But I soon forgot all about "Garden Ops" when I dove into the real meat of the game: 24-player online skirmishes and capture-the-base turf wars where actual players also control the zombies. The 12-on-12 matches are wonderfully hectic and delightfully diverse, partially because the huge environments (including cartoony towns, suburban neighborhoods, and a castle) are well laid out, and partly because each of the four different plant and zombie heroes have distinct, satisfying playstyles. How far do you want to be from the fray? If you like getting close and personal, the Zombie Scientist’s goo shotgun will do the trick. Meanwhile, the plant team’s Cactus can snipe from a distance. There’s also the Sunflower, a support class that heals with focused beams of light, and the Foot Zoldier Zombie, which can rocket jump up to the tops of buildings and deal death from above.

If it sounds like I’m describing Valve's famous cartoony action shooter Team Fortress 2, that’s no accident: Garden Warfare producer Brian Lindley readily admits that a mix of PVZ and TF2 was one of the game’s original goals.

Where TF2 is a mirror match of identical character classes, though, the plants and zombie teams each feel unique. As you might expect, the plants are at their most powerful dug into the ground, and not just figuratively. The zombies don’t have a sniper like the Cactus, and the other three plants can burrow into the earth to turn into powerful stationary turrets — or in the case of the Chomper, a giant purple piranha plant that swallows enemies whole, to avoid detection by tunneling through the ground. The zombies, meanwhile, have abilities that give them enhanced mobility and devasting single use attacks, like a jackhammer that the Engineer can ride into battle like a motorized pogo stick, or the All-Star Zombie’s dash tackle which sends enemies flying through the air. The plants and zombies make excellent foils for one another, both individually and as a team.

The best part is that the abilities really complement each character’s playstyle. While the Cactus is sniping, it can protect its flanks by dropping exploding Potato Mines and Wall-nut barricades, or even pilot a flying hunk of garlic that can drop exploding ears of corn on enemy positions. (Don't ask how.) The Scientist can close the distance to enemies with a short-range teleporter, drop a sticky grenade, then warp out once again. Some of the abilities can also be devastating when used cooperatively, such as a pair of Sunflowers healing one another while laying down cover fire, or an Engineer dropping an airstrike into the midst of a Zoldier’s smoke grenade, where foes are unlikely to notice the marker beacons soon enough to react.

While the abilities are fun and work quite well, each of the game’s eight characters only has three to work with, and you can unlock them all within a few hours of play. Afterwards, there isn’t much else to obtain that isn’t cosmetic. You can save up coins to buy packs of stickers which unlock a few permanent weapon upgrades (three per character), and some character variants with different weapons (like the Fire Flower which shoots flames instead of sunbeams), but it’s slow going even if you play fairly well. A ten-minute match might net you 2,000-3,000 coins, but buying a new character costs 40,000 coins, so that’s easily a few solid hours of your time for a single character even if you’re laser-focused on that goal. On the flip side, though, you’re also guaranteed at least 750 coins per match whether you win or lose, so you’re making at least a little progress every time you play a round.