Anomaly 2 Review

Turning the Tower Defense Tables.

→ May 15, 2013 Anomaly: Warzone Earth flipped tower defense on its head in 2011 with its excellent and unique “tower offense” premise. Anomaly 2’s campaign is largely more of the same, but that's OK, because the true star of developer 11 bit’s sequel is its brand-new, fully-fleshed-out asymmetrical multiplayer mode. It’s tense, it’s polished, and I’ve never played anything quite like it.

A real-time strategy game where one side plays the defending, immobile alien towers and the other the attacking human convoy sounds incredibly strange – and it is. But it works for the most part, because defeating a wily human opponent requires clever tactics and excellent on-the-fly strategy.

Most matches start with plenty of downtime as the column meanders around the map gathering resources for its assault, but it’s a time of tension. Both players need these moments

to advance through the tech tree and observe their opponent as they feint and parry without ever coming into contact. The tower player must sell and replace poorly positioned towers in anticipation of the attack, and the convoy player must reconfigure his force to counter those towers as he circles around probing for weakness in the lines with his nimble, free-moving commander unit. When they meet in short, intense confrontations, both players set off abilities to counter and re-counter one another in an ever-shifting power struggle.

Both sides have a collection of power-ups that can help tilt battles in their favor and open up a great range of tactical possibilities. My personal favorite is Taunt, a tower ability which forces the convoy to focus all fire onto a single target. Think you’re going to burn down my Scorcher before it eats through your units? Think again.

I’ve never played anything quite like it, but that originality makes it unfamiliar, and there are some growing pains as the community learns to handle Anomaly 2’s new mechanics. Even with ample in-game help and guides, many of the games I’ve played so far devolve into the tower player just spam-constructing as many towers as possible at the last moment to try to ambush convoy players. But that strategy may prove is as risky as a Starcraft Zerg rush against an experienced player as the community learns and evolves. Multiplayer is a complex beast full of scoring rules and unintuitive limitations, and it’ll take time to fully understand.

Whether the multiplayer community will grow into a balanced and thriving metagame remains to be seen, but if it does it’ll be well-supported by great features like stat tracking, matchmaking, leaderboards, persistent ranks, and comprehensive tutorials to help ease into the complex multiplayer ruleset. It’s an impressive initial foray into competitive player-vs-player.

Anomaly 2’s four- to five-hour campaign might be more of the same – it’s played exclusively from the column point of view, and until the final missions there are barely any radical new units or features to play with other than cool robot transformation effects. But like the multiplayer, it’s still a polished and satisfying challenge. The post-apocalyptic story is basically just an excuse for more tower blasting, but Anomaly 2’s missions are super tough and sweetly satisfying when you finally figure out the perfect path, convoy configuration, and power-up placement to make it through an especially hairy section of tower-infested turf.

Feelings of campaign deja-vu aside, Anomaly is impressively polished for a $15 game. I was impressed by battles that take place around a wrecked Statue of Liberty (a must in any post-apocalyptic game taking place anywhere near New York it seems) and an overgrown Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, among other memorable locales. Whiz-bang graphics, physics effects, and respectable voice acting contribute to making it a worthwhile campaign. Completionists will be happy to hear that every stage is highly replayable thanks to individual score leaderboards, challenging sub-goals, and multiple difficulty levels.

The balanced stage designs aren’t afraid to punish you severely for configuring a poor convoy. This makes it all the more satisfying when you snatch a narrow victory from the jaws of defeat with a clutch enemy-disabling EMP power-up at the perfect moment.