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Plants vs Zombies Neighborville makes zombie chaos fun

18 June 2026

A kid friendly AxelGamer look at Plants vs Zombies Battle for Neighborville, with silly zombie missions, plant battles, hidden gnomes, and heaps of backyard chaos.

Plants vs Zombies Battle for Neighborville is one of those games where the idea sounds completely cooked, but then you play it and it somehow makes sense. Plants are fighting zombies, zombies are launching rockets, and everyone is running around a colourful town like the garden has turned into a giant playground battle. It is not trying to be serious, and that is why I reckon it works.

I watched my AxelGamer video again where I was playing on the zombie side, and it reminded me how random the game feels in a good way. At the start I was just trying to pick a zombie and remember the controls. That is honestly pretty normal, because there are lots of characters and buttons, and sometimes you spend half the time going, wait, which button does the cool thing again? Then suddenly you are firing a rocket, hiding behind a roof, or getting chased by a plant that looks way too angry for something that lives in a garden.

The game was made by PopCap and published by EA. It first came out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows in 2019, and the Complete Edition came to Nintendo Switch in 2021. EA says the game has 20 fully customisable character classes, a social region, free roam regions and different player versus player modes. The Switch Complete Edition also packed in the post launch stuff and made the unlocks work without a premium store, which is pretty nice if you just want to play and collect things.

What I like most is that every character feels a bit silly. In the video I used a zombie with a big cannon style attack, and I kept trying to line up shots from far away. Sometimes it worked and I felt like a genius. Other times I missed completely and had to reload while the plants started spotting me. That is the funny bit. You can try to play carefully, but the game keeps throwing goofy moments at you.

There are also little discoveries everywhere. I found coins, looked around broken houses, got confused by a beach area, and even found a golden gnome. That kind of thing makes the world feel more interesting than just a normal battle map. You are not only shooting peas or rockets. You are poking around corners, wondering what a weird object is, and getting distracted by shiny stuff. I like games that reward mucking around, because sometimes the best part is not winning straight away. It is finding something strange and yelling about it.

The plant enemies are funny too because they look cute, but they can absolutely wreck you if you stop paying attention. A Peashooter is basically a plant with a face, but when it starts blasting at you, it does not feel harmless at all. The Wildflower enemies are small, but they still make battles messy. That is a cool trick from Plants vs Zombies. It looks friendly and bright, but the fights can still get intense.

I think Battle for Neighborville is best when you do not take it too seriously. If you treat it like a super serious shooter, you might get annoyed when everything becomes chaos. But if you treat it like a silly backyard war with upgrades, coins and ridiculous characters, it becomes heaps more fun. You can try a mission, swap characters, test abilities and laugh when your plan goes wrong.

The controls can be a bit confusing at first, especially when you are swapping upgrades or trying to remember how to jump. In the video I had that exact problem, and it made me laugh because I was trying to look cool while also forgetting basic buttons. But once you get used to it, the game gives you a lot to mess with. Upgrades can change how your character plays, and choosing a different zombie or plant can make the same area feel fresh again.

For younger players, I reckon it is a good fit if your family is okay with cartoon shooting. It is not realistic or gross. It is plants and zombies bonking each other with pea blasts, rockets, goo and silly powers. The humour is more wacky than scary. Some characters are creepy in a funny way, but it is still colourful and over the top.

My favourite thing is that the game lets you be a bit cheeky. You can hide somewhere, line up a massive shot, then panic when enemies notice you. You can run into a mission without fully understanding it and still have a laugh. You can collect coins and hunt gnomes and pretend you totally meant to do whatever just happened.

So yes, Plants vs Zombies Battle for Neighborville is still a fun one for AxelGamer. It has zombie chaos, plant battles, bright maps, weird secrets and enough silly mistakes to make a video entertaining. It is the sort of game where you might start by saying, I will just do one quick mission, and then suddenly you are changing upgrades, searching for more coins, and trying to defeat one more angry plant before dinner.