Plants vs. Zombies

Plants vs. Zombies puts the player in the role of a gardener who plants defenders on a lawn grid to protect the house from waves of advancing zombies. The foundation is a simple tower defense — plants instead of towers, sun instead of mana — but PopCap Games packed it with so many ideas (a peashooter, mushrooms that put the night to sleep, a catapulted watermelon) that a genre previously associated mainly with PC strategy games suddenly worked as a light, relaxing game for a broad audience with no prior strategy experience.

The game came out in 2010 and arrived on mobile phones shortly after its success on PC, where it showed that touch controls — dragging a plant card with a finger onto the chosen tile — are more natural for this type of game than a mouse and clicking. The humor, the cartoonish visual style, and the gentle difficulty curve made it one of the most accessible strategy games ever, playable even by children and casual players with no experience of the tower defense genre.

The mobile version stayed a paid game for a long time without aggressive monetization, which sets it apart from its later sequel and most of the other genre copycats that followed it. That purity — pay once and play without restrictions — is one of the reasons the game is still remembered today as one of the gold standards of the tower defense genre, on mobile and beyond. A soundtrack with a slightly ironic, circus-like flavor and the recognizable zombie character with a traffic cone on its head also gave the game a visual identity that players still recognize at a glance today.

Why play it: Recommended for anyone looking for an entry point into the tower defense genre — it's funny, clear, and unlike its sequel, it doesn't push you to reach for your wallet every few minutes.