So Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a reverse tower defense game that released on the PC a year ago with an iOS quickly done. 11 Bit Studio turned the tower defense genre on its head with their unique title that put you in control of the creep going up against the towers and it’s finally made its way to the 360. Given its difference from traditional tower defense games, it’s pleases me to say that this isn’t some cheap port and the controls are actually quite smooth.
Anomaly: Warzone Earth
Developer: 11 Bit Studio
Price: $10 (800 points)
Platform: Xbox 360 (reviewed)
Anomaly throws you in control of the commander who leads a squad of six potential units and your goal is simple: kill the aliens. There isn’t much else to the story in the game besides the short mission briefing you can choose to read and the minor quips Random Army Guy #393 says during the mission. The game will take you from Baghdad to Tokyo in 14 missions that will all last you a few hours depending on your skill. I blew through the campaign in around 3 hours while a friend of mine took a bit longer. The game does have an odd pacing to it with it introducing new alien units and human units at a nice pace, but all of these missions are complete pushovers. It’s not until mission 12 that the difficulty suddenly ramps up and the stages are brimming with enemies when compared to the previous 11 stages where you’d have a clear path between many enemies down a street and little to none; the last 3 missions are so littered with enemies you have no good choices.
The game itself controls fantastically with your commander tied to the left stick, sprinting is on the L trigger, speeding up time for everyone is on the R trigger, and all your commands are tied to the face buttons that open up some slick looking menus. Everything is just as easy and fast to do as it was on the PC, if not a little better since I found controlling the commander with the analog stick a lot smoother. The main idea of Anomaly is that it’s a reverse tower-defense game, the way that this works is that you press the Y button to bring up a tactical view of the map highlighting your route, alien artifacts, and the aliens themselves. In here you’ll be able to change the route your squad will take through the various ravaged cities. Don’t bother sticking to your first route because you’ll soon learn that you’ll need to switch up your route many times through missions. As you play the game you’ll unlock power-ups that you can use to help keep your squad from becoming scrap metal. The commander himself is technically invulnerable; he can take hits and die, but he’ll get back up in 5 seconds. Of course, you don’t necessarily want him to die because those are 5 seconds of vulnerability for your squad which can mean the difference between success and failure. The power-ups you use all deploy in a circled area that run on a short timer so you’ll need to figure out the best places to drop them so you can get the maximum efficiency from their limited use. You’ll come across your typical healing aura, a smokescreen that makes enemies less likely to hit anything in the circle, a decoy to divert enemy attention, and an air bombing run. These are in limited supply with certain checkpoints granting you a few extra and a supply jet dropping some after certain enemies are killed, so you’ll have to be smart about what you use and if you really need it.
There is some variety with the units available to you, but not by much. There’s the APC which does pathetic damage but can take some hits, a crawler that does quite a bit of damage but is made of glass, a unit that shields 2 others, a tank, a twin flamethrower dragon tank, and a truck that feeds off your abilities to deploy power-ups for you. Most players will realize how useless the APC is once they acquire the shielding vehicle and by the end of the game you’ll learn how amazing the Tank followed by crawlers, shields, and a supply truck is. I did find the enemies having a bit more variety with your typical cannon fodder turrets, shield draining beam snipers, massive behemoths, and two of the most dick enemy support units I’ve ever seen. The first is the hacker that drops homing force fields onto your commander. If he’s in the force field then any of your units who are also in it will open fire on him instead of the enemy. Not a big deal if you stay out, but later missions have such tighter areas with little movement that it gets a little annoying. The one I have a problem with, who I forgot the name, drains the energy from your power-ups (that are within range) and can also resurrect any of its fallen allies. Since the game blew through the introduction of the enemy I had no understanding on its resurrection ability. My only plan was to run my commander straight to those fuckers and bomb the hell out of them. The game really would’ve benefited from a sort of codex or fact sheet detailing the various things in the game. It could not only give you a better understanding of the strengths/weaknesses between units, but it could possibly get into a bit of some backstory for the game which would also be nice.
Just as you’d expect you can upgrade your vehicles with any cash you earn by destroying enemies or picking up alien artifacts. I did feel that there was a slight unbalance to the upgrade system that tied slightly with the difficulty pacing of the game. As I said before, the first 11 missions are complete pushovers yet you won’t ever get much money to upgrade more than maybe 3-5 units to the first upgrade tier; on the other hand, the final 3 missions toss so much money at you it’ll be impossible to not have all your guys rolling around at least at the second tier (there are 3 tiers). It’s not a big deal since I didn’t really need the upgrades previously to finish the missions, but it really felt odd that they would include it and barely let me use it to its full potential until the end. There is the option of selling a unit, but I never really saw the point in doing it unless you have loads of extra cash and accidentally picked an APC over something useful.
So as the entitled gamers you are, you’re probably thinking “Hey, I should get something extra for months of wait” and you’d be happy to know that you do get something extra. You’ll be treated to a new mode called Tactical Trials that includes 6 new missions that take place in a virtual setting. The virtual reality setting is a nice break from the destroyed cities from the campaign and the missions actually pack some punch. It took me around 30 minutes to knock out the first mission so I’d say you can expect a good few hours to keep you rolling.
The game has a nice overall look with the graphics and a sort of dirty look to everything (although that might be because of the ruined cities from the aliens). Everything stands out nicely with enemies draped in bright reds and your vehicles/commander in a light blue. All of this helps more than you think when later missions require quick thinking and awareness of all the surrounding towers and your line of six units.
The Final Word
So while the game itself is fantastic and a fresh way to look at an old genre, I’m not sure how many people are really going to dig this twist on tower-defense and go through the brutal side-missions and tactical trials. If you are a tower-defense fan, then go and buy this. It’s got a decent length for $10 and I’m sure you’ll have a blast with it.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
