Anomaly: Warzone Earth

I can easily say that Anomaly is the most refreshing strategy game I’ve played in about 5 years. Whoa there, I’m using my ending line first? Yes, because if you see the words “strategy” and “tower defense”, most people start deleting the website from their favorites. Anomaly Warzone Earth flips the script on the tower defense genre by creating tower offense.

You play as the leader of of a group of future military group sent to investigate the mysterious crash of an unidentified flying object that has broken up into the atmosphere and landed in Baghdad. From there you control only with your mouse. And there is everything you need. You left-click to move your character to it’s position. You are given a convoy to spend money on and place in order. Their path can be changed at will by scrolling the mouse wheel down to zoom out on the map and get a nice neon overview of the land and what intel you have will show enemy structures. From there you can set their path for collectible resources or in what order to take structures down. You cannot control the speed of your convoy, but you can speed up time by holding Tab key.

As you destroy structures, air support will drop power-ups. There are 4 kinds: Repair, Smoke Screen, Decoy, and Air Strike. And they aren’t given very easily, despite destroying structures. To apply power-ups, bring your character to where you want to place the ability, right-click and choose it from the list. However, you can’t be throwing smoke or healing your guys at every corner and hope to have enough resources to make it to the end. Your convoy can be composed of 6 types: APC, Crawler, Shield, Tank, Dragon (a kind of tank, not the RPG-style fire breathing beast), and a Supply. Not all of them are offensive. By their names they are supportive or defensive parts of your convoy that can be configured in any order to work to the best of your ability.

The goal of each mission is different and not too repetitive, and doesn’t necessarily always require you to destroy everything in sight. You are graded on your performance and are given medals and achievements by how well you do. Missions are not timed, so you don’t have to worry about that working against you. There are leaderboards in place to score you against the world.

As you go through the story it’s not before long you end up in Tokyo where you have learned the other half of the ship has landed. It’s not a spoiler as you can see from the main menu there is a “Baghdad Mayhem” and “Tokyo Raid” which are non-storyline related missions designed for a more precise way of playing and offering more longevity to the game since there is no competitive or cooperative multiplayer.

For the price, you can do no wrong to experiment on this game. There is a demo and it does the game justice showing what you’re in for. So I say give it a download and if you like what you play, buy it for yourself (or a friend if you’re feeling generous). The full-game offers an exciting story-based game with excellent longevity and replayability all while being rewarding and challenging.

VERDICT: THIS GAME IS WORTH $9.99 OUT OF IT’S $9.99 DIGITAL PRICE TAG

I originally wrote this for Saving Content: http://www.savingcontent.com/2011/05/anomaly-warzone-earth-review/