Anomaly Defenders Review

Anomaly Defenders is a weird proposition. It removes the tower offence unique selling point of the original two Anomaly games and leaves players with a familiar, albeit fun, tower defence game. One might compare this new direction to a Battlefield game which limited players to 4v4 fights over tiny maps. Or an Assassin’s Creed game in which you couldn’t run - at all. So this new Anomaly isn’t about commanding a convoy of vehicles through an alien tower infested Earth, this time it’s those very alien towers that you must control as the humans launch an attack on their home planet. It’s a tower defence game in every sense of the term, so those looking for the same genre-twisting fun of the first games will be severely disappointed from the off.

If you’ve got the right mindset, however, or if you’re a big tower defence fan looking for a quick fix, then this is a good little game worthy of your attention. There are 24 levels to get to grips with, each offering a slightly new challenge. Plus an accessible and understandable tech-tree keeps the game interesting throughout. The game begins rather abruptly: you’re given a very short introduction and told to defend the launch ships from the human attackers. It’s all the help you’ll get before you’re thrown into the combat zone. The UI is pretty intuitive, so even tower defence newbies will sink into the gameplay process quickly. However, with three difficulty levels available there’s something for every standard of player.

The overall feel and presentation is still classic Anomaly, all shiny robotic aliens and cheesy sci-fi mecha-tanks. All of the in-game towers and human vehicles are taken from the standard games, which will be pleasantly familiar for series fans, although it’s a shame 11 bit studios didn’t include a few new varieties to pick and see. The animations have also been transferred over; the only visual difference is the alien home-world setting, a vibrant land which strikes an amusing balance between retro 1980s alien and modern designs. This is certainly one of the best looking tower defence titles out there.

The technology tree is the slightly more unique aspect of Anomaly Defenders. It’s a free-form tree with which you can allocate and reallocate points at will. You can use it to unlock and improve towers, upgrade tower abilities and access general stat boosts such as cheaper towers or improved health. The sense of development is on point; you’ll always feel as though you’re one step ahead of the humans, even on the trickier levels, and that free-form approach means you can adapt your set of skills for each mission. It gives the game a degree of pre-match strategy which can make the individual levels more interesting.

Which is thankful, because the levels do have a tendency to blur into one big tower defence-y mush. None of the levels are bad, but none of them are especially inventive or original. They’re largely based on tried and tested tower defence layouts and while they do each present something new to overcome, they don’t present enough differentiation to make any individual levels standout. Even the ‘bosses’, basically super-powered versions of the standard enemies, are incredibly unoriginal. The level layouts do require a certain degree of strategic planning, but it is all too easy to just spam the basic tower and cover the field with them.

The game can still be very fun though, despite the average level design. The manic moments that define these types of games can be found in Anomaly Defenders pretty regularly. The game embraces a sense of temporariness; nothing is permanent and anything can be brought down in a moments notice, which makes games fast and frantic. There’s always an upgrade to be made, health pack to be deployed or some other action that requires your totally divided attention. The game is best during those hairy moments, although it can still be amusing to watch your perfectly placed collection of towers wipe out an enemy advance. These thrills are standard for any good tower defence game, but it’s an optimistic sign that Anomaly Defenders reaches this level.

On the whole though, it’s difficult to see the game as anything other than a quickly-made cash grab. It’s well made (although a fair few game crashes were suffered during testing) and fits the bill to a tee, but ultimately the series was far better as an unusual riff on the tower defence genre as opposed to an uninspired conformer to the norm. For the Anomaly series as a whole, this seems like an unnecessary step backwards from the fun convoy-leading gameplay of the first two games. As a game in and of itself however, Anomaly Defenders is a capable and fun game that fans of the genre should enjoy. At a low price it’s worth a gamble, but don’t expect the same inspired experience of Anomaly 2.