Anomaly Warzone Earth - iPhone Review

Anomaly Warzone Earth - Chillingo / 11-Bit Studio

Price: $1.99

An alien dome encompasses downtown Bagdag. You, the commander of a small on-the-ground squad, are sent to investigate and eliminate the alien forces taking over the city.

Without a doubt we all are way too familiar with the Tower Defense genre. As tower defense games once ruled the app store. Chillingo and 11-Bit Studio flip this concept, putting you on offence. While this isn’t completely original concept, no one has executed it to perfection, until now.

Each level has an objective, including: traveling to a safe zone, collecting alien samples, destroying an alien, escorting a VIP, etc. This keeps your progression through the game fresh and interesting. Once the objective is set, you must purchase a squad of vehicles. You are then shown a dynamic map of the town and towers/aliens in which you set your route. Placing a route is simply exectuted by placing arrows at intersections. Your route may be changed at any time, which also pauses the action. When you start the mission, your map will transform a war-torn Bagdad, exploding with eye-candy. I’m blown away every time.

As you advance through the 15 level campaign, additoinal units and special abilities will be unlocked. Units consist of the typical tank and rocket launcher, but also include a shield and special ability tank. The shield unit may be the most important of them all. Special abilities include repair, smoke shield, distracter units, and an air strike. The smoke shield and distracter abilities are so important, so use them wisely and sparingly. Special abilities are earned by destroying towers or generated by the special ability tank.

As for strategy, you’ll find the “fastest route” approach successful in the first couple of missions. You’ll soon find yourself doubling back to destroy a few more towers, collecting those must-have abilities. There isn’t one route for success, and will scrap your well thought-out plan on many occasions. What success boils down to is key timing and placement of your special abilities.

Completion of the campaign unlocks a “Commander Trials” mode, which places an additional constraint on the missions. This adds quite a bit of replay time.

I can’t express enough how much I love this game. RTD is the new TD.

Rating:

5.0/5.0