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 🙂

ScampLAN 2

The weekend just passed was ScampLAN 2, with a couple of friends bringing their PCs round to our house for gaming and silliness 🙂

We played a lot of Dungeon Defenders.. which I had a look at last week.  This game has really grown on me over the week..

I’ve now tried out all the characters, but the one I’ve played most has been the Huntress, who specialises in traps and ranged weapons.  I felt she was slow to get off the ground with.. the traps start off with only a few charges and are soon used up.. but after gaining many levels and improving both the traps and the character’s stats, she now feels quite powerful 🙂

When you level up, you can spend your points on stats for the character or for your towers.. I’ve spread my points out between the Huntress and her traps, but another friend has put most of his points into his Monk, making him fantastic in combat but with rather weak auras.  For the characters the three of us developed over the weekend, this worked very well, as it meant the mana could be spent on building and upgrading stronger towers and traps, without getting too close to the defense unit cap.  We got as far as the Servant’s Quarters during the weekend!

Another game we had a turn at was Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.
We tried to play this previously, but thought we might do better if we were in the same room and able to communicate a little better.  However, as in our previous attempts to play, we found barely-visible enemies were able to take us out with ease.. the game is supposed to be about realism and tactics, but if I’m approaching on my belly through trees and bushes, I don’t think it’s realistic to be shot down so quickly by people I can’t even see yet.

I also suffered from a rather random bug, which had my character float up into the air before being thrown back down again.. and of course, taking realistic fall damage.  This happened a few times, but settled down enough to complete the mission.  However, the fun was lacking for most of us, so we didn’t go back for a second mission.

In between the gaming I had a bit more of a poke around with VoxelSniper on Minecraft.
I had a failed attempt to add Zombe’s flying mod.. not quite sure what went wrong, but the game wouldn’t launch.. before I installed VoxelAir, which allows me to jump high into the air and land without damage, or hover above the ground.

You can jump rather a long way up.. and when I came down, I was surprised by the crazy number of mobs which had spawned!

I found an interesting bug with VoxelAir too.. after being killed while hovering, courtesy of a few Skeleton Archers and a lack of care, I respawned still hovering.. floating upwards in fact!  Using the “/give” command simply dropped a new feather at my feet, out of reach.. a friend also tried to give me a feather but it also landed out of reach.  In the end I used “/kill” a number of times and eventually spawned close enough to a feather for it to pick up.

Next up will be forming a nice piece of flat land for a huge project.. more later 🙂

With four people and a reasonably couch to take advantage of, there was also some console gaming.. though we found a distinct lack of co-op games allow four people on one console.  So many games boast “2-4 player co-op”, but don’t specify that this means two people on one console, and two on a second console.. annoying.  We tried Call of Duty: Black Ops.. we wanted the Nazi zombies, but only the arcade mode allowed all four of us to play.  We had a couple of runs on that, with me claiming the top spot for one run!  Red Faction: Armageddon failed us, as did Rainbow Six Vegas.. so we ended up shooting each other in Halo 3 which entertained us for a while!

Hunted: Demon’s Forge was picked up at the start of the weekend too, and we attempted some co-op in pairs.  We all found the game surprisingly hard, though Tim and Jason attempted to play without going through a tutorial first.. masochists!  I think the game would be a lot easier if you were able to carry more than one health vial each.. we also found the game punished deaths by sending us a long way back each time.  I’m looking forward to playing the game by myself at some point soon, too.

Another game which made an appearance over the weekend was Gears of War 3!
I hadn’t yet finished Gears of War 2, but the copy of #3 will be going home with Jason at the end of the week, and Tim wanted to start some co-op, so we’ve been playing through it anyway.. on hard!

So far, I’m loving it.. though noticing a few changes! The world has been destroyed by the Hammer of Dawn, and the enemies now include mutated Lambent creatures.. I’m noticing a huge change from the graphics of the original Gears of War as well, with the character models all being far more refined.  Good changes all round.. and still a great game, as far through as we’ve gotten this far! 🙂

Dungeon Defenders

Dungeon Defenders is a Tower Defense Action-RPG game by Trendy Entertainment.. delayed some months, but finally released yesterday.  There have been a few combination tower defense and action games lately, and like the others, there are two phases per round: the Build phase, where you place barriers and traps, then the Action phase, where the enemies come..

