Just as importantly, the game's experience (XP) grind no longer hinges on challenges that players have to complete in order-which made the original game's endgame grind pretty brutal, since a single impossible-to-fetch challenge would block any progress. (EA did not provide a copy of the game on PC ahead of the game's launch, but the PC version of GW1 scaled pretty well across various configurations, and hopefully this sequel is just as flexible.)This is exactly what the game needed: a large enough spread of peculiar and specific classes so that its asymmetrical battles leave enough wiggle room for any class on either side to still have fun things to do. Thankfully, the shadow-light play and intricately detailed plant and zombie characters still look quite good, and they run at a mostly steady 60 frames per second on both consoles-though in my anecdotal experience, I actually noticed better performance on average on the Xbox One build. It's so prevalent that it borders on distracting. I didn't expect this title to stand toe-to-toe with the fidelity of Star Wars Battlefront or even Battlefield 4, but I was surprised to see so much pop-in of debris, foliage, and grass in the game's Xbox One and PlayStation 4 builds.

Visual performanceLike most EA games these days, GW2 has been built in DICE's Frostbite 3 engine. This makes certain classes less fun to play if the rest of your team favors other classes too heavily. The issues with those classes come mostly from how their array of powers leave a few too many vulnerabilities open. Last year's classes remain largely unchanged-so much so, in fact, that most unlocks accrued in the 2014 game can be automatically transferred to the new one. The sequel's most noticeable change comes from an increased number of classes on both sides of the white picket fence-and it's the game's true saving grace. Each character comes with its own primary, unlimited-ammo weapon and three recharge-to-use, class-specific powers, ranging from rocket launchers to acrobatic maneuvers, bombs, healing powers, and more. Instead of hovering over a garden and placing amped-up plants to defend against a variety of silly, undead fighters, you now take direct control of a single creature on either side of the conflict and engage in one of a few types of online, third-person-shooter battling. GW2's core concept remains the same as the original-meaning the series barely resembles the popular, accessible tower-defense game it's named after.

In short, everything good about the original 2014 game has gotten better, and everything bad about it has gotten worse. GW2 does a lousy job inviting players into its universe, because it wallops them over the head with a sloppily curated single-player campaign, a confusing meta-structure, and a ridiculous focus on grinding for content unlocks. Platform: Xbox One (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Windowsīut boy, do EA and Popcap seem to have it in for players in search of that content.

Garden story game length