I’ll be honest: I didn’t buy into the “Plants vs. Zombies” craze at first. I’m a fan of Popcap — God alone knows how many hours I’ve lost to “Peggle” — but as clever as their peashooting strategy game sounded, I wasn’t all that impressed. I downloaded the demo for the PC and, quite frankly, found it uncompelling.

On a generous whim, I decided to give the iPhone version a try.

Have you ever heard a heavenly choir sing? It’s lovely, if a bit reminiscent of a chorus of frozen peas smacking into undead flesh. Thwack, thwack, *groan* … mm, yes, that’s lovely.

The premise of “Plants vs. Zombies” is in equal parts simple and bizzare, mixing a bit of tower defense in with progressive real-time strategy and a heaping dose of casual tongue-in-cheek goofiness. Members of the undead community are assaulting your house in droves, single-mindedly pursuing the (understandable) goal of feasting on your gray matter.

To defend against this reanimated onslaught, you apparently decided the best course of action would be a detonate a dirty bomb inside your garden shed, because plants of the normally sweet and unassuming variety have mutated to become violent killing machines of zombie death. Which is just as funny as it sounds.

The battle starts on the front lawn, and eventually moves to the back yard and up to the roof. In each case, the playable area is divided into five or six lanes. Zombies are rather stupid creatures, and will only attack in a straight line down one of the lanes. Defensive plants, for the most part, are only effective in a single lane (i.e., your peashooters only shoot at zombies in the lane they are planted in).

Sunpower is your primary resource. It falls from the sky on levels set during the day, and can be produced from certain plants. You start each level with just enough sunpower to build one or two plants, and are then forced to juggle between planting passive defenders (walnuts slow down zombies; garlic forces them to change lanes), active defenders (peashooters, starfruit), resource plants and a variety of more specialized veggies.

At the beginning of each level you’ll have to choose which plants to use. By the of the game you’ll have dozens to pick from, and you can buy upgrades that will increase the number you’re allowed to use in each level.

There are also a number of alternative game types thrown in to mix things up a bit (if the words “zombie bowling” don’t get your nerd all up in here, you have no right to call yourself a gamer). While rarely as compelling as the traditional game mode, they do offer variety and a welcome change of pace.

But those are all things that can be found in any version of this game. What makes the iPhone version so special?

The touch interface is the most obvious answer. Interacting with the game is extremely intuitive, even more intuitive than using a mouse. There’s nothing revolutionary or dramatically original about it – it just works extremely well.

Plants vs. Zombies is, of course, a casual game, and the iPhone is perfect for the casual gaming due to its mobile nature. I find myself pulling it out and mowing down a few shambling cadavers several times a day for a few minutes at a time. I’ve never had so much fun waiting for a meeting to start.

There are occasional performance issues when the corpses descend en masse, but nothing so bad that it detracts from the experience.

The iPhone was made for games like this. Not for phone calls or playing music, as some seem be mistakenly believe. No. It was made for “Plants vs. Zombies.” Fire up your app store and get this game, then let me know what your take on it is.

Jerod Jarvis is an independent gaming journalist and founder of Duality Games. He maintains gaming columns for The Washington Times Communities and for The Outpost. When not blogging madly about games, he freelances for the Spokesman-Review in his hometown of Spokane, Washington and attends school at Whitworth University. Check out his presence on Facebook and Twitter to stay up on Duality Games updates and the inside scoop on the gaming news you care about.