**A Closer Look at Plants vs Zombies 2**

As we delve deeper into the world of Plants vs Zombies 2, it becomes clear that there is very little premium content to purchase. In fact, most of the new features and plants can be obtained without spending a dime. This means that players are free to explore the game's many levels and challenges without worrying about making unnecessary purchases.

One of the standout features of Plants vs Zombies 2 is its vast array of new plants and zombies. The boomerang plant, for example, does double damage by hitting the same zombie twice, while the snap dragon fire-breathing plant covers three rows and has a unique ability to absorb zombie staffs. These new additions add a fresh layer of strategy to the game, as players must adapt their tactics to take on the increasingly challenging zombies.

The game also features a variety of mini-games and challenges that can be played throughout the levels. One such challenge is the "branching paths" system, which adds a new level of complexity to each level. This system allows for multiple branching paths, with different levels of difficulty and reward. Players must navigate these paths using their plants, collecting sunlight and resources along the way.

Another notable feature of Plants vs Zombies 2 is its ability to freeze zombies in place using certain plants, such as the iceberg lettuce plant. When powered up, this plant can freeze every zombie on the screen for a short period of time, giving players a much-needed advantage in battle.

The game also includes a variety of new mechanics and features, including the introduction of "plant food" which allows players to power up their plants for increased effectiveness. This system adds a new layer of strategy to the game, as players must carefully manage their plant food resources to maximize their chances of success.

One of the most exciting features of Plants vs Zombies 2 is its level design and progression system. With over 60 levels available at launch, each with multiple branching paths and challenges, players are in for a treat. The game's level progression system is designed to keep players engaged and challenged, with new levels and mechanics added regularly through updates.

Finally, it's worth noting that Plants vs Zombies 2 will be an iOS exclusive initially, before making its way to other platforms later on. This means that fans of the series will have a head start in exploring all that the game has to offer.

**New Game Modes and Features**

In addition to the new plants and mechanics, Plants vs Zombies 2 also features a number of new game modes and challenges. One such mode is the "Zombie Bowling" challenge from the original Plants vs Zombies, which has been revamped with new levels and gameplay mechanics.

The game also includes a variety of branching path levels, each with multiple challenges and difficulties. These levels are designed to provide players with a fresh experience every time they play them, as the order in which the levels appear changes randomly.

The game's level design is designed to be highly variable, with different levels offering different rewards and challenges. For example, some levels may have a limited number of plants available, while others may require players to use more than 15 plants or spend over 2,000 Suns.

Overall, Plants vs Zombies 2 is a must-play for fans of the series and newcomers alike. With its vast array of new features and mechanics, as well as its highly variable level design and progression system, this game is sure to provide hours of entertainment and challenge for players of all ages.

**Launch Date and Availability**

Plants vs Zombies 2 is set to launch in Late July, initially as an iOS exclusive before making its way to other platforms. This means that fans of the series will have a head start in exploring all that the game has to offer.

