Just finished getting the final
single-player trophy in Anomaly: Warzone Earth for PS3. In this game
you play as a commander who guides a handful of units through city
streets to combat stationary towers. It gets called a “tower
offense” game quite a lot because it is almost the polar opposite
of the genre known as tower defense. In tower defense games, you
build stationary towers to defend against enemies that march in on a
set path. And this game is literally the exact opposite. You send
your troops in on a set path to attack stationary towers. And it's
really, really fun.
The unique (as far as I know) game
mechanics take a few levels to get used to, but are really great once
you understand them. At the beginning of a level, you get a set
amount of money to buy armored vehicles with. You can purchase, sell,
upgrade, and change the position of these units at any time. You can
have up to six vehicles at a time, with most missions starting you
out with enough cash to buy 1 to 3. You earn more money as you go by
destroying towers and by collecting minerals that are sometimes
scattered around the levels. Once you have purchased your starting
squad, you set your course on the tactical view map. Once you start,
your vehicles roll (or in the case of the crawler, walk) along the
path you have set for them on the tactical map at a set speed, and
you have no direct control over them. You can pause the game and
access the tactical map to change your route at any time by pressing
triangle. This map pops up instantly, which is very important since
you will be accessing it very frequently, and any lag time would be
very detrimental to the flow of gameplay. The vehicles will
automatically fire on any enemies within range.
You are in direct control of your
commander, a soldier on foot in a high-tech battle suit. You are very
fast, and have a health bar that quickly recharges if you take
damage. If your health is totally drained, you will be unable to move
for about 3 seconds while your health fully recharges. You only fail
a mission if all of your vehicles are destroyed (or if you fail at a
mission objective). Your commander does not have any direct attacks,
but can employ 4 different powers. Pressing cross pauses the game and
brings up your menu of four powers, each assigned to a different
direction. To deploy it, you hold the direction of the power you want
(for example, up for repair) to highlight it. Then press cross again
to activate it. Each of these powers places a stationary circle on the map
centered on where your commander is currently standing. The powers
are repair, which fixes any of your units that drive through it;
smoke screen, which causes any of your units in its radius to be
harder to hit; decoy, which displays a holographic tank that all
enemies in range will fire on until its timer or health bar give out;
and airstrike, which targets enemies within its radius for a bombing
run from air support. You have a limited amount of each of these
powers, and you get more by killing towers. They are also dropped in
at certain points in the level by air support. A few miscellaneous
controls include zooming in and out with the R1 and L1 buttons, and
speeding the game up temporarily (literally just fast-forwarding
everything) by holding either R2 or L2.
So you basically build, maintain, and
upgrade your units as you set their path on the tactical map, and
then you use your powers to babysit them to make sure they are
successful. I've never played anything like it, and it is really well
done. It almost sounds like it plays itself, but it actually requires
you to pay attention the whole time as leaving your units alone will
result in them being destroyed post haste.
The main campaign mode has full voice
acting and a somewhat interesting story about something crash landing
from space in Baghdad and Tokyo and causing a giant red dome to cover
those cities. You go into these domes and start fighting the newly
formed towers inside. The story is not offensive, but not that great.
It has a few cool elements though.
In each mission of the campaign, you
have an objective. These have a really great variety that really adds
to the game. It feels like you are doing things a little differently
in each mission. Some have you getting from point A to point B.
Others have you taking out specific targets or protecting a VIP unit
embedded in your squad, or clearing a path for an airborne transport
that slowly flies through the level. Some levels have a timed
element. Most of them have more than one objective, revealing new
ones as you accomplish your current goal. And there are a few really
cool ones that I won't spoil (I feel like I've been giving too much
away in these reviews, I'll try to leave a few things for you to
discover). Missions take around 10 to 30 minutes each, which is a
good length for what you are doing. Suffice it to say, I was really
pleased with the great diversity of tasks and situations that the
game throws at you. This game would be really solid even if each
level had the same objective, but the fact that you are doing
different tasks in each level that are all fun to accomplish really
pushes the game's greatness forward.
Pressing square pauses the game and
brings up the menu that lets you buy, sell, and upgrade units. The
units you'll be controlling are all pretty interesting. A few
examples are the basic APC, which has high armor but low attack, the
high attack powered crawler, a missile-launching quadrupedal mech,
the shield generator, which adds another layer of armor to units near
it, and the supply vehicle, which generates power-ups when you kill
towers. These along with the handful of other units are all fun to
experiment with, although once I had access to all of them I quickly
developed a favorite load out and basically stayed with it.
