However, Anomaly is not an ass-kicking, kill-'em-all alien shooter. Instead, it's a smart riff on the tower defense formula. Instead of setting up lines of defenses for incoming crawlers, you are the forces that must survive the gauntlet. The aliens have many different weapons with myriad strengths and weakness, so survival depends on your ability to outflank (and out-think) these extra-terrestrial cutthroats.
You control a small on-foot commander that scouts out positions, picks up essential power-ups, and deploys resources as needed. You must make sure your column of vehicles (which you do not directly control) makes it through the defenses. You choose the make-up of your convoy – APCs, launchers, shielding vehicles, etc. – as well as the order of the vehicles within the column. Leading with a well-armored APC, for example, will take some heat off the devastating but poorly armored launchers.
Though you can create and upgrade a beefy convoy, success typically boils down to two things: your power-up deployment and your route planning. While you do not drive or aim vehicle weapons, you can zoom out to a high-level map view and click on intersections to designate the column's route through the battlezone. Strangely, I had a lot of fun just trying to make the most efficient routes that could cause the greatest amount of devastation while minimizing both exposure and travel time.
Supporting your column with power-ups is where Anomaly gets frenzied. If you think tower defense games are too chill, Anomaly's script-flip will have you rethinking that position. You have vehicle repair stations, smoke screens, decoys, and more at your disposal – all with timers and different areas of effect. The wide smoke screen will obscure your column for multiple enemy towers, but it doesn't last very long. Dropping a decoy in the middle of a firefight is great for drawing fire away from your vehicles, either giving them breathing room for fighting back or a break in the action for rumbling through a repair power-up.
I became downright excitable during some intense firefights, especially when I realized too late that my route was decidedly less than optimal. I rushed around the streets, trying to replenish spent power-ups by picking up air drops while remaining close enough to my column to give it the support it needed. The commander can be temporarily incapacitated from alien blasts, too, which can prove disastrous if it happens at the same moment the column is most vulnerable. The balance of strategy and action is really impressive. While there are down times as you roll through a cleared area, when the lasers start raining down from the towers and I realized my column was in trouble, I was as wide-eyed hunched over Anomaly as I've been in some games of Team Fortress 2.
Anomaly benefits from great settings, especially the Baghdad location, which tells a narrative without ever speaking a line of dialog. That's good because the actual dialog in Anomaly is rather cut-and-paste tough guy soldier tropes. However, regardless of the script, Anomaly does tell a solid story with a good mid-game wrinkle that sends this alien invasion story spinning into another direction.
Developer 11 bit's art direction in Anomaly is striking, too. The war zones are appropriately battered, but the use of bright colors (reds, blues, and greens really pop off the screen) make sure Anomaly doesn't settle into a monotonous sea of desert browns or cityscape grays. The alien designs are playful, although when I was being slammed by an 80-foot-tall behemoth, I found the invaders to be anything but.
