Battle for Neighborville is a great shooting game for people of all ages. It's fun, hilarious and definitely appealing to the group of gamers who need a break from the intense battles of much more serious shooters like Battlefield, Call of Duty and Apex Legends. With 21 current playable character classes, you'll never lack for choice and the game also tells you what role each class is specialised in, whether it's Attack, Defend or Support.
The social hub, Giddy Park is definitely a lot more fun than the Backyard Battleground with Public hubs, unique modes like the Dance Hall of Obedience, competitions like Bounty Hunts or Trolley Target Shooting and is a great way to practice your skills or test new upgrades you unlocked.
Multiplayer is definitely the biggest part of Battle for Neighborville, and the Playlists are fun, various and different and the weekly LTMs never make you bored of the main Playlists.
In my opinion, each Playlist in Mixed Modes should be separate so fans of Suburbination don't have to hope that it's not Gnome Bomb.
Probably my least favourite way to play Battle for Neighborville is the PvE free roam regions. It provides a route into Multiplayer but the missions are largely repetitive fetch quests for three items and after you take down a large boss you have to hunt for resources. After hours of grinding to 100% complete every region, that's pretty much it. I like the campaign in Garden Warfare 2 more than Battle for Neighborville's PvE but here's hoping the developers update each region frequently and don't just leave us bored.
I have decided to give BfN a solid 7.8/10.
Multiplayer and the Giddy Park social hub are great strong points for the game but the repetitive and fairly mundane PvE really pulls the game from a well deserved nine.
To improve the game, PopCap could:
- Frequently update free roam regions and add more campaign
- Implement Cross Platform Progression and Play
- Release a Switch version
- Bring back Torchwood and Hover Goat: two really hard to unlock characters we only got to use in Garden Warfare 2
- Have a max of 24 classes - the 4 extras being Wizard, New Plant Character and Torchwood and Hover Goat
- Bring Private/Solo Play from GW2 - Solo Play should not be limited to PvE.
I would appreciate it so much if an EA Community Manager could pass this onto the PvZ BFN development team at PopCap Vancouver because these are points from various sources like the BFN Discord.
Thanks for reading my review!
