Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville™

To be honest, I don't entirely see what the hate toward this game is about. I personally prefer this more lively artstyle to the prior GW games more gritty and dark tones. The hub world is pretty good, although I can't deny that jumping behind enemy "vines" of GW2 deserves plenty of merit. The characters here in BFN are much more charming, and the game itself is easier and simpler without the character variants of the prior games (although, again, they had their pros). Sure, it would be cool to have an incendiary nightcap, or a dark matter snapdragon based off of Heroes, but that may have been too crowded. That was my gripe with the others, too: too crowded.
This installment definentley had its own problems, especially what with balancing, but I suppose it's too late to change that... But there's a reason I have 350+ hours in this game. I may not be able to get people to play this game- my favorite game- but I implore you: give the other entries in this franchise a shot. Interact with the community. And most of all, let's try a new hashtag that may or may not have been used before:
#savePvZshooters
We're counting on you, Popcap, Electronic Arts. Save our beloved franchise.
(Maybe that Project: Hot Tub, thing, too. That was shaping up to be a BANGER!)

very fun, player base is dying tho, some gamemodes have no players :(, although may be dead you most likely will be able to play with others

It's a good game but the losers that no-life this thing and do nothing but snipe from one corner and face hug a wall then jump sniping are keeping new players out. I'll play story mode when I touch it again cause I have no time to waste behind those no-lifers. Also you better believe I flanked him and killed him. Absolute bozo corner snipers in this game.

The worst mistake people make is comparing this to the Garden Warfare series. There's a reason why they didn’t just name it Garden Warfare 3, it's a completely different spinoff that just happened to also be a third person shooter.
But it is actually, REALLY good. I like it more than Garden Warfare 2 (which I have 19 hours on).

As a PVP game, it's entirely the wrong kind of chaotic: even after 50 hours, you never know where you're getting hit from, what is hitting you, and you can be one-shot by invisible effects, with no death report. You can be locked into playing your least favorite character 4+ times in a row and be expected to beat a stacked team with seemingly infinite healing, while the AI on your team is stuck on the opposite side of the map. It used to be a very tryhard game with pro TF2 Sniper players sitting in places only reachable with exploits, but the randoms left still playing seem much more casual, for the most part.
As a PVE game, there are four maps with some fairly dense content, and there's a good co-op mode which used to be very popular. Despite it not living very long as a "live service," what's here is still a very enjoyable third-person shooter. Some of the challenges are properly tough, the boss battles are consistently fun, and it's unfortunate that the "collectathon" content can only be done once. Very solid even just for single player, and I've never felt the need to consider the cash shop, as the battle pass is very grindable and rewarding, as well as the cosmetics obtainable with coins. Old or not, certainly worth considering, when on sale.
Addendum: Okay. After the grueling grind that was the achievement, "Time to Seriously Go Outside," I maintain that the game is, overall, fun, but it's not fun for achievement hunting. Particularly, the methods of grinding experience for the achievement demonstrate a lot of the game's flaws, such as how there had been multiple nerfs to experience grinding, and sometimes characters, without any real reshaping of the goals to compensate. As well, the game almost always puts you on the team you're not currently set up to grind in private matches, as if trying to punish you by giving reduced Coins.
It seems to be rather well-known that the AI cheats, as was in Garden Warfare, but the ways in which it cheats are the frustration; most people suggest grinding against teams of only Cactus or Captain Deadbeard, and this is good advice, because they kind of can't shoot you—like, at all. Except for when the AI decides it's time to delete you, in which case a single Captain Deadbeard can remove a fully overhealed Oak in three shots with frame-perfect input. Here are some of the fun ways Captain Deadbeard can cheat:
Can Anchor's Away to specific "clipping points" on the map, at greatly extended distance. Can both enter and exit Barrel Blast while being carried by Anchor's Away. Can exit Barrel Blast at any time. Can ignore all damage while in Barrel Blast, guaranteeing multiple vanquishes. Can calculate exact hit zones for all plants in the area to maximize damage.
What's worse, characters just earn experience at different rates. Captain Brainz and Chomper are better played on offense than defense, and you'll begin to gaslight yourself into thinking Rose's Arcane Enigma in the full team is better experience than just hoping you can get assist. (It's not.) Meanwhile, Engineer can sit atop the payload and hold left click for two minutes at a time, achieving Master rank in half the time.
It did suck all the fun out of the game, but not everyone cares about getting rare achievements, or knows the servers are going to likely be up for a long time and they can play at their own pace. It doesn't feel accomplishing because there was no challenge, only monotony, the game's excellent sound design just never wore.

Don't let the bad reviews on this game deter you from buying it. The game itself is incredibly well made and is a ton of fun. The game offers so much, pvp, pve, open world exploration, boss fights, etc. I don't see why so many people dislike this game. Its very well thought out and is a ton of fun. At the time of writing this review I got the game yesterday, and already have over 11 hours on it. The replayability is endless with so many things to do. With multiple different side quests and optional things I could write an essay on just those alone. The game offers hundreds of hours of playtime, and very rarely gets boring.

Summary:

9/10
Excellent game, loads of fun to play with lots to do. Excellent graphics and game play as well.

While this game is definitely not as good as Garden Warfare 1 & 2, it is still a pretty fun game.
The characters are a LOT more balanced than the first two games making it so that you can play as any character and still have fun. In the first two games certain characters were just garbage and hard to use while in this game the characters are all good so that's a plus for this game.
There are some nice added features that they didn't have in the first two games like sprinting. The sprinting animations are very goofy and cartoony which i didn't like at first but it started to grow on me. I started to like the goofy animations because in the end this is a goofy game.
They added a ton of new characters to add new playstyles to the game, however, they got rid of character variations in place for the new skins system. There are no longer character variations which kinda sucks as it was in the first two games. If you haven't played the first two games then basically the character variations were like skins for your characters that actually changed how the character plays. The characters weapons could be different or be used differently and stuff like that. They replaced this system by only adding cosmetics and no character variations which is about my only complaint about this game. The new characters are all very unique and there are more characters than in the previous games with cool new abilities.
All in all I would rate this game about a 7/10. I would only recommend buying this game on sale along with the first two games. It is a very good game and it is fun. you can still very easily find multiplayer matches because it fills up the spaces that it couldn't find players for with bots. BTW the trailer song is a banger so go listen to that if you haven't already.