There’s a decent game somewhere in Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Everything about Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 seems designed to get in the way of the thing it gets right: giant, instantly accessible team battling on the Internet. If you're looking for an enjoyable evolution of the Team Fortress formula, complete with diverse, complementary character classes and 22-minute battles across staggeringly large maps, this one's pretty danged good—and easily the most kid-friendly team-battling game of its kind.

But boy, do EA and Popcap seem to have it in for players in search of that content. 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. In short, everything good about the original 2014 game has gotten better, and everything bad about it has gotten worse.

Rambo-styled cobs of corn

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. 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. 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.

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. 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 issues with those classes come mostly from how their array of powers leave a few too many vulnerabilities open. This makes certain classes less fun to play if the rest of your team favors other classes too heavily.

That issue has been addressed by six new classes, and they're all pretty goofy-sounding. Your ass-kicking plant options now include a magical, crowd-controlling rose, a Rambo-styled cob of corn, and a slow-but-powerful orange who can access a speedy "rolling" form. Zombies, meanwhile, now have a legitimate sniper in the form of a pirate captain, along with a melee-focused superhero zombie and a really intriguing imp character. The imp packs a lot of speed and power, along with the ability to occasionally put on super-powered robot armor, but it has abysmal health stats.

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. 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. Now you can get XP for doing useful things in a battle, whether that means fulfilling an objective or successfully using a class-specific power.

Popcap didn't tinker much with the modes on offer. Like last time, the primary modes are team deathmatch and a PvZ twist on Team Fortress 2's "Payload" mode—in which one side tries to overtake each major point on a map in order, while the other side has a certain amount of time to successfully defend each point from takeover. The last game only let zombies do the attacking and plants do the defending, and luckily, this mode now flips the game in the other direction.

That's particularly good news because the game's new maps are jaw-droppingly huge—and there's no reason for only one side to have all the invading fun. The maps aren't just massive for size's sake, either. They pretty much all have criss-crossing, vertically minded designs meant to block out the kind of straight-line, defenders-just-shoot-everyone garbage that bogged down last year's Star Wars: Battlefront. Some particular standouts include a lunar outpost with fun gravity trickery, a winter-wonderland map with naturally snow-hazy paths, and a volcano-ripped island paradise with a cool mix of underground and mountain lines for invaders to pick from.

These maps house playgrounds for "Horde"-styled PVE battles as well, and these are particularly satisfying thanks both to players' class variety and some very welcome twists on the old active-tower-defense genre. In particular, certain boss characters add crazy conditions to the battles on occasion, including a need to take out certain limited-time objectives while fending off the boss or risking total defeat. (The game also includes a couple of control-point combat modes, including one where you must carry powerful bombs to destroy an enemy post while avoiding having your foe blow the bomb up while it's in your hands.)

What's more, each map in the game's major attack-defend modes comes with a unique, climactic twist that changes the win condition—and sometimes turns into an evened-odds battle that either side can win. The game does a pretty crummy job telegraphing these conditions for new players, but after a single playthrough of any map's conclusion, you'll hit an "ohhh, that's what I should've been doing" epiphany and be ready for the next round on either side.

Robo-triceratops and a meaningless flag

Sadly, most of the game's confusing content does not come with such quick relief.

For starters, the game has kicked basic text menus to the curb in favor of a large overworld, split between a plant base and a zombie base, throughout which various game modes and menus have been placed. Instead of picking through a menu to start a multiplayer game, for example, players now run up to a multiplayer stand, select some options, and then walk their character into a warp portal to go to a match. Same goes for starting campaign missions, checking character stats, and so on.