Love Yourself Some Plants Vs Zombies On Your Android Device? Leave Devil Alone Is A Very Decent Clone That Just Hit The Market

Android Police

Plants Vs Zombies

I loved Plants Vs Zombies on my PC. LOVED it. I don't get excited by games much anymore but Plants Vs Zombies by PopCap captured my full attention for weeks when it just came out a couple of years back. A version for the iPhone came out later and enjoyed similar success to the original game. PopCap's Android page, however, has been quite empty. Literally:

Will PopCap ever release an Android variant? It's possible, but in the meantime, we have to quench our PvZ thirst by finding existing alternatives in the Market.

Leave Devil Alone

A few days ago, a new game called Leave Devil Alone by a relatively unknown publisher GZORZ showed up in the new releases section of the Android Market. When I went to check it out, I found what essentially ended up being a clone of the Plants Vs Zombies concept. And a pretty damn good clone at that.

Sure, some of the menus contain broken English, and the welcome message was even written in one of the Asian languages without any translation - all it did was lower my expectations. Once, I played the game for the first 5 minutes, I knew GZORZ was onto something - something great and quite polished. The level of detail in everything but the English text is pretty stunning. The gameplay is enjoyable, though, as many complained, gets hard fast.

The Gameplay

If you are not familiar with the concept of Plants Vs Zombies, it is very simple. You start on the left and plant... plants, or in our case here, weird creatures that attack the zombies arriving from the right, or in our case some sort of guardian-looking dudes. As you go through game levels fighting, surviving, and collecting money, you unlock more and more creatures for your army as well as magic spells that can help sway battles in your favor.

The gameplay was only half of the reason behind original PvZ's huge success - the other half lay in the excellent humor and crafty cartoonish graphics. Leave Devil Alone doesn't quite reach that same level of humor or graphics but at least the gameplay does not disappoint. Overall, I am still quite surprised how well it is done.

Price

The game is free, but after some time, I noticed a sneakily positioned Buy Full Game link on the main screen. Apparently, only the first few levels are available in the free version of the LDA. The Buy link opens up some sort of a Paypal library window, built right into the game itself.

When it was working yesterday, I was reluctant to punch in my password in a random window that may or may not belong to the real Paypal. Today, this window doesn't even work.

While I realize the manufacturer's desire to make LDA available to users in all those countries without official paid Android Markets while saving some dough and not paying Google any commission, I would really rather see an additional separate Market version the lucky ones of us can just purchase. At least it would be safe, and would hopefully, you know, work.