Ya’ll, PopCap is dead and they’re not coming back. The maker of beloved puzzle games was absorbed by EA a while ago, and the franchises that we played to avoid doing work back in high school and college now no longer exist. It’s why we have things like Bejeweled Stars and why Bookworm hasn’t been heard from since Obama took office. But the core franchise, Plants vs. Zombies, still gets acclaim and occasional pushes to make it a thing again. Garden Warfare was decent, that weird mobile reboot that just came out isn’t. Still, EA wants to make sure players remember the original, and help players who can’t access the original for one reason or another. Either way, Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted is here, it brings back the core game in its entirety, adds some new things and, naturally, gives the whole shebang a fresh coat of HD paint.

Somehow, this name was not changed, and I’m okay with that.

Never played before? You’re in for a treat! This nonsensical tower defense game has you keeping zombies from invading your home. You do this by aggressive gardening, planting flowers, fruits and nuts with different abilities and powers. Plants can only be placed if you have enough sunlight, which you get from the sun or from certain plants that generate sunlight. Move from the front yard to the back and up to the roof, day and night, while zombies up their game with different armor and their own ways to dispose of your botanical soldiers. Can your brains survive the onslaught? Do your best!

In theory, this should have been easy money for EA. Plants vs. Zombies was a cultural phenomenon and is still talked about as one of those great tower defense titles. It went through several iterations as it moved from PC to mobile to almost every console of the 2010s. The bones of the game is easy enough to build upon, and Replanted was supposed to bring the best of everything you knew before (the story campaign, the minigames to improve your engagement, a versus mode with another player) plus the updated graphics, improved score and a couple new bonus modes for invested players. The new Cloudy mode offers players a chance to defend with more limited conditions for sun (but also lower plant costs), and hardcore mode will chuck you back to the very beginning if you lose once. Both interesting, but not what a new player would engage with.

It’s so polite and informative!

Truth be told, the promise of Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted is what drew me in. Despite already owning the GOTY edition, I did like the way the updated graphics looked. Most of the sprites have gotten a cleaner polish that looks bright and strong on modern displays without being too artificial like we see with some AI upscaling. Crazy Dave, the neighborhood character who gives you help in the form of advice and sold powerups, has gotten a great glow up that makes him pop on the screen. While people bemoan the loss of Shigihara’s original feel of the soundtrack, the remastered edition still ticks all the boxes, even if we are missing the joy of the classic sensation. Most of what you see looks and sounds excellent, and, while this wouldn’t be my number one for 2025, it certainly was a great contender for an enjoyable timesink.

Almost immediately, the wheels start to come off the wagon as you dive into the game. For one, for reasons that escape me, the cards have not been properly updated for Replanted. At the end of each stage, you get a card that grants you a new plant to use for the subsequent runs. All of the cards are clearly stretched, rough sprites from the original game, and I need to understand why. It’s such a simple thing that could have been done to complete the HD update, and yet it sticks out like a sore, underdeveloped thumb from the very beginning. It’s hard to appreciate the HD graphics of this new Plants vs. Zombies when each level proudly showcases an element that screams “this wasn’t important to us, so we figured you wouldn’t care, either!” It certainly doesn’t change the gameplay, but it’s noticeable and bothersome.

No, you don’t need new glasses, it’s just…bad.

Then there’s the matter of the controls. To their credit, EA did a bang up job of mapping the buttons and controls to the Nintendo Switch for a smooth, playable experience. The joysticks glide around the map fluidly, and you’re able to pick up dropped sunlight and coins by just glancing over them, so there’s no stress about pickups disappearing. You can quickly toggle between plants with shoulder buttons, and there’s a dedicated button for shoveling and removing plants so you can easily swap out offense for defense or just remove a sunflower that you no longer need. If you’re using a controller, you’re in the clear, and I imagine this is what EA had in mind when trying to port Replanted to every console that would take it.

