Anomaly: Warzone Earth solidified 11 bit studios' name in the indie space as the guys who made the tower defense genre feel fresh again. They did this by literally flipping it on its head. No longer were you tasked with placing down towers strategically in order to dispose of oncoming enemies. This time, you were the one charged with making your way through these towers, using multiple means of offensive and defensive capabilities. Anomaly 2 then amped up the action by introducing some sweet new unit enhancements and gameplay refinement. Naturally, the gameplay translates to the PS4 flawlessly.
Anomaly 2 originally released on the PC back in 2013, so make sure to check out our official PC review by David Sanchez.
Anomaly 2 is, for all intents and purposes, a hell of a game. It won’t take you terribly long to get through, and it’s surely not flawless, but a lot of effort has clearly gone into creating a deliciously pleasant reverse tower defense experience that simply deserves to be played. The multiplayer is a nice idea that you’re likely to get varying degrees of entertainment from depending on your personal taste, but the single-player campaign offers up a satisfying dose of exciting, rewarding, and cathartic strategy action.
The game revolves around controlling a commander on the battlefield, leading his convoy of offensive vehicles through battle-scarred maps. Throughout your missions you'll buy new units and thus expand your convoy, upgrade them, and even morph them into alternate states depending on the situation.
It might not look like it initially but once you get past the opening act of the game, it becomes much more strategic. No longer will you be able to just rely on the preset path, and you'll need to frequently pause and alter your course of action to ensure maximum survival. Morphing your units is also part of that strategy since both forms have a different focus. Usually a vehicles second form is much better at dispatching a lot of enemies at close range. Shifting between these states becomes an integral part of completing missions.
Your little commander also has some skills of his own. You can lay down various buffs that can help heal your units or place down ones that act as decoys to enemies, altering their course of fire, and allowing your units to get some extra hits before their showered with bullets. Playing on Normal or easier will generally get you enough of these items so you'll be able to constantly place them down, though playing on a higher difficulty will make these drops way more scarce. At that point, you'll need to carefully decide whether it's worth putting down that healing circle now, or save it in hopes of distracting the enemies with a decoy or perhaps increase its damage for a short duration. The beauty of Anomaly 2's stages is that they allow for this sort of experimentation.
You can also go head to head against another player, where one plays as the commander, per usual, and the other plays a more traditional Tower Defense game, by placing down various defenses. It's a neat back and forth where no one side ever seems like it has a huge advantage.
I wouldn't call Anomaly 2 a gorgeous game by any means, nor does it seem to use any of the PS4's extra graphical capabilities, but for the type of game it is, it's certainly serviceable. After all, you'll spend 100% of your time staring down at your convoy from high up, and you're never allowed to zoom in to check out any of the detail of the maps.
Anomaly 2 was a pretty great follow-up to the pioneer of the Tower Offense genre with enough changes to make it feel fresh. If you've played it before, there really isn't anything here that screams "Buy me again!" but for those that haven't yet experienced the joys of Tower Offense, Anomaly 2 on the PS4 is a pretty great example.
