-plants. Seriously, fuck you EA. I'd have happily given you ten, even fifteen bucks for the full game. You don't need to do this shit.
- Powerups. They're neat, but it feels really out of place here. That and they cost a ton of coins and I get the stinking suspicion that EA just added them to milk some more money out of the players.
- Its an EA game now. Again, fuck you EA. This is the one exception to my 'No EA games' rule I'll make and only then because I loved the first game so much.


So yeah, in short, it's a fun game that really adds a lot to the old game's formula. I will admit that the paywalls aren't as big a deal for plants as only a few of them are 'pay or you can't get them' and the only one I gave up any money for so far was the torchwood, it just really irks me that EA went and did that because the game would be just fine without them and, again, I'd have no problem paying money to get it if they paywalls weren't there! The game itself is free to play, but you need to pay to get those upgrades or more coins so it's another one of those freemium games.

Final verdict: If you liked Plants VS Zombies 1 or if you're a fan of tower defense games (and you have an iPad since it's iPad only right now) then go for it.