![]() Heavily armored tanks, supported by a shield generator tank, make for better survivability but since the shield-tank takes a spot in the column, it costs you in frontal attack power as you approach towers. Rocket units have a long range but are fragile, so you don’t want them at the front unless you’re continuously going to micromanage the unit order in your column (which you can do instantly by pausing the game). Units come in a variety of types, ranging from cheap and weak APCs to long-range rocket walkers, armored tanks and flamethrower tanks, shield-tanks that project a shield to units in front and behind it, and supply wagons that provide you with ability items as you destroy towers.īecause your units will move in a column, positioning becomes just as important as choosing what to spend your money on. You have a limited amount of money to buy them with and even though you can upgrade any one unit, it never turns it into an indestructible force you don’t need to look after. While managing your commander’s abilities keeps you engaged throughout a mission (the game pauses when you enter the map to plan your route), managing your units is equally important. ![]() Even though you can get through the game’s 14 missions relatively quickly on Advanced, you’ll find yourself restarting from a checkpoint quite often in the later missions. As you progress through the game, you go from a casual “Oh well, I might as well pick this thing up while I’m not doing anything” to “Holy crap, I need to pick up these things right now or I’ll run out, but I also need to lay down a smoke screen and heal my upgraded tank before it dies!”Īnd make no mistake Anomaly can become very challenging on the “normal” (Advanced) difficulty, even for veteran strategy gamers. Your commander can use abilities to drop down zones that repair any unit that passes through it (usually healing up to 3 units in a column before it disappears), create smoke screens that reduce enemy accuracy and damage, plant a decoy unit that draws fire from all towers within range, or call in a direct airstrike to deal with particularly annoying tower types.īecause there is no other way to heal your precious units than by using a repair ability, and because your commander doesn’t do any damage himself, you’ll quickly find yourself rushing between collecting ability items and trying to use them in tactical locations. And it’s these abilities that turn Anomaly from what could have been a boring attempt to turn the tower defense genre on its head, into a challenging and very enjoyable game of micromanagement and tactical planning. As you destroy towers, it provides you with a little money (more for larger towers) and occasionally allows an airplane to drop an ability item for your commander. Whatever route you end up with, it is inevitably littered with various types of enemy towers, each with different types of attacks, that require you to deal with them in various ways. Events happen dynamically and force you to re-evaluate your path, and then there’s the matter of letting your units pass resources on their path, so you can upgrade and buy new units. Setting a path is not simply a matter of creating the shortest route to a mission’s goal and never looking at it again, though. A quick scroll-up on the mouse, or a press of the control key, zooms you out to a map where you can direct the units’ route by changing the direction they will take at certain crossroads. In every grid- and maze-like map, you start with either a set amount of cash to buy units or a few units by themselves. That is, while it lasts.Īs a commander unit who walks around on the map, your job is to keep your units alive and to support them. But three core gameplay elements and a hell of a lot of polish help make Anomaly: Warzone Earth an innovative and fun title. ![]() Just like in a tower defense game, a column of units will have to follow a route to a goal on the other side of a map. ![]() And by doing so, 11 bit Studios has created one of the most enjoyable strategy games in recent history. Instead of building towers to force units through a path, you create a path for units to destroy towers. On the other hand you have Anomaly: Warzone Earth, which turns the genre on its head to give you a reverse tower defence strategy game On the one hand, you have a game like Sanctum that changes the perspective to first-person and adds the player as a weapon. Even though the tower defense genre has grown stale over the years, some developers understand that there’s still some life in the genre if you play around with the formula.
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