Winning with Anomaly: Warzone Earth

11 Bit Studios‘ action-strategy game Anomaly: Warzone Earth came to me via Day 5 of Splitkick.com’s Holiday Giveaway competitions!

This is a reverse tower defense set in a future Earth where aliens have crash-landed, leaving large energy domes, or Anomalies, in several major cities.  You play as the Commander, leading a platoon of armoured units into the Anomaly to explore, and then re-take the city.

The first level has you enter the anomaly, and serves as the tutorial.. setting a path for the platoon, adjusting this to avoid falling asteroids, and repairing units which took damage..

Adjustments to the path are made in the tactical view, which freezes the action while you plan your new route.. avoid obstacles, or take a second pass of a not-quite-dead tower.  I found a lot of items were dropped after killing a tower, so I aimed for them on most missions 🙂

The commander can place smoke screen and decoys, and repair your armoured units.  I found him surprisingly strong.. able to take some fire from the towers, but regenerating very quickly once out of fire again.  He went down only once, while I was planting a decoy in the middle of a large group of towers.. and even this was only a three second knockdown before he was back on his feet!

Each unit has their own strengths and weaknesses.. tanks are well armoured but less offensive than crawlers, and shield-generators are unable to fire at all.  Setup of the platoon is mostly down to the player, although some units are added as part of the story, such as the shield generator drone and tank.  As you earn money during a mission, you can upgrade units or add more to your platoon too.

This means you can play as you want.. I mostly went with an APV or tank, shield-generator and crawler and upgraded them rather than add to the platoon.

Splitkick.com’s Holiday Giveaway also provided me with a Riot Nassus skin for League of Legends.. another game I want to revisit 🙂

I love tower defense, but I loved destroying towers for a change 🙂

League of Legends

My boss at work actually suggested League of Legends last week.. I took no notice the first time he mentioned it because I thought he was talking about one of the many Facebook games he’s suggested in the past.  Then I saw a screenshot..

Back at i39, I played Heroes of Newerth.. under beta, which is why it didn’t appear in the blog despite the many, many hours played following lan.  At a first glance, I thought LoL looked very like HoN.

Like HoN, there are two opposing teams headed by up to five player-controlled champions, bases at opposite sides of the map, and paths linking the two bases.  Minions for each team are spawned at intervals, and spend their lives pushing their way towards the enemy base, fighting the enemy minions and destroying turrets along the way.
At the end of each lane there is an inhibitor; if your minions destroy the enemy inhibitor, you get super minions..

Unlike HoN, the inhibitors respawn after a little while, which means you can still make a comeback..
Of course, the game’s all over if you destroy the enemy Nexus 🙂

Another difference is that you can choose any Champion regardless of team.. with HoN, you were restricted to Legion or Hellbourne heroes, though there were a lot more to choose from.  Different Champions are available for free each week, though you can unlock more with Riot Points, which you buy with real money, or Influence Points, earned simply through playing.. we dubbed these ‘Internet Points’. 🙂

The Champion I’ve been using for these last few games is the assassin Akali.  I really like her abilities, and tend to use second ability Twilight Shroud, which slows any enemies within it, then Crescent Slash to damage anyone within range, then Shadow Dance to jump straight on an enemy Champion, escpecially if they’re trying to run away.

I’m finding the range of items in-game a bit easier than I did with HoN, though whether it’s down to it being simpler or just because I’ve learned a lot more about stats from playing WoW, I’m not sure.

League of Legends is free to play.. go and try it out! 😉