
The game's mechanics, which require you to map out your path and adjust it on the fly all while controlling your own commander avatar to gather power-ups and perform decoy tasks, feel immediately comfortable on the Xbox 360's controller, and never overwhelming. Fortunately, Anomaly Warzone Earth's gameplay bucks this trend and feels quite comfortable.Īnomaly boasts a surprising amount of action and intensity for a strategy game. Most strategy games aren't created with controllers in mind, and feel quite unwieldy as a result. One of the biggest obstacles that strategy games face when being ported to a console is the control scheme. You have no means of attacking when using the commander, but can be used to gather power-ups strewn throughout the map and draw fire from enemy towers. The commander is the one unit that you can navigate through the map and his role is one of support for your other units than to attack your enemy buildings. In Anomaly, you don't have direct control of your units, save one. At the end of each mission, you're ranked on how well you did, earning gold medals for completing goals quickly and efficiently. You'll constantly be juggling various power-ups like health, smoke screens, decoys, and even area-leveling bombs while switching up your path on the fly to avoid attacks and bottlenecks.
Anomaly warzone earth retail code#
The publisher provided GamesBeat with an XBLA download code for the purpose of this review.While you may be mostly taking on stationary units, the action in Anomaly Warzone Earth is pretty intense. While it’s hard to control, Anomaly is still playable and enjoyable as long as you take the time to really master the interface first.Īnomaly: Warzone Earth was released on Apfor Xbox 360.
Anomaly warzone earth retail trial#
The main campaign mode is extensive for a downloadable title, and several trial levels and three difficulty options are available for you to explore. It feels like an iOS menu stretched out across a television screen and works about as well.Īnomaly: Warzone Earth is an inventive take on classic tower-defense mechanics that is a great fit for just about any platform, but the jump from click-or-touch to gamepad input is infuriating. The menu is very dark and laid over a dimmed backdrop, which makes reading text a chore. Upgrading and buying new units is awkward and unintuitive. While this issue isn’t severe enough to render Anomaly unplayable, it feels very clunky compared to the seamless action happening on the world map.

Menu navigation is very clumsy with the 360 controller and sometimes leads to accidental item deployments and poorly chosen paths. The maps are complex enough to allow for multiple strategies.Īnomaly unfortunately suffers from many issues that plague other PC/mobile ports: a frustrating interface that makes more sense when using your fingers or a mouse. You can’t barrel directly toward your goal and hope to win. The street grids are positively labyrinthine, making it very easy to accidentally loop back into a dangerous situation.

It’s up to the commander to make sure that their route doesn’t lead them into environmental hazards and ambushes. Platoon vehicles navigate narrow streets following a set path. The machines and alien ships stand out as shimmering, otherworldly monsters in the devastated landscape. The developers have shockingly realized the environments in their use of lighting and depth. While the fictional representations of Baghdad and Tokyo are rather generic, that doesn’t make them any less beautiful. The action is much more fast-paced because of this and more appealing to players to whom the defense strategies required in RTS games like StarCraft might overwhelm. You don’t have time to fortify a starting location and mine for resources.

You’re an investigatory squad trying to get to the heart of this supposed alien invasion. Rather than placing units to thwart attacks, you are the aggressor attempting to break through almost endless defenses to reach the inner “tower,” or ship in this case.Īnomaly is unique in adapting this real-time strategy mechanic without also requiring the player to defend a base. You directly control the platoon commander and collect various power-ups that will help your tanks and jeeps through the endless assault from enemy machines. In Anomaly, you guide a group of military vehicles through hostile city streets.
