Anomaly: Warzone Earth Review (iOS)

Review by Destin Legarie on http://wireless.ign.com/articles/119/1192785p1.html

There's a man vomiting in the space between two subway cars. I can hear it splashing on the glass behind me and watch as a rather drunk teenager stumbles away to the next car. Later a person I don't know has decided to tell me about his collection of Apple products as I clutch my iPad protectively.

Thankfully these situations haven't ruined my trip home because all I care about is protecting the troops I've sent on a mission of destruction in Anomaly.

Described as "Tower Offense," Anomaly may sound strange at first. In Anomaly, you're the one causing the destruction instead of protecting yourself from it. You command a small group of humans trying to stop an alien invasion in Bagdad. The dastardly alien menace has dropped turrets, hacking towers, and power nodes into unmovable positions. Luckily for the human race we mastered the ability to put large explosives onto vehicles long ago.

At the start of each mission you have an opportunity to pick which units you want to send into a situation, and what path you want them to take. Do you want to risk it all and go for some cash, or do you go straight for the goal, confident that you can get through without the cash to upgrade your troops? Each stage is full of decisions - you can send in walking missile launchers, tanks that can target multiple enemies, shield generators, item generators and more to get the job done.

It may sound easy, but trust me, Anomaly is not for the timid. I played through on Casual and I can attest to the game's sharp difficulty curve. Sure it starts out simple enough, but once new enemies are brought into the fold and upgrades are made available, higher levels of strategy must be implemented to ensure success. Mid-game path changing, decoy deployment and smoke screens must be utilized to ensure alien obliteration.

After clearing the game, a mode called "Commander Trials" unlocks that will have you go through the missions again, but with a set of rules in place. Do you think you can get through the first mission and still have four repair charges left? Sure that one's easy, but how about doing the final mission while destroying all the towers on the way to the boss? Trust me. This is no small feat.

Squad Assault rounds out Anomaly's offerings. Think horde mode, with a twist. You're given a small squad and you're sent out to take on wave after wave of enemies, each time getting only five minutes to complete the task. By wave ten, you're going to be knee deep in enemy turrets and low on power-ups. It's a fun challenge and changes up the monotony of the campaign.

Said monotony is my only major complaint. I also didn't like that you could collect funds to buy new units during each mission, but the funds didn't carry over to subsequent missions. Perhaps this was to maintain balance, but if I scour every inch of a level to collect resources, I want to use them in later missions. It also gets somewhat repetitive listening to the same song each mission. I would have liked to hear a variety of tunes as I destroyed an entire alien species.

Closing Comments

Anomaly: Warzone Earth on the iPad is a decent value at $3.99. It’s ideal for short play sessions. Its variety of modes will keep you coming back, and if you stick through the campaign even more modes open up. The gameplay can be challenging, and it may not look as pretty as its big brother on the PC, but don’t count it out. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a perfect challenge for any strategist, and will have people looking over your shoulder to see what fate you’ve decided to bestow upon those evil aliens. If it can distract me from a drunk guy and an apple fanatic it will most likely have you just as engrossed.