Anomaly Defenders
Developer: 11 bit studios
Price: $10
Platform: PC
A Steam code for Anomaly Defenders was supplied to us
The tower defense game with a twist opens up the third entry in the series with another twist. This time around you’re playing as the aliens defending their home world from human invaders and the game plays like a traditional tower defense game.
Now what’s easily my biggest issue with the game is its lack of story. For something that’s supposed to be the conclusion to the Anomaly series there isn’t a single bit of story info besides “Humans have invaded, kill them”. There’s no mention of which ending from Anomaly 2 is canon, no background info on the aliens to understand why they attacked Earth in the first place, and not a single mention of how the humans are even able to suddenly invade their planet. For fuck’s sake, the game just end with a “YOU WON!” notification and rolls the credits. I was really hoping to learn more about the aliens and ended up learning jack shit.
Unlike the previous two Anomaly games, Defenders takes you away from the role of the commander and puts you in a traditional tower defense point of view. You play as the aliens this time around so you’ll survey the arena before starting and plan out your tower placements to protect your base (Launchpad) against waves of pesky humans. Unlike most tower defense games where you sort of sit there watching enemies hammer away at them there’s a bit of interactivity in the action with your active abilities. Clicking on a tower will allow you to use up your energy to do various things such as repair a tower, increase its range, or even cause it to explode. It gives the game a bit more of a faster pace compared to most tower defense games. I will admit that it was pretty neat seeing all the human units I controlled in the previous games since I knew instantly how to counter them, I just wish the game would let me freely place my towers because some maps seemed designed specifically for the use of certain towers. The game does have a healthy amount of missions though, just over 20, which will likely take you a few hours to get through. Strategy is key in this game because the game can get pretty damn challenging in a good way; getting through a tough fight actually feels pretty rewarding. There aren’t any random difficulty spikes here either which is something that bugged me in the first two games.
Killing enemies or dropping Harvesters in specific locations will allow you to collect resources that fund the construction of your towers and their upgrades. There’s a neat sort of mechanic where the enemies will always divert their path to attack your Harvesters and the game tells you to use this to your advantage to lure enemies away from your base but it ends up being more of a mandatory thing than an optional tactic like the game makes it seem. You’ll always want a Harvester out to collect money and since they’re indestructible there’s no worry of ever losing one. If one ever does get damaged too much and shut down (which switches the enemy’s focus back to your base) you can pay the measly repair cost to fix it. There are also way more tower placements near Harvesters than the path to your base which means not placing a Harvester or letting one shut down will basically screw you over.
If you’ve played your fair share of tower defense games then you’ll know how tech trees usually work in them. Your tree here will branch into three categories: units, passive support skills, and active abilities such as repair. Each mission gives you a certain amount of tech depending on the difficulty you play and you can freely spend them on whatever you want. If a mission is kicking your butt too hard you can simply hop into the tech tree menu (in the main menu, not during gameplay) and take the points you invested back to spend them somewhere else. It’s a helpful way of letting you experiment with different units and upgrades since you most likely won’t have access to them all until the very end and that’s only if you’re playing on hard to get the maximum amount of tech points.
This next thing really makes me question who to recommend this game to since all of the units from the game are taken from Anomaly 2. If you played Anomaly 2 you’ll recognize every human and alien unit that shows up here besides a few that weren’t included. There’s absolutely nothing new for fans of Anomaly to sink their teeth into besides the change from tower offense gameplay to tower defense which is weird considering people flocked to Anomaly because it switched the tower defense perspective. And while the game is still a pretty solid tower defense game on its own, it doesn’t do anything to separate itself from the pack which means tower defense enthusiasts won’t find anything drastically new here.
Anomaly Defenders plays more like a quick little spin-off diversion game for the Anomaly series instead of the conclusion to the trilogy it’s touting itself to be. It really feels like the developers made this 100% for Anomaly fans to give them a taste of the other side of combat in a “You played the game with all these units this way, now let’s see you do it the other way around” sort of way. Now while I appreciate the effort, the problem with this is that Anomaly Defenders doesn’t even try to do something different from other tower defense games; it just sort of sits there apathetically with every other decent tower defense game.
The Final Word
While it’s much less grand in scope compared to its predecessors, Anomaly Defenders is still a pretty decent tower defense game that fans of the genre will likely enjoy if they don’t mind it not doing much new.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
