The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I have done many things. However, one of the things I have done is beat the story mode of Anomaly: Warzone Earth HD on my iTronic Pad. Another thing I will have done in just a few moments is write a blog post about that experience.

Anomaly basically takes the idea of “WHAT IF YOU WERE THE ENEMIES IN A TOWER DEFENSE GAME?!” and attempts to make a whole game out of it. This is an interesting premise that hasn’t been done before! The result is fun but, unfortunately, not really a long-lasting fun like Tower Defense proper. At least in my opinion.

Basically, you have a little squad of six slots. You can place various units in them. APCs fire quickly and are general all-around units. Tanks fire slowly, but have heavy armor. Crawlers fire slowly, but fire very damaging rockets. Shield units put a recharging Halo-like shield on the units in front and behind it. Supply units spawn power ups when you get kills. Dragon tanks are super expensive, but can attack two towers at once and I think have a minimal DoT effect. You buy and arrange these units in these setups, then you move them about the map. You don’t have direct control, but you can basically plan where they will turn on the roads in the blasted cities you fight in, and can change that plan on the fly. For most missions, you are either trying to simply get through an area alive, or take out specific targets along your route.
This would be kind of boring, but the game gives you a bunch of powerups to play with. You can heal your units, or set up a smoke screen to make enemy fire less accurate, or set up a false unit for enemies to fire at. The real strategy of the game is deploying these correctly, because they are a limited resource, and are basically the only way of assuring you aren’t constantly losing units and not having enough money to replace them.

The interface in this game is just PERFECT for the iPad. I’m sure it’s a fun game on PC too, but I hear you have to move a little guy around to pick up powerups, which seems much less fun. Seriously, though, the interface is responsive and you understand it immediately. The game looks fantastic and doesn’t lag or have any issues like that whatsoever.

However, you really just kind of figure out what to do, and then the fun is gone. The campaign is 15 missions, and by the end of it, it really felt like they had used up all their variety ideas. Of course, they did a good job keeping it varied until then, but there wasn’t much left to do after that. So it was good it ended there. The game keeps an overall campaign score to compete with your friends, and has difficulty levels, of course, so if you want to eke out all the fun you can, that stuff is there. There’s also some sort of “Squad mode” which I assume is some sort of endless thing I don’t really want to play, so I haven’t. But, you know, they tried to make it worth your money.

I had a lot of fun with the game, but I also paid a dollar for it. It’s normally sold at a premium, and as much as I had fun, I dunno if it’s got enough staying power to be worth more than a buck or two. I probably wouldn’t have been happy to buy it on Steam for the 10 dollars it originally was. Then again, maybe I would be. I like game experiences that are fun, but don’t overstay their welcome, and this was that, to be sure. In any case, if the idea sounds appealing, it’s done really well, and you should try to play it sometime. It is fun. Just don’t expect it to last you a real long time.