As we wait for the game's release, it's clear that Plants vs Zombies 2 is shaping up to be one of the most exciting and challenging games in the series yet. With its new plants, mechanics, and features, this game is sure to provide a fresh and fun experience for players of all ages.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Simon Sage from imore we are at E3 2013 checking out for the first time Plants vs Zombies 2 coming exclusively to iOS at launch uh and we've got one of the folks from EA here who's going to walk us through it how's it going man it's going very well thanks for asking so uh what's new in Plants vs Zombies 2 well there are a lot of new things in Plants versus Zombies 2 the first thing I would say is the the tra the time travel theme this time around is very new so rather than sort of a series of levels that take you to different parts of your house your backyard your front yard your roof now you're traveling through time with Crazy Dave and his time travel machine to visit different historical periods and face off with zombies from those periods so you start off in ancient Egypt you work your way through that you get to a sort of 16th century pirate world then you work your way through that you get yourself to um a uh Wild West Cowboy sort of scenario so you've got Cowboy zombies um and along the way you're going to earn a lot of new plants unlock a lot of new plants while you're facing all these new zombies and we've got a couple of very specific new uh features in the game one is plant food so if you think about the original Plants versus Zombies there were upgrades to certain plants you could go from the peashooter to the repeater or the Gatling pee you could go from the melon P to the winter melon p in Plants versus Zombies 2 we've replaced that to an extent with a food system where you feed the plants plant food and it sort of supercharges them temporarily so every plant effectively has an upgraded mode that is temporary so let's take a quick look give an example of a level in ancient Egypt uh first I'll close in on the it's very different right the other thing we've done is try to make the maps more sort of nav able so you're not just following this linear path you have choices you can go down branching paths to unlock new plants or you can skip that for a while and try to stay on the main path and get to the next world as quickly as possible so it gives the player more options so first I'm going to pick my plants for this level I'll pick mostly new ones just to show your viewers some of the new stuff in the game how many how many new plants total are going to be in this one there will be uh at least a couple dozen I'm not sure the exact number but a couple dozen new plants and several dozen new zombies and largely they're themed to the world where you first encounter them so the plant food is shown down here at the bottom this is your plant food sort of receptacle I haven't earned any plant food yet but when I face off with a glowing green zombie that's a sign that that zombie is carrying plant food and as soon as I take that zombie out I will get some of that plant food we got some tombstones in the way there too that's that's kind of similar to the old version right yes although they are slightly different in the original the Tombstones were largely about spawning new zombies in Plants versus Zombies 2 the Tombstones are more of an obstacle to some of the projectile plants some plants can catapult right over like the Cabbage pul he could fire over the Tombstones but a lot of plants can't the other thing that's very new about Plants versus Zombies too are these touchscreen powerups so in addition to being able to power up every plant by feeding it plant food I can actually use this to actually touch the the zombies and interact with them directly so each of these represents one there are three ways for me to sort of Reach Out And Touch a zombie directly so if I use this one it has an effect similar to the lightning read I can actually zap the zombies or even the Tombstones for a for a brief period of time so are those just on cool down how do you pick those those are on those are not on coold down you can select them anytime but they do cost coins you earn those coins through gameplay or you can buy more coins so it's important to note that another significant difference between this and the original game is this is a free-to-play game wow now what we've done is made every level and every zombie absolutely free you'll never have to pay to face off against any new zombie or to get to any level there's very very little premium content that you have to buy or that you can only buy I should say the stuff that you can only purchase isn't even they're not things that you need to proceed through the game it's a handful four or five plants that are premium plants and in fact they're all plants from the original Plants versus zombies so all the new plants all the new zombies in fact every zombie you will encounter without paying a dime excellent excellent so let's try out a couple of the new ones we've got the boomerang going there he's one of my favorites he does sort of double damage because after his boomerang pedals hit a zombie they come back and hit that zombie again so you kind of get double your money on those um the snap dragon is a fire breathing plant he covers three rows and you'll notice that the zombies have new abilities too right this is the raw zombie and he is uh his sort of Staff his magic staff will uh absorb your sons he does give them back once you take him out I've gotten a little distracted here talking to you so I'm going to lose a I'm going to lose a lawnmower here but hey that's what they're for we got a little more plant food there so let's try powering up a plant so let's do the Bon Choy and then we'll power him up and and now he fires in every direction with super powerful punches one of my favorites