Hey all,

This morning I took a swing at playing Anomaly Warzone Earth, by 11 bit Studios. What is it? Well, put simply, it’s a tower offense game, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s well worth the $10 that I spent on it.

In the year 2018, debris from an alien craft slammed into Earth. The debris created a spherical “anomaly” around itself as a means of protection, and now the player must take Platoon 14 and investigate. Needless to say, the aliens aren’t 100% benevolent.

The player must move through the streets and weather the fire from a variety of alien towers that have been constructed to protect the remnants of the alien craft. At the player’s disposal are a handful of armored vehicles and the player’s avatar, a soldier clad in armor clearly inspired by Tron. In terms of strategy, the player decides which routes through the city to take, which vehicles to bring, and must use targeted abilities to keep the convoy alive and kicking.

So far, I like the game pretty well. The graphics are gorgeous, with all kinds of debris and dirt giving the game a gritty feel. Explosions are satisfying, choppers and planes fly overhead, and towers shoot pew-pew-pew lasers. I like the music well enough, though I’m a little unsure as to whether it fits the game; it sounds more like the music of an espionage thriller than of an alien invasion. The amount of radio chatter adds wonderfully to the immersion, and also reinforces the sense of desperation that the soldiers are enduring.

The controls are a bit strange, particularly the use of the avatar’s abilities. Still, I think that this is mostly just a bit of a learning curve: I keep assuming that the ability will go off right where I am standing now, rather than where I just clicked on the screen. It’s a bit odd, but I’ll get used to it.

Even on the “casual” setting, I lost a couple the missions during my first impressions. I think a part of this is that the game is rather unforgiving, and part of it is that I haven’t let learned the art of playing and speaking at the same time. I’ll have to see how badly I fail at the later missions when I don’t have the latter of those excuses to fall back on.

Part 1

Part 2

I’ll be honest: this was not my finest hour. I’m not going to make too many excuses; I will only make a couple. Again, the sound levels weren’t great despite taking some time to try to get them right. I think that I might end up adding in the audio after playing the game for 15-20 minutes instead of trying to talk over the game sounds. This would also alleviate the problem of the game sounds distracting me while I’m trying to be coherent. It’s definitely something that I’ll be working on.

Till next time,

S