Critical Play: Battle Cats & Plants vs. Zombies

Cats are adorable. That’s my reasoning for starting this game. After playing a bit of the game, I noticed a few things about the game:

The tutorial was brief and had short descriptions, allowing a single glance at each bubble dialogue to be enough to understand what it was trying to teach. In addition, the tutorial was slightly spread out such that I don’t unlock all of the game until I’ve reached a certain point in the game. However, as much as they tried to stagger releasing each game feature, I still got bombarded by multiple “You’ve unlocked [???]!!” pop-up messages. The messages were easily dismissed and thankfully, most of the unlocked features were extraneous to the core game-play as a tower defense (since I didn’t read any :’’’D).

As a tower defense game, Battle Cats had me planning out how I should allocate the limited currency where xps (experience points) went towards upgrading various elements of the game and coins were spent during game-play to purchase cats to defeat the opposing army. In addition, time is another form of currency that wasn’t as obvious. Time allowed me to gain more “energy” that would let me play more and limited how often I can deploy cats into the battlefield. Overall, the theme of cats wasn’t integral to the game-play. Any other creature can be swapped with the cats without any issues. In a way, cats allow the game to be flexible in terms of what abilities cats can utilize (axe-wielding cats, long-legged cats looking like they walked out of a Dali painting, etc.).

On the other hand, Plants vs. Zombies delves into their theme so deeply such that there are puns in names, sunshine as energy, zombies wearing various paraphernalia that contributes towards a visual indicator of strength/abilities, and so forth. What sets this game apart from the Battle Cats game are listed as follows:

• Multiple lanes => more careful planning of how to arrange immobile defenders as attention must be divided among multiple routes that the enemy can take as opposed to a single lane in Battle Cats
• Plants are immobile => immobile defenders => players must plan ahead on how to approach a level as opposed to spamming as many cats as possible in Battle Cats where each cat is easily expendable
• Enemy’s level/power can be gauged based on what they were wearing => players know which lane to prioritize their resources towards while in Battle Cats, the enemies came in the form of all sorts of creatures and sizes, making their ability/strength not clear until they start attacking
• Long delay in enemy attacks => there is a grace period in which the enemies have not reached any plants yet, allowing me to quickly dispatch them while Battle Cats’ delay is much shorter where time is a priority to start fending off the enemies (zombies are slow vs. animals/creatures that could move faster)