to put the plant food on is the iceberg lettuce plant if you just plant the iceberg lettuce and one zombie steps on it it will freeze that one zombie but if you put it if you power it up with plant food it freezes every zombie on the screen for about 10 seconds do we have any any new game modes here I mean this is more or less the the same kind of gameplay we've seen but I remember that there were a couple of really great you know like the the zombie bowling from the original was was a lot of fun anything new on this front yes there are mini games off some of the branching paths um let me see if I can find one of those for you and we're going to be adding more of those over time it's really important to note that at launch this game is going to have about 60 levels they'll all be new they'll be populated primarily with totally new zombies totally new plants to fight them with we're going to be adding more worlds and each of those worlds are going to have branching paths with additional uh new plants new zombies so let's see if we can find one of those challenges I think it's this one I got to admit I'm not totally familiar that they're they're a little hard to identify they don't just call themselves out this is one in the sense that you don't plant I wanted to show you the one where it's more of a concentration like game but this is a a sort of challenge where you're just served up plants you don't get to pick you don't have to collect Suns to plant them there was a similar miname in the original um and it was a fan favorite so we kept this one around and in this case you're literally just being sort of served up certain plants by conveyor belt the good news is again we've put a lot of variability in there so the next time you play this level it's not going to be the same and all of the levels have multiple challenge modes to them so if you've played a level before you want to go back and play it again it will be different there will be some twist to it like don't plant Beyond this line don't use more than 15 plants on the whole level don't spend more than 2,000 Suns on the level those kinds of they're not too difficult at least at the beginning they get progressively more challenging but they add a nice twist if you should decide to go back and play a level again it's the the guarantee we make is it's not going to be the same as the last time you played it and we know that people love to play these levels over and over and we get a lot of customer feedback from people who say I'm still playing the original four years later you know and there's a certain amount of variability there but boy if you could make it even more random that'd be great so that's really what we've tried to do here looking awesome so uh we got a lot of new plants a lot of new mechanics there with the with the plant food uh new consumables freet toop playay model uh there's a lot of great stuff going on here when's it coming out uh it's going to launch in Late July it'll be an iOS exclusive initially and then we'll bring it to other platforms awesome well definitely looking forward to thanks a lot thank youhey everybody this is Simon Sage from imore we are at E3 2013 checking out for the first time Plants vs Zombies 2 coming exclusively to iOS at launch uh and we've got one of the folks from EA here who's going to walk us through it how's it going man it's going very well thanks for asking so uh what's new in Plants vs Zombies 2 well there are a lot of new things in Plants versus Zombies 2 the first thing I would say is the the tra the time travel theme this time around is very new so rather than sort of a series of levels that take you to different parts of your house your backyard your front yard your roof now you're traveling through time with Crazy Dave and his time travel machine to visit different historical periods and face off with zombies from those periods so you start off in ancient Egypt you work your way through that you get to a sort of 16th century pirate world then you work your way through that you get yourself to um a uh Wild West Cowboy sort of scenario so you've got Cowboy zombies um and along the way you're going to earn a lot of new plants unlock a lot of new plants while you're facing all these new zombies and we've got a couple of very specific new uh features in the game one is plant food so if you think about the original Plants versus Zombies there were upgrades to certain plants you could go from the peashooter to the repeater or the Gatling pee you could go from the melon P to the winter melon p in Plants versus Zombies 2 we've replaced that to an extent with a food system where you feed the plants plant food and it sort of supercharges them temporarily so every plant effectively has an upgraded mode that is temporary so let's take a quick look give an example of a level in ancient Egypt uh first I'll close in on the it's very different right the other thing we've done is try to make the maps more sort of nav able so you're not just following this linear path you have choices you can go down branching paths to unlock new plants or you can skip that for a while and try to stay on the main path and get to the next world as quickly as possible so it gives the player more options so first I'm going to pick my plants for this level I'll pick mostly new ones just to show your viewers some of the new stuff in the game how many how many new plants total are going to be in this one there will be uh at least a couple dozen I'm not sure the exact number but a couple dozen new plants and several dozen new zombies and largely they're themed to the world where you first encounter them so the plant food is shown down here at the bottom this is your plant food sort of receptacle I haven't earned any plant food yet but when I face off with a glowing green zombie that's a sign that that zombie is carrying plant food and as soon as I take that zombie out I will get some