If you read my first piece on the recent "Zen Pinball 2" Wii U eShop release, you may remember how I praised Zen Studios for doing their best to convince the player he or she is playing real, physically plausible pinball, just as they've done with almost every one of their releases. In a turn of irony, the first table up for review is the "Pants vs. Zombies" table, based on PopCap's popular franchise. It's by far the "gamiest" of any tables I've played from Zen Studios before, featuring animated zombies walking across the stage, currency in the form of Sun points and coins and the ability to change the features of the table's actual ball, which is a green seed to begin with.
And now I bite my tongue.
In acquiring the rights to use their first actual video game property as the basis for a table, instead of, for instance, the Marvel or Star Wars franchises, Zen Studios used the opportunity wisely to create a fun, colorful pinball table that stretches the pinball game further into video game territory than they've ever done before. Your objective, much like in the actual "Plants vs. Zombies," is to defeat Dr. Zomboss by eliminating varied waves of incoming zombies, using both your pinball and a collection of power-ups and plants you can use on the field of play. The zombies themselves are animated, unattached to the surface of the table, defying any sense of reality, but it works pretty well. The missions, of which there are four you need to complete to get to the final Zomboss mission, are delightfully tense and live up to the table's IP in a way I've never seen a table to before. It's almost like you're playing a round of "Plants vs. Zombies," only with flippers and a ball, preventing zombies from reaching the "Welcome Mat" directly in front of your out hole.
Collecting sun points with your ball, which, in another gamey turn, are spread over the surface by a gleeful sunflower, allows you to purchase various plants, some of which can be plopped directly on the table while others augment your seedling ball with zombie-killing properties. It's all very gamey, but your pinball skills won't go unneeded either. A couple tricky shots, one of which is the only way to spend your sun points, require some getting used to, but overall it's a fairly straightforward table from a strictly pinball-physics points of view. The orbits aren't too difficult to combo up, multi-ball is earned in a total of three ways, which means it's going to happen quite a bit, and nailing the actual zombies isn't that hard until their numbers increase and they start wearing protective helmets and traffic cones on their heads. Once that starts happening you need to take advantage of those gamey aspects.
Other score-earners, like a watermelon-tossing min-game and the plentiful upgrades you can buy with your coins (by opening up some dude's trunk and plopping your ball directly inside), keep the gameplay fresh as you try to complete each mission. There is one major issue, however, and I'm not sure if it's a glitch or a conscious decision on Zen Studio's part. The kickbacks are not lit at the beginning of a round, and it seems pretty difficult to activate them in the way the game asks you too. I was only able to do it once, and even then it was a random prize. Granted, the majority of your balls are going to be lost straight down the center, but chances are you'll lose one per game to the kick-back vacant side slots as well. Previous reviews of the table on other platforms indicate the kickbacks actually made the table pretty easy, so it may be that Zen adjusted the table accordingly. I'm not sure, but it does affect the way it all works.
In any case, the table is still a good bit of fun, if shallow in the long term. For a couple of reasons, the "Plants versus Zombies" table is great for beginners who've just downloaded "Zen Pinball 2" for their Wii U. Physically, the table is simple enough, and the table objectives translate well into the gamer mindset. Once you do nail down missions and the like, however, the table gets a bit too easy, but by then it's simply time to move on to a more challenging table.
