Anomaly Defenders

The game looks beautiful, that's its only strength. It is plagued by annoying pop-ups, both in-game while you play and also when you're just looking through the menus. While most maps are little bigger then your screen the scrolling of the map is made both annoying and counter productive. There are invisible borders that not only halt your movement in their direction but also along the border, so if you want to move up or down while you are touching the left side of the map you can't, you have to first move back a bit. Add in the map borders are never straight and never defined and that makes this frustrating. Also scrolling is done by either dragging the mouse or by the screen-edge or both at the same time in opposite directions when you quickly want to be somewhere, which is fucking annoying. No you can't turn any of this off either. Not every concept on how your towers work is well explained or visible in the game, for example; the way obstacles work, its not exactly clear where the borders lie on where a tower can shoot and what is blocked. Every map, tower, special ability, and all upgrades are locked content, when will developers finally give up on this shitty tradition? The way you go about upgrading/selling upgrades could also have been done better. Experimenting with different powers and towers is so fucking annoying when you can't do it fast, it takes to much time to sort though menus and to clicks multiple times to sell something, and then zoom in or out to find what you want and maybe move the screen around, then again multiple clicks to buy upgrades. Its fucking busy work that other games do with as little as 2 or 3 clicks. Its crazy, you can scroll so far on this screen you can't even see the tech tree at all any more. I've played half of the game's content at this point and its not all that fun, its also not all that bad but there are better tower defense games out there, some are even free.

The gameplay has nothing to do with dynamic, original Anomaly. Everything feels very static. It is just a tower defence game using unit models from Anomaly universe, which seems simple at the beginning, but suddently becomes much more complicated after the level 12. Pros: - As a tower defence it is actually good, you cannot survive without good strategy - you have to understand the weaknesses of towers, just outnumbering the humans will not work. Cons: - no cutscenes, no real story (no story at all if you did not play Anomaly), no characters to identify with, you don't even know who you are - not really inspiring music (I think 2 soundtracks only all the time) - Strong assymetry: towers are much more weaker than in Anomaly series, but attackers usually strong. And you can't play as a tower boss yourself. - not all tower units from the original series implemented - one enemy type -self exploding tank- was introduced, but not observed anywhere in game.

This version of Anomaly reverts to "traditional" tower defence gameplay. You defend your base, a launchpad, from a variiety of attackers. Although often difficult to see, the attackers are battle robots and tanks and your objective is to destroy them by placing various weapons turrets in predefined spots along their route before they reach the launch pad and ultimately destroy it. A win earns you technology points that can be used to upgrade your weapon turrets. Gameplay graphics are nice, more detailed and artistic than most similar games. My main criticism is what I consider to be lack of longevity and replay-ability of Anomaly Defenders 24 levels/missions and you're done and it doesn't take long.

I really liked this one. The designs of the towers was pure sci-fi goodness. Not overly wrought, great for casual to more expert tower defense players.