Hey everyone! Is anyone still here? I still check MSXL on a regular basis, and it's a shame there's not more discussion going on, what with so many great new games on the horizon! I wanted to talk a bit about Garden Warfare, and the fact that pretty much every review I've read, although positive, is leaving out what is great about this game. First off, I'll say right off the bat that this is a fantastic game. It's the most "next-gen" thing I've played on my Xbox One, as the graphics are absolutely gorgeous, and the game runs perfectly at 60fps in 900p. That said, there are two aspects of this game that take it from good to great, and they are two things that are practically not mentioned at all in reviews. [b]Gardens and Graveyards[/b] Garden Ops (horde mode) and Team Vanquish (team deathmatch) game modes are pretty boring, and yet those are the modes that are outlined in every review. Garden Ops, while certainly challenging, offers the least interesting gameplay in Garden Warfare. Team Vanquish games, on the other hand, don't feel very balanced, and the matches are waaaaay too short (they should be first to 100 kills instead of 50). The bread and butter of this game is it's "rush" mode: Gardens and Graveyards. It's interesting to note that this game is built on the Battlefield 4 Frostbite 3 engine, so I imagine it wasn't too difficult to port over rush mode from the Battlefield series. This mode is a known favorite in the Battlefield series, and it translates perfectly to Garden Warfare. At it's core, this mode involves plants defending a single point, while zombies try to attack it, but it's much more complex that that. In order to start capping a garden, there needs to be more zombies than plants in the proximity. Once the zombies reach a majority, the bar starts going from green to purple. The only way for plants to gain a majority is to physically be within the garden's radius. However, as a zombie you can spawn AI zombies at areas outside of the garden that will count towards the total zombie count in addition to human players. In addition to that, the engineer class of zombie can get to a randomly spawned teleporter point, build it, and instantly halve the time it takes for newly spawned zombies to get to the garden. He can defend this point by building turrets, but the plants can destroy the teleporter with enough fire power. This brings in an entire meta game, and often the battle on a map turns to a battle for a teleporter more than a battle for the garden! The zombie teams that don't know about building teleporters are the zombie teams that lose. G&G matches are intense, and constantly sway back and forth. If you manage to push the plants back to their final objectives, things get even more intense. Each final objective presents a unique and difficult task in order to win the game. One involves chipping away the health of a giant sunflower until it's destroyed, while another involves planting 4 charges at the base of a "tactical cuke" (giant cucumber missile, lol). Many people contribute the difficulty for zombies to destroy these final objectives as a balance issue. Not so at all, as the difficulty makes things all the sweeter when you can pull it off! It's not supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be challenging, and in turn, rewarding! G&G is the mode that has kept me coming back to this game. [b]SmartGlass Integration[/b] The other surprisingly awesome (and unspoken) feature of Garden Warfare is it's awesome integration with Microsoft's SmartGlass app for tablets. It took me a week to figure out how to do this (I kind of stumbled onto it), so I don't completely fault reviewers for not mentioning it, but it's awesome and needs to be described. In Team Vanquish and Gardens & Graveyards, players have the chance to go into "Boss Mode", which is the same idea as Battlefield 4's "Commander" mode. Battlefield 4 has a great app for this mode on tablets, but playing on a tablet means someone can't play on the Xbox One using your same account. They are two separate things, and you have to choose to play one or the other. In Garden Warfare, you can do [i]both at the same time[/i]. What this means is this: while I'm in a game, my wife can hop onto the couch, snatch up our iPad, and (as long as someone on the Xbox isn't in boss mode) can instantly become the boss for [i]the match i'm currently playing in.[/i] That means that we can both communicate on where she should drop an airstrike, revive sprinkler, heal flower, or radar beacon. In addition to being able to actually work as a team, all of the points she gets for playing as the boss are added to my score! In the first game we played with her as the boss on our iPad, I got 4 out of the 6 end-match awards! One was for healing, and I wasn't even a healing character! It was awesome. For those that think the boss is over-powered, it's not. You can actually destroy the boss by shooting it out of the sky, which requires a short respawn timer and resets the boss's currency they use to purchase abilities. In addition, the boss only has a single offensive move, and while it can certainly deal damage, it doesn't deal instant damage, and can be easily avoided. Either way, this mode is amazing, and would work especially well for parents who have children who can't quite use a controller yet. So there you have it, two great features of this game that have kept my wife and I addicted since launch. If anyone else has this game, and has not yet added me as a friend on Xbox One, feel free to do so! (the smi1ey) Sadly, I won't be able to join you until the March update is released, because I signed up for the beta like a moron, and now I can't accept party invites from people who don't have it (I unregistered since). That said, I can still add you!