Garden Warfare's Boss Mode is "our version of Commander Mode"

We caught up with producer Brian Lindley to discuss the playable zombies of Garden Warfare and the intriguing Boss Mode.

As you may already be aware Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is a co-operative shooter set in the Plants vs. Zombies universe that adds some elements of the tower defence for good measure and allows you to play as zombies as well:

"I personally like the engineeer," says Lindely. "Both due to his apparel or lack there of in various locations, and just the mix of abilities and the role he plays on the battlefield."

Apart from the engineer, there is also the vanilla soldier class, the all-star (former football star) and the scientist.

"All of their abilities have been designed to work together as a sort of fighting unit. The one who kind of leads the charge is probably the soldier. The soldier is this just kind of standard infantry class. He's the guy who's going to run around, do a lot of damage, kind of create a lot of havoc. But when you combine him with some of the other classes, like the scientist for example, who is a healer but he also has a really powerful short range attack. He can warp in and take out zombies really quickly. But he also can drop healing stations around the battlefield for his zombie teammates.

"You combine these two classes you get really powerful, but if you start to get the other classes involved like the engineer. Well, he's got a lot of tactical abilities where he can throw stun grenades and incapacitate the plant team temporarilly for his other teammates to come in. He also has this jack hammer ability, he can activate things like these teleporters at strategic locations in the battlefield. So he's really critical to tactical gameplay. And then you throw the All-Star into the mix who is just the straight up heavy damage dealer style character. A lot of fun to play, super humorous shooting his football cannon all over the battlefield."

Exclusive to the Xbox One version is Boss Mode, that can either be played with Kinect or a tablet through Smartglass.

"Basically in a nutshell it's our version of Commander Mode, but for Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. And when you're playing Boss Mode you're going to have a top view of the battlefield. Using Kinect you're just using simple motion controls and gestures to collect resources and deploy things on the battlefield to help your team. But if you have a Smartglass compatible device you can get that same exact experience with the touch interface. You know the best way we love to play it at the office is actually have one player that's in the battle using the controller and the player sitting next to them with Smartglass just helping them as the boss and they're getting their team to victory."

Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is planned for release early next year on PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.