Double Dose Of Free Games

Along with the usual free PS+ games in the month of December, Sony held an event, which I talked about last week, where they also passed along a sampling of free games. Specifically for the PS4, these two games were Secret Ponchos and Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare respectively. While you can still download Secret Ponchos for free this month, PVZ was only available during the event.

Mexican Standoff

Secret Ponchos is one of those exclusively online multiplayer games: All strictly deathmatch or team deathmatch, and set up to play like a dual-stick shooter.

There are supposed to 6 available classes to choose from, but only 5 were available to me when I started playing. You aren't limited in the amount of characters you wish to create, but they are all independent of one another i.e. they level up on their own, and if you go into a match with a character, that is the character you will use the entire march. Each character is unique though which was cool. They each have their own main and side arm, and special abilities to go with them.

Mexican Standoff was pretty fun, albeit simple. The only frustrating part I found was that if a person had a weak internet connection then it didn't seem to impede them at all. All it seemed to do was confuse the fuck out of you because you see them bobbing around because the game couldn't decide where exactly they were. So you can't hurt them because they aren't actually there while they simply just kill you. It didn't happen too often, but every few rounds there was always some schmo with crappy internet.

Aside from that, Mexican Standoff is solid fun, but not enough for me to ever pay for this game. Personally if they took a League of Legends approach to this game I think it would be very successful: Boost the amount of characters you have, rotate the roster of free characters every week, add more skins, and then sustain it with micro transactions (which they already have). As it stands right now, if I never got it for free, nothing would compel me to buy Secret Ponchos; but since it is free, go download it this month because it is fun.

A Different Type of Zombie Shooter

With Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Popcap games took their cute little tower defence franchise and turned it into a third person shooter...with walking plants. Having both a simple single player mode along with the usual multiplayer affair, there are enough modes to keep you occupied. The fact that you can also play 2-player split-screen is an added bonus.

The single player and co-op modes are exactly the same thing: Tower defence. You pick a plant class and then are plopped into a large map. You then are able to place your garden in 1 of 3 spots. Once you hunker down, you need to defend your garden from wave after wave of zombies. To help facilitate your defensive perimeter, you can place plants in conveniently placed pots around the area, acting as your towers. They go down pretty easy however, making you replace them constantly in the later levels. You of course have only a finite amount of plants at your disposal. But fret not, because you can always get more by opening up boosters packs from the in-game store.

Because of course there's an in-game store, why wouldn't there be? So as you play any part of this game, you accumulate points which you can spend in the store on card. Cards can be anything from consumables (i.e. the potted plant variety), to a 5-part piece to unlock a skin. That's right, you need 5 different cards to unlock a skin. Now if you don't want to play the game to unlock points and buy cards, they also make it easy to use real money to get points. I don't know why you would ever need to use real money mind you, since you get the points pretty fast, but I digress.

I played a lot more of the tower defence than I did the team deathmatch online, but from what I did play, it was pretty fun. A little slow though. The plants move around pretty clunkily and most weapons are single shot, so it appears pretty slow. The style of the entire game works well with the speed though, so it isn't really a complaint, more if an observation. And like anything in a game, you'll get used to it.

Unfortunately if you missed it while it was free at the beginning of December, you would have to pay to play this interesting and cute shooter. Considering I was actually looking into buying this game for a reasonable price (I was thinking like $20) I'm happy I got it for free, but I still think this is definitely worth it, and I would still happily pay $20 for it.