Celebrate the holidays with family-friendly shooter Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 tonight on Beam

Every weekend, Windows Central livestreams an Xbox One or Steam game for 1-2 hours and gives out free games to the cool people who join us during the stream. It's like a live podcast, only you also get to watch a game while chatting with our awesome readers and viewers!

Tonight on Beam, we'll be playing Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, the family-friendly 3rd-person shooter from EA. Garden Warfare is celebrating a holiday event right now, plus it just got an exciting new online split-screen feature. Read on for quick impressions, contest winners, and the full video replay of the livestream.

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

The original Plants vs. Zombies was a zany tower defense game. After EA acquired developer PopCap, they followed up with a mobile-exclusive sequel and a much more action-packed spin-off called Garden Warfare. Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is a bigger, better family-friendly third-person shooter featuring lots of competitive and cooperative goodness.

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The zombies have overrun the town of Suburbia thanks to interference from the future. The war-torn city now functions as the game's hub world, with both factions occupying a camp on opposite sides of the map. From your home base, players can take on story-based solo quests, multiplayer-focused daily challenges, customize their characters, and more.

The first Garden Warfare was only really good as a competitive online game, but the sequel opens things up by making all modes available in single-player, split-screen, and online. The four-player co-op mode can now be played with zombies in addition to plants, adding some welcome variety. And 12-versus-12 online battles still offer plenty of frenzied competition.

Garden Warfare 2 recently received a major update that allows split-screen players to join in online games, opening up a whole new realm of fun for local players. And the current in-game holiday event gives players lots of ways to earn festive outfits and decorations. It's the perfect way to kill some time (and zombies) with family this holiday season!

See on the Xbox Store

The Contest

We streamed Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 for ~90 minutes tonight. During that time, we gave out a total of 6 Garden Warfare 2 game codes:

2 for Xbox One
2 for PlayStation 4 (North American accounts only)
2 for Origin (PC)

See the contest winners at the end of this post.

How to watch Beam livestreams

We're now streaming on Beam, Microsoft's interactive livestreaming platform. It provides some welcome improvements over Twitch, such as a cleaner website layout, built-in stream interactivity, and extremely low latency.

You can follow our channel at Beam.pro/WindowsCentral. From there, you'll be able to watch the stream and participate in chat directly from any web browser, including the Xbox One and Windows Phone browsers.

To receive email notifications when our Beam streams go live:

First, follow our channel.
Now select your profile from the top-right corner of the screen.
Pick the Account option near the bottom of the menu.
Go to the Notifications tab.
Make sure Send me important email updates on the Beam platform is enabled. This option is labeled deceptively, but it's required for all forms of email notifications.
Click or tap the Email box next to our channel name until a check appears. That's it!
We highly recommend that you set a recurring alarm on your phone. Our weekend stream always starts at the same time (9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific), so the phone reminder can be very helpful.

Beam does not offer Xbox One or Windows Phone apps yet, so watching from the browser is the only option on Microsoft platforms. But Beam does offer apps on Android and iOS. Yes, that's a strange inequity. Native Xbox and Windows 10 support is coming though, so stick with us!

Future streams

Want to know what's next for Windows Central's weekend Beam programming? We stream a different game every Saturday (and sometimes Sunday). The stream always starts at the same time: 9pm Eastern (8pm Central, 6pm Pacific, 2am GMT). Over the next few weeks, we'll be streaming the following (schedule not finalized):

December 24: Jackbox Party Pack 3. Join us for this special holiday party stream. Everyone can play along without owning the game, and we'll have extra prizes to give away!
December 31: Little Acre, the beautiful adventure game coming to Xbox, PlayStation, and PC in December. Win a copy of your own!

We hope you'll tune in as often as you can! Set a recurring alarm on your phone so you'll always know when it's time for the stream to start.