Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition
BANGER · Strategy · 2009
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 8.2h
- Value
- $0.61/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 128MB of video memory, 16-bit or 32-bit color quality. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Zombies are invading your home, and the only defense is your arsenal of plants! Armed with an alien nursery-worth of zombie-zapping plants like peashooters and cherry bombs, you'll need to think fast and plant faster to stop dozens of types of zombies dead in their tracks.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
October 2016 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. Its cuts run 60 percent off as a rule. There have been 55 in the 14 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is the best reviewed of its genre. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Bloons TD 6 ($13.99, scores 87) and Bejeweled® 3 ($4.99, scores 96).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $12.28. It costs $4.99.
87 from critics against 98 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 20 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written September 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 93 percent of the 11,374 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 8.2 hours; clearing it takes 43, which is 5.2 times the campaign.
Still 2.7K concurrent players, 17 years in.
The drop-off
82% start to 9% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
2,656 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
nostalgia really blinds cause this way better than i remember. the main story mode progression is honestly a little snack compared to the puzzles and minigames, which are the best part in my opinion. the strategy aspect is not that complicated at all, you will mostly use the same plants over and over, with someplants getting used maybe a couple of times as necessary. The grind for some achievements is ferocious, but...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition scores 97/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/3590/plants-vs-zombies-goty-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.