Critical Play: Theme Only Games
For this critical play, I will be reviewing two games: Battle Cats (developed by Ponos Corp and released in 2014) and Plants vs. Zombies 2 (developed by PopCap Games and released by Electronic Arts in 2013).
Both games are of the “tower defense” type and derive fun from the challenge (obstacle course). Based on the core of their game mechanics, the two titles can be classified to be “tactical strategies” as they are played in quick rounds forcing the player to make quick decisions intertwined with a slow resource upgrade path. Both products have a relatively weak storyline and no significant narrative.
The theme chosen within the larger genre of tower defense, however, leaves major footprint on the design. For Battle Cats, the main operational units on the field are the namesake “battle cats”, which move in a line formation towards the enemy lines (see title screenshot). Player has no control over what cat engages which enemy, and the critical decisions need to be made to balance the rate of income (that permits the player to get more cats) against the rate of the cat production. Since cat types have different movement and attack characteristics, the order of units matter a lot (e.g. it is generally beneficial to place long-range weapon cats behind the melee units).
On the opposite hand, Plants vs Zombies 2 operates static objects in a 2D grid (plants on the playfield). Here, the player defines the defense against every zombie phalanx explicitly, by means of planting the seeds in the row beds aligned against the advancing zombies.
This gives the more challenging maps in Plants vs Zombies 2 a better flavor of strategy as player can move resources from one row to another. It also makes the rounds in Plants vs Zombies 2 necessarily longer and slower as the player needs time to select and move the plants to the board and wait for the zombie attackers to come. On the opposite hand, Battle Cats is a game of attrition, where the player is primarily concerned with boosting the economy while surviving the enemy wave; with enough resources, a round in Battle Cats can be won very quickly.
Aside from these theme-induced differences, the two titles are remarkably similar in the rest of their game mechanics. Both employ a “between-battles” upgrade system where fighting units can be given a boost paid in coins of experience or (preferably for a publisher) with in-game purchases.
Both games also feature support for paid “boosts” in the battle round, where special resources could be activated to temporarily support the units. There are only minor differences to how this system works: for example, Battle Cats requires the player to pre-allocate all available boosts before the beginning of battle rounds and uses them automatically, while Plants vs Zombies 2 gives access to all active boosts from the start of the round, but requires the player to turn them on. Plants vs Zombies 2 is actually quite aggressive about promoting boosts, and forces the player to learn about them without solicitation.
There are also minor differences in how the two games treat the in-game currency: while in Plants vs Zombies the battle experience can be only supplemented with cash purchases, Battle Cats also offers an option to do promotion errands (like signing up for commercial offers and trials) to earn their in-game currency. To prevent gamers from accumulating too much battle points with grinding, Battle Cats rations the number of times one can replay the old levels (by overpowering the weak enemies) and decays the rewards for replays. On the opposite hand, Plants vs Zombies 2 curtails grinding by offering no replay option altogether.
The two games also demonstrate the remarkably similar devices to move the narrative forward. Quite often, the narrative takes a second seat in the tower defense games, and in the original Plants vs Zombies the story was limited to player defending his own house against zombies (with a sporadic help of a mad neighbor). In Plants vs Zombies 2, the mad neighbor is still there, but the entire house defense theme is gone. Instead, the player if offered “a trip” to different zombie-infested locations in time and space suggested by a talkative neighbor’s vehicle— which is actually quite hard to comprehend and appears a bit incoherent.
This said, Battle Cats fares not better in the story department. This game opens with a very amateurish scrolled text about significance of battling cats to humankind that appears entirely disconnected from the actual game content. To gloss over this problem and keep some variety in the game rounds, Battle Cats also goes for a travel theme offering the player a tour de force over “ locations” across the world that slightly differ in decorations.
As a result, we can clearly see that these two games that belong to the same genre have developed many similarities. They resort to the same way of pushing the narrative, to the similar upgrade mechanics and to almost identical monetization methods. They balance the battle by use of economy and resource replenishment rates, and offer comparable ways to tip the outcome of battle with paid boosts.
Battle Cats and Plants vs Zombies 2 do differ a bit in the ways to control the battle that are dictated by their battlefield dimensions (static 2D-placed plants vs dynamic 1D fighting cat lines) — but when stripped clear of decorative elements, these two games appear similar enough that they could have been developed by the same company. This is a rather unhappy conclusion, as it illustrates that truly novel game ideas remain few and far in between, and most of popular gaming titles are in fact the refined and reskinned versions of rather old concepts.