The problem arises when you try and use the touch screen controls, which is how I most experienced Plants vs. Zombies on both my DS and my long-ago iPad. There’s a lot of unnecessary double tapping to confirm some actions, and the drag and drop approach isn’t always clear or accurate. I thought it was my fingers, but it kept occurring at the most random and inopportune times. Then it ramped up the hate by simply refusing to work or respond, usually in the middle of a firefight with football zombies. I would then need to rapidly pivot to the buttons, which is feasible but incredibly annoying when you’re attempting to stay alive. Sometimes the touch controls would remain inoperable until I rebooted the entire game, which…this is a Nintendo Switch, not a Packard Bell running Windows ME. Rebooting should not be the solution to a game’s error.

Here, we see how a good layering of “shoot everything” is the solution to all of life’s problems.

The icing on the disaster cake for Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted comes in the form of the Disco Zombie. This is not a rare or invisible monster that you can only find if the stars align and you’ve got a memory card from Circuit City. It’s a guaranteed mob during the night time attacks, and it dances in, summons a few other zombies to dance with it, and then shambles forward. It’s impossible to miss if you play further than the first “world” and transition from daytime to nighttime. You don’t need to do anything other than play the main game, the literal original form that everyone will partake in. You can’t even unlock co-op or versus mode at this point: every player must get through the night, and, as such, must meet the Disco Zombies. Plural. Because they happen more than once.

So how the hell did QA miss that, when the Disco Zombie appears, the game starts to suffer incredible slowdown and, more than once, freeze and stop completely? I’m trying to finish a fight for my life with mushrooms instead of plants, because it’s night time, I’ve finally got a decent build going, and now my game is going to start chugging because a Dancing Queen shows up in my midsts? It happened every single time a Disco Zombie showed up. He dances in, does a turn, the spotlights drop to indicate the other zombies will appear, and now I’m rolling the D20 to find out if the game will simply hiccup a bit, have a full stutter attack or just give up and pinwheel for a moment. It’s so small, it’s so incidental, but the fact that it happens at all is insane to me.

I could have hand drawn this screen in the time it took to unfreeze.

As of their last call, Electronic Arts has a total equity of 6.39 BILLION U.S. dollars. They serve the entire worldwide community, employ thousands of people, have a streaming/subscription service all their own, and make a crazy amount of money churning out several sports titles with new numbers in their name every year. Yet they were so concussed about how to approach a beloved reboot that no one was asking for that they fumbled the ball within the first twenty minutes of the game. This is the Nintendo Switch; I wasn’t trying to run Replanted on an Apple Newton. Yet, for someone who is willing to drop on the game that costs twenty dollars – which, reminder, money is also used for food – the expectation is “this won’t run very well, but it sort of works, so that’s good enough for us: make it good enough for you.”

PC reviewers are lamenting that the game requires them to always be online: great news, the Switch doesn’t. Instead, you just get a game that mostly works, but really fails the player when it doesn’t. Is this EA’s subtle way of telling everyone to get a Switch 2? No problem, ship one to my house and I’ll do a new review with that version of the game. But I, like millions of people, have a Switch 1, and Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted doesn’t run great. It has the potential to be fun and enjoyable, but it keeps forgetting to do the one thing you need it to do: be a functional game. It’s a clear case of buyer beware, and people who have the option to get the original Plants vs. Zombies: GOTY should just do that: it’s cheaper, lacks the bells and whistles but is still an absolute joy.

Penny Pincher: save eight bucks by not having a QA person tell you that the game has fundemental flaws.

You can slap a fresh coat of makeup and a beautiful dress on a reanimated corpse, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a staggering, hungry mess. Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted ends up doing meta commentary on itself. The franchise has been raised from the dead, not with something new but with a necromantic amalgamation of what it was, what it could be and what it ultimately is. If you have no other way to play Plants vs. Zombies, you can mostly enjoy it on the Switch, and at least the asking price isn’t too strong. But don’t reward mediocrity. Insist that this be made better, or simply walk away. The zombies, I assure you, will be just fine.

Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted is available now on Steam, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series One X/S and Nintendo Switch/Switch 2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted was provided by the publisher.