Developer: 11 bit studios
Publisher: 11 bit studios
platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Anomaly 2 – Preview
Anomaly 2, created by 11-bit studios a small Polish indie development studio, is a Tower Offense RTS. The game continues a few years after its predecessor, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, which was described as a reverse tower defense game. The point of the game was to get past the towers with a convoy instead of building towers to prevent letting anyone through. Anomaly 2 keeps all the elements of the previous game, while offering a lot more.
Story:
In Anomaly: Warzone Earth, several alien spaceships crash-landed in multiple major cities of the world. You play as a commander of a platoon sent out to investigate anomalies that occur around the crash site and to gather information on what is happening as the anomalies are neutralizing every possible threats.
Now in Anomaly 2, a few years after the invasion, human kind is on the verge of extinction. Earth is now machine controlled, and humans must try and survive by banding together and moving around in convoys, searching for food and supplies.
Graphics:
If you thought the first one looked good you’re in for a surprise. Thanks to a new and improved visual engine the game looks more beautiful than ever. It offers new and improved graphics that make you stare at your screen.
Sound:
The game’s soundtrack breathes battle tunes, like you’re going to take part in the biggest war of your life. The music suits the game very well, I don’t think I could imaging the game with any other music.
Gameplay:
The multiplayer beta offers you 2 modes, the single player tutorials and the multiplayer.
Off course you start with the single player tutorials, to get to know how the game works. This is explained very well in these tutorials. There are 3 levels available, where you can choose between 4 difficulty settings, from casual to nightmare. Casual seems to be very easy as to where nightmare is really difficult, you really need to pay attention on your strategy.
While playing you can enter the tactical map by pressing ctrl, and change the route of your squad. This is done by clicking on the arrow at a crossroads to change the direction in which your squads moves. So you can only change the direction at a crossroads, you can not turn around and go back. If you really need to go back you’ll have to run around a block to achieve this.
In the tactical map you can also spent Carusaurum to buy, sell or upgrade vehicles. Which you’ll need to do to survive the rounds, as different maps needs different vehicles to clear the round.
In multiplayer mode you can choose to play as the squad or as the towers. This very unique in this genre and it’s very welcome too, as tower defense games really needed an innovation.
Playing as squad you’ll need to destroy towers which are already placed at the map. You don’t need to destroy them all, just enough to earn enough points to win the round. So choose wisely which ones you’ll want to destroy and which ones you’ll pretend to attack so the other players wastes Carusaurum on building towers there.
On the other team, the towers, watch out to not build towers where you don’t need them. If you’re out of Curasaurum, the squad team will destroy you like it’s nothing. Defend the towers that you think the squad team is most likely to attack by building your towers around them.
So the multiplayer idea is a very good one, but it has some shortcomings.
I played the multiplayer a few times against a friend, and the one playing the squads always won. It feels a bit like the person playing the towers is a bit at a disadvantage. Off course it’s entirely possible we didn’t understand the tactic to play the tower side very good. But then there should’ve been a more detailed explanation of how to play the tower side. Like two example movies showing the play style of both sides during the same multiplayer match.
Also the duration of match was really short. I think the longest we played was for about 5 minutes. It would have been better to need a higher score to achieve victory, because reaching a 1000 points isn’t very hard.
These are the two points which, in my opinion, needs some rework done.
Conclusion:
Aside from a few remarks I have, this game looks like it can change the tower defense genre. The multiplayer is a very nice addition which, if worked out correctly, could become very popular. And if this is the case, every other Tower defense game will adapt this mode into its menu. So be on the lookout for the release of Anomaly 2, if you’re a fan of this genre you’ll want to get this game into your collection.
Anomaly 2 - Preview,
Related Items
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Sounds awesome! Will give it a try!
[…] There are 6 tutorials to play through, 3 squad tutorials and 3 tower tutorials. As mentioned in our preview, here you’ll be able to play on offense as the squad or to play on defense as the towers. These […]