Posted on: December 11, 2014

MischiefMaker
Games: 818 Reviews: 66
SO CLOSE to being the best of the series
Like the previous Anomaly games, you control a convoy of military vehicles navigating a city overrun with alien turrets, basically a reverse tower defense where you control the creeps. In addition to choosing the units and giving them a route, you can pause the game and rearrange the unit order at any time, AND new to this game, the vehicles are all transformers and can be switched between two forms with different weapons and powers. There are also nifty new handling features, like if you maintain target lock for an extended time with the hellhound miniguns, their barrel rotation speeds up and increases damage output, which can be a game changer in certain situations. As before, your little avatar can drop area-affect powerups to aid the vehicles when the going gets rough, and his handling is slightly improved over the previous games. Now the negatives. There are 14 missions at 3 levels of difficulty, but sadly this is the kind of campaign that's a long, glorified tutorial drip-feeding new units bit by bit, so you only get a small handful of levels with your full strategic options available. What's worse, the designers REMOVED the skirmish aftergame from the previous titles where you have the full unit list and battle random formations of turrets. In its place is a multiplayer mode that nobody plays. Don't hold your breath for a skirmish DLC either, the designers gave up and turned Anomaly 3 into a straight up vanilla Tower Defense game. How frustrating! If you want replay value, you have to stick with the earlier titles with their weaker graphics and more limited units.
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