Contrary to what the help section says, your objective is to actually protect your house from the zombies, who as mentioned above, want a piece of your brain for dinner. Behind all the goofiness and cuteness, is a seriously well balanced real time strategy tower defense game. The gameplay is simple. The primary objective is to defend your home or ‘tower’ using the ‘units’ at your disposal, which in this case happen to be plants that happen to shoot stuff. Your battlefield is your lawn, which is drawn up into a grid, in which a plant can be grown in every square. The grid contains five ‘lanes’ in which the zombies creep, crawl, charge, vault and even moonwalk towards your home. Your task is to place the plants at your disposal so as to counter the advancing zombies. Sounds simple enough.

At first, you have a small number of plants available, namely various kinds of pea shooters (plants that shoot peas) and walnuts (or rather wall-nuts) which act as walls, slowing the enemy down there are also stuff like vines that entangle the zombies, and potato mines that explode on impact. Up to 6 of these can be selected for use in each level. For the plants to grow, you need sunlight, which is available freely in the form of little suns that fall from the sky. You must catch these suns to fill up your sun meter, which in turn allows you to plant more plants. Each plant has a sunlight requirement to purchase and a reload time which has to pass before you buy another plant of the same kind. There are sunflowers which actually produce sun light, so having a few planted in your garden helps with filling the sun meter. The early levels are pretty simple with nothing much happening other than a few zombies with little or no armor crawling towards you in a number of waves. These can be taken care of with a few sunflowers and pea shooters. Each level completed unlocks new plant varieties, new tools and cool new mini games, such as zombie bowling using walnuts!

Variety and creativity take this basic mission structure and turn it into something special. Just when you've gotten your daytime defense strategy down, the zombies decide to attack at night and you have a whole new set of plants to manage. In the latter stages of the game, you will be dealing with the zombies in your backyard rather than your lawn, and there will be snorkeling zombies which try to creep in. New units come along that fit the new environments, and this steady trickle of new elements helps keep the gentle difficulty curve from becoming dull. All of the units are cleverly realized and adorably animated. Happy sunflowers bob merrily as they fuel your defense efforts, and pole-vaulting zombies jog toward your house with gangly athleticism. The visual charm makes the game a pleasure to look at, and it helps keep things feeling fresh.