Experimenting on the fly is very easy though, since you can sell
units at cost as long as they are repaired up. So if you try a set-up
out and don't like it, you can sell it all and start over at any
time.
There are several types of enemy
towers to contend with. You got your basic ones that shoot lasers at
you when you get close enough, then there are big ones that fire
slowly but are very powerful. Some have a chain-lightning effect,
causing damage to adjacent units as well as the one targeted. There
are also some more indirect ones, like one that absorbs the energy of
your commander's powers if they are deployed near it, then uses that
stored energy to re-build any towers that were destroyed near it.
There are a few other enemies as well, some of which have very
interesting abilities besides just attacking you. In the story mode,
some of these are portrayed as enemy responses to certain tactics and
technologies, which is actually a nice touch as these explanations of
enemy powers makes sense.
Once you beat the campaign, you can
play through it again on a harder difficulty if you like. There are
three. I beat it on “hardcore” mode, the hardest of the three,
and while it was challenging and required some new tactics to get
through when compared with “advanced” (the game's normal mode),
it was not the super-hard task the name makes it out to be. I think
they could have probably added in another difficulty setting above
hardcore that would really push the player to the limit of what's
possible in the game. It would have been fun to push up against a
truly hardcore challenge using these great mechanics.
There are three bonus stages that you
can play independent of the campaign. Baghdad Mayhem gives you 5
minutes to march across the map and destroy a big generator. Once you
destroy it, the clock resets and new enemies and a new generator
spawn. This lasts for 10 rounds. It's a fun little romp that is worth
checking out.
Tokyo Raid has you going from island
to island, with each island giving you a different mission objective.
It's a marathon of 18 islands, and unfortunately you cannot save, so
make sure you have close to 2 hours on your hands before taking it on
(it made me stay up past my bedtime to complete it!). Tokyo Raid is
really fun since you very quickly run through many different types of
missions. You never know what you'll be getting into when you cross
the bridge onto the next island! By the time you're done, you'll feel
like you played a whole campaign in 2 hours.
The last bonus stage is Baghdad Mayhem
Rearmed. It's the same as Baghdad Mayhem, but lasts for 18 rounds. It
takes about an hour, and represents the game's toughest single-player
experience. I died on rounds 17 and 18 several times. Managing your
powers so you don't run out is very important in this mode, as you'll
be facing hordes of the game's toughest towers in a crazy melee of
destruction by the final few rounds. I felt a great sense of
accomplishment beating this mode on the hardcore difficulty.
There is also a co-op mode, which I
unfortunately can't comment on since I have no one to play with.
The game's graphics are very good.
Although it plays from an overhead view and is therefore 2d in
practice, everything appears to be rendered in 3d with dynamic
shadows and remarkable detail. Zooming in reveals a level of detail
in almost every facet of the environments. It didn't need to be as
pretty as it is, but the extra effort to make it look so nice really
makes the game shine. There are only a few music tracks, but they are
worth listening to and adapt quite nicely to what is happening on
screen, becoming tense as you fight, then placid as you walk through
the rubble of abandoned streets. I got this music stuck in my head a
lot at my day job, and it would dynamically ebb and flow in my mind
as work got hectic and then slow and then back to battle again.
This game has a decent spread of
trophies. The majority of them are for doing specific things in a
level, such as covering a full squad with a smokescreen, using all
four powers at the same time, and fully upgrading a unit. These are
cool milestones that I got at different points while playing through
the campaign. I love it when trophies make you do stuff with the
gameplay you might not normally do, and these are great examples of
that. I had my eyes open to try out what they asked me to do, and
executing them when the opportunity was ripe was good fun. You also
earn trophies for beating the bonus levels. The hardest one for me to
get (I got them all except the 2 trophies relating to co-op mode) was
“Avenger,” which wants you to kill 5,000 towers. That's a lot of
towers. I got it after completing everything on the advanced and then
hardcore difficulties, and then grinding out a couple hundred more
kills on a level that features re-spawning towers.
So what's the verdict? Well, this game
innovates, and it's new mechanics are very well executed. Combine
that with a good deal of polish in the graphics department and a lot
of well done design choices, and you've got a tier 2 Great Game.
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