Anomaly: Warzone Earth Hands-on

Developer: 11 bit studios / Platforms: XBLA / Release Date: March 2012

UNDER THE DOME

It’s official. Tower defense games have been done to death—they’ve become the Vampires of the gaming world: sparkly, pale, inoffensively appealing (in a bland kind of way), and in most cases, pretty much by definition, passive.

And then there’s Anomaly: Warzone Earth.

The thought-process, evidently, was to turn the Tower Defense genre upside-down—or at least, inside-out. To this end, Anomaly is touted as a ‘reverse tower-defense’ game: Instead of preparing for an onslaught with a seeding of defensive installations and point-defense guns, you are the onslaught. This approach appears to have worked well, with the PC and iOS releases in 2011 all scored pretty positively with reviewers.

The setup: Big, Bad Aliens have invaded Earth; they’ve made hostile landings in—of all the possible urban pairings—Baghdad and Tokyo. Immediately upon touchdown, they’ve thrown up massive, mostly impenetrable domes of energy, completely enclosing the two cities and cutting them off from the general reach of the world’s strategic military forces. Your job: Take a single lean-and-mean battle group (composed of APCs, armored attack-vehicles, shield-generating support-solutions and a single can-do Commander), breach one of the dome’s tiny weak-spots, roll in there, and kick some alien butt.

The kicker: The aliens are playing tower-defense. They’ve already got their defenses scattered block-to-block throughout each city. The gameplay challenge for you is to view a tactical map of the urban-sprawl streets laid out before your forces, hand-pick a small force, arrange their single-file order and plot out their progress as you roll toward each new Objective (a critical transmitting station, some hitherto-unseen new type of enemy, a key installation, or what have you). On the way, you’ll have to pass by entrenched aliens waiting for you to run into their guns, so you’ll have to figure out the best configuration of your on-the-roll battle group. Heavily armored APCs in front, to absorb the first blasts of defender fire, followed by bruising attack-vehicles to hit back? It seems the obvious configuration, but the tactical situation will change.

Once your force advances through the streets, it can’t stop; therefore, it’s up to you to monitor its progress continually—you can pause the game at any time to examine a top-down city map, making spontaneous changes to both its battle-route (turn left at the next intersection, continue straight, then loop around the block for a chance at an alien’s poorly defended flank), and to the driving-order of the forces under your control.

While your main taskforce can only mindlessly roll forward with occasional route corrections from you, your Commander is always under your direct analog-stick control, and this is where the gameplay gets really interesting. The Commander doesn’t have any per-se weapons himself, but he can run around at will, throwing up temporary area-effect buffs such as Heal, Smoke Screens, Decoys, and such. Also, he can dash about freely and collect new pick-ups that litter the battlefield. And every now and then—assuming your automated forces have rolled by the proper city-blocks to acquire additional resources—he can purchase new units for immediate deployment and upgrade/rearrange the order of existing ones. Furthermore, he can call in the occasional direct air-strike on particularly hard targets. The balance of an automated main force and free-roaming player control is pleasantly redolent of those ‘Chopper Command’ game clones, where a single controlled helicopter must keep watch over an advancing armor column, except the orientation is top-down rather than side-scrolling—and from what we’ve played, it works beautifully.

All the while, the tactical situation is subject to change suddenly and in some cases radically. You had a great, efficient route planned through the sprawl of downtown post-invasion Tokyo…but maybe the aliens have suddenly blown up key intersections—now you’ll need to re-route your forces, keeping that Commander near the front of the column (and alive) to repair friendly units or actively distract hostile ones.

Anomaly features two full campaigns, one for each besieged city, and a thorough, well-done Tutorial that efficiently gets you up to speed on all you need to know. In addition, the game boasts six ‘simulated’ missions, very evocative of the VR Missions found in the Metal Gear series—lots of stylized, iconic-UI visuals paired with specific, unusual tactical challenges and puzzles.

Anomaly‘s unique, aggressive breed of ‘tower offense’ gameplay is coming for the Xbox 360 in March 2012. Even if you though you couldn’t stomach yet another iteration of the tower-defense genre, Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a promising, visually appealing and all-around engaging exercise in playing outside the box—or, in this case, inside the dome.

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