of that plant food we got some tombstones in the way there too that's that's kind of similar to the old version right yes although they are slightly different in the original the Tombstones were largely about spawning new zombies in Plants versus Zombies 2 the Tombstones are more of an obstacle to some of the projectile plants some plants can catapult right over like the Cabbage pul he could fire over the Tombstones but a lot of plants can't the other thing that's very new about Plants versus Zombies too are these touchscreen powerups so in addition to being able to power up every plant by feeding it plant food I can actually use this to actually touch the the zombies and interact with them directly so each of these represents one there are three ways for me to sort of Reach Out And Touch a zombie directly so if I use this one it has an effect similar to the lightning read I can actually zap the zombies or even the Tombstones for a for a brief period of time so are those just on cool down how do you pick those those are on those are not on coold down you can select them anytime but they do cost coins you earn those coins through gameplay or you can buy more coins so it's important to note that another significant difference between this and the original game is this is a free-to-play game wow now what we've done is made every level and every zombie absolutely free you'll never have to pay to face off against any new zombie or to get to any level there's very very little premium content that you have to buy or that you can only buy I should say the stuff that you can only purchase isn't even they're not things that you need to proceed through the game it's a handful four or five plants that are premium plants and in fact they're all plants from the original Plants versus zombies so all the new plants all the new zombies in fact every zombie you will encounter without paying a dime excellent excellent so let's try out a couple of the new ones we've got the boomerang going there he's one of my favorites he does sort of double damage because after his boomerang pedals hit a zombie they come back and hit that zombie again so you kind of get double your money on those um the snap dragon is a fire breathing plant he covers three rows and you'll notice that the zombies have new abilities too right this is the raw zombie and he is uh his sort of Staff his magic staff will uh absorb your sons he does give them back once you take him out I've gotten a little distracted here talking to you so I'm going to lose a I'm going to lose a lawnmower here but hey that's what they're for we got a little more plant food there so let's try powering up a plant so let's do the Bon Choy and then we'll power him up and and now he fires in every direction with super powerful punches one of my favorites to put the plant food on is the iceberg lettuce plant if you just plant the iceberg lettuce and one zombie steps on it it will freeze that one zombie but if you put it if you power it up with plant food it freezes every zombie on the screen for about 10 seconds do we have any any new game modes here I mean this is more or less the the same kind of gameplay we've seen but I remember that there were a couple of really great you know like the the zombie bowling from the original was was a lot of fun anything new on this front yes there are mini games off some of the branching paths um let me see if I can find one of those for you and we're going to be adding more of those over time it's really important to note that at launch this game is going to have about 60 levels they'll all be new they'll be populated primarily with totally new zombies totally new plants to fight them with we're going to be adding more worlds and each of those worlds are going to have branching paths with additional uh new plants new zombies so let's see if we can find one of those challenges I think it's this one I got to admit I'm not totally familiar that they're they're a little hard to identify they don't just call themselves out this is one in the sense that you don't plant I wanted to show you the one where it's more of a concentration like game but this is a a sort of challenge where you're just served up plants you don't get to pick you don't have to collect Suns to plant them there was a similar miname in the original um and it was a fan favorite so we kept this one around and in this case you're literally just being sort of served up certain plants by conveyor belt the good news is again we've put a lot of variability in there so the next time you play this level it's not going to be the same and all of the levels have multiple challenge modes to them so if you've played a level before you want to go back and play it again it will be different there will be some twist to it like don't plant Beyond this line don't use more than 15 plants on the whole level don't spend more than 2,000 Suns on the level those kinds of they're not too difficult at least at the beginning they get progressively more challenging but they add a nice twist if you should decide to go back and play a level again it's the the guarantee we make is it's not going to be the same as the last time you played it and we know that people love to play these levels over and over and we get a lot of customer feedback from people who say I'm still playing the original four years later you know and there's a certain amount of variability there but boy if you could make it even more random that'd be great so that's really what we've tried to do here looking awesome so uh we got a lot of new plants a lot of new mechanics there with the with the plant food uh new consumables freet toop playay model uh there's a lot of great stuff going on here when's it coming out uh it's going to launch in Late July it'll be an iOS exclusive initially and then we'll bring it to other platforms awesome well definitely looking forward to thanks a lot thank you\n"