With Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, the developer PopCap has turned the popular tablet-based tower defense series into a family-friendly multiplayer shooter for Xbox One and Xbox 360. The Plants vs. Zombies console game can be played in tower defense survival mode, similar to the tablet games, or competitive, which becomes more like an online co-operative multiplayer shooter like Battlefield or Call of Duty.

The competitive mode is 12 on 12 and players choose from plants or zombies, which each have four classes. The four classes are assault, medic, tank, and damage dealer types and each has three special abilities that focus on supporting the team in a specific way. The Garden Warfare or tower defense mode can be played alone or with up to four players. Crazy Dave drops the players onto a map, who then pick places to plant the garden to defense from the incoming hordes of zombies until Dave returns for the pickup. There are ten waves of zombies that swarm the extraction zone, some featuring familiar zombies while others have new boss zombies.

The only thing that some people dislike is how Xbox Live Gold is required to play the game. One writer for iTWire reported that "There is a split-screen local multiplayer mode with endless waves available, so long as you have a second controller and a friend and don't mind the horrid squinty split screen. Try to actually play the single-player campaign mission, however, and you are absolutely out of luck.

"The game has an online multiplayer mode and this too requires Xbox Live Gold."

When Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ for short) debuted on tablets several years ago, the strategy game that requires users to defend a garden from zombies by placing plants over a grid based board was an instant hit. The game actually began on Windows but found a natural interface in the touch screen of phones and tablets where the game became popular due to its colorful and humorous characters. The valuable franchise was later bought by Electronic Arts who released the sequel, Plants vs. Zombies 2. That game featured more expensive in-app purchases, although none were required to unlock all the levels.