YMMV / Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville

• Awesome Music: The theme song. A happy funky song with a very catchy chorus and rap vocals to complement. For your convenience, here's the full version!
  Come on down to Neighborville
  Come on down to Neighborville
  Love it here, and we know you will
  Come on down to Neighborville!
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Expect to see many Engineers, whose powerful abilities give him a pretty low skill cap. Unlike most characters he’s even capable of damaging you with his primary without you being in his line of sight, and you can walk into his projectiles and get hurt even if they straight up miss. Most of his abilities are some of the best in the game; Bullhorn Swarm is a stun that lasts for centuries, and Heavy Helper is a Big Bolt Blaster that fires by itself and essential gives zombies that stand near it infinite ammo.
  • Acorns at launch would frequently stay in their Oaks for the entire game, since the Acorn by itself was basically a Joke Character. Oak has a crazy amount of health (even more with the Hardened upgrade and three passengers), a powerful splash damage weapon with a huge clip, and Super Sap Trap, which is That One Attack as explained below. However, once the TTK changes were put in place, things completely flip flopped, as entire Plant teams would be nothing but Acorns zooming around and going on massive killstreaks. The reason for this is that the patch significantly increased Acorn's damage. The class already had one of the largest clip sizes and fire rates, so even 7 damage per shot still stings like hell. Compounding this, Acorn is as small as the Imp, but with much more health (125 with Hardened) so he basically became a Lightning Bruiser.
  • Night Cap's small size, equally small hitbox, combined with above-average speed and very speedy attacks, and you got yourself a veritable mainstay.
• Goddamned Boss: Each of the quest bosses can be this, but two stand out:
  • Olds Cool, particularly in his phases in which he sits in the center of the arenas while three walls of glass panes spin around him, forcing you to shoot holes in them through which you can pass through. Depending on what character you've chosen, this can be incredibly difficult as the character hitbox and primary weapon make a world of difference in this phase. It becomes even worse when the walls regenerate, as they don't stop moving when doing so and thus can reform right as you're about to pass through a hole you've made, dealing tons of damage.
  • Dreadwood. Most of the fight takes place on an arena where it is easy to get knocked off by Dreadwood and the plants he summons. Getting back up to him is a chore, as you have to press the switch to activate a nearby launcher to take you up to him while dodging the Dreadroots. Then you get Dreadwood’s health down and find out he’s a Shielded Core Boss with spots that need to be shot, and if all of them aren’t destroyed in time, he heals. Repeat this four more times.
  • On a lesser (yet still infuriating) note, any and all Battle Leaders/Elusive Foes that have or gain limited invulnerability or give it to others. Special mention to Weirding Wood’s Elusive Foes, who each use this gimmick in one form or another.
• Memetic Badass: Major Sweetie has been on the good side of "Hidden Badass" style memes, being seen as an absolute ass-kicker, a War criminal, even racist.
• Narm: "That zombie has a beautiful voice" in the theme song sounds somewhat funny for how cheesy and forced it sounds.
• That One Attack: A surprising amount of abilities are very dangerous, compared to previous games.
  • Fung Fu is probably the most hated. It causes Nightcap to zip around quickly, doing massive damage in a very short amount of time. She is basically invincible during the attack, and even if you do escape in time, Nightcap is pretty slippery and can hide out until the ability recharges.
  • Super Sap Trap was clearly intended to be a sticky bomb like ability, but it was quickly discovered that it's way more efficient to shoot it like a ZPG. Its way faster, has a disgusting large hitbox, and could be stuck to a Chomper for sneaky kills.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Crystal Dog medals. To get it, you must bring a Crystal Dog to the Strange Well in each region. The Dog is dropped by the Treasure Yeti, a boss infamous in the Garden Warfare games for fleeing after he's been chased for a certain amount of time. He has loads of health, can slow you and if he burrows underground to flee, you have to find him again and start over. Zombies have to chase down the functionally similar Marigold instead, which is just as frustrating. Worse, even if you do manage to defeat them, you then have to take the Crystal Dog to the well, but picking it up disables your abilities AND causes you to take increased damage, which limits your ability to fend off all of the other enemies you’ll inevitably run into. And if you try to put it down at all, it’ll break and you’ll have to start all over again. Don’t even try this sidequest if you’re on the other side of the map.
  • The Boss Turf Takeover weekly challenges are this. The first challenge^note Open a boss chest may sound easy at first, until you realize the chance of completing this challenge in a full lobby is 1/16^note Full lobby means no AI backfill and the maximum amount of players in Boss Turf Takeover is 16 because pretty much everyone that isn't AI in the lobby will try to run towards try to open the chest, along with the possibility of enemies vanquishing you in the middle of opening it and opening the chest only counts towards the player who opens it. Even worse is if the attacking team captures an objective while the chest hasn't opened yet, the chest despawn! Since only one boss chest appears per area, except the final area, which means only 3 players can complete this challenge per match.
    • The second challenge^note Vanquish a boss is definitely easier than the first one as vanquishing a boss can be shared between players if you are careful enough,
    • The third challenge requires you to win five Turf matches as opposed to completing it^note since completing counts both wins and losses. Since Turf Takeover is one of the lengthiest mode, winning a Turf match can be tiresome and if the team composition is unbalanced, have fun.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some of the new character designs have not been as warmly received as the others. The biggest offender seems to be Rose, whose more...ahem...curvaceous body looks kind of strange.
  • The lack of variants has been very polarizing. Those in favor of them say that it gave players more things to unlock and offered up a variety of playstyles for each class. Those who are fine with no variants point out that the game's upgrades system and the multitude of skins and customization options more or less allows you to create your own variants, as well as point out that the smaller number of characters makes the game easier to balance.
• Ugly Cute: The Space Cadet has the same giant googly eyes as the other zombies, but some of her animations make her come off as the zombie equivalent of Adorkable.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: While the Denser and Wackier art style makes all the characters look okay, Rose and Citron's redesigns have been heavily criticized for looking bizarre or outright cursed to look at; specifically, Rose's eyes are spaced apart and she has a more... curvy body, while Citron traded his shades for a visor that reveals his eyes.