Our enemies here are goblins, orcs, dark elves and similar, and they head towards the Eternia Crystal in the centre of your castle, while you use your player character’s abilities to help fend them off, as well as repairing and upgrading your defenses as you go..

There are four classes of player characters to choose from: Apprentice, Huntress, Squire and Monk, each with their own abilities and defenses, and apparently more to come later.  The characters all level up and acquire loot through the game too, unlocking more defensive options and stronger abilities.

The game has a singleplayer mode, as well as co-op for up to four players, and a PvP mode.  We had a few problems getting into the game to start with.. being unable to connect to the servers or each other.. we managed to launch the game around an additional update coming out, but after validating the game files and restarting a few times, we were able to get into a co-op game together.

Starting off, you are placed in the host’s Tavern.. this has a number of other features I’ve not yet explored.  From here, you can choose whether you’re doing a Campaign or a Challenge, and choose the level and difficulty.

For our first co-op playthrough, I took the Apprentice, who specialises in elemental towers and magical attacks.  He starts off with a Magic Missile Tower.. but it wasn’t too long before I was also able to use Magic Barricades.  I’m looking forward to the Fireball and Lightening towers, but I’ll need to level up more first!

The enemies will go out of their way to attack your defenses, but you can repair them, and with enough mana, upgrade them too.

Killing enemies awards mana, and at the end of every level you can open chests around the map, which provide mana as well as various pieces of loot.. armour and weapons.  Loot comes with varying stats on it, and some pieces are class-specific, so as it dropped we shared it out accordingly.. my friends were playing as the Squire and the Monk.

After defeating all waves on the first level, we were able to move straight on to the next level, which had enemies coming from three sides.  We were doing well enough until the Kobolds arrived.. but they explode, and cause rather a lot of damage..

If you are killed, you have a short count-down to respawning.. but if the enemies have reached your crystal, that’s time you don’t want to spend laying on the floor 😉

The three of us were unable to beat the second level on this attempt, but as the characters have levelled up and gained some nice loot, I’m sure we’ll do better next time..

Sanctum got Updates!

FPS Tower Defense game Sanctum received some updates recently, adding new maps and towers!

Some of these updates are free, both others are via paid DLC..

Annoyingly, I see a lof of moaning on the Steam forums by ungrateful people who expect to be handed more content and not pay another penny.. despite some of these people only having picked the game up cheap in a Steam sale!  What they’re missing is that if the devs continue to work on the game, they need to continue to pay their bills and have some kind of income.. and optional DLC allows for this. I’m sure the whiners would absolutely love to go to work for nothing.. 😉

We went for a quick game or two to take a look.. it seemed that Sanctum had took a leaf out of BulletStorm’s book as we had the Penetrator and Violator in the mix, along with the rather interesting Holo and Ampfield ‘towers’, which allowed for more damage to be dealt to mobs.

I especially liked the Holo tower, which we paired with Gatlings or Penetrators.. and with the right positioning, players can shoot through the tower for a damage boost too 🙂

There was also a new weapon.. a Shotgun, which could be used for single shots, or by holding down the right mouse button, all shots could be fired at once for a rather powerful blast!  I loved this weapon, but haven’t decided which weapon is best to switch out with.  The Assault gun has the grenade alt-fire, while the Sniper allows you to hurt airborne enemies, and the Freeze gun is useful if a pack of mobs seem to be escaping the kill zone.. I guess it has to come down to balance.

Dwarfs!? Base Defense

Dwarfs!? has a Tower Defense mode called Base Defense.  This mode starts off with the diggers, who actually dig out the paths the monsters will use, and with a little direction and coin, you can have them create a reasonable maze.

However, you also need to reserve enough money to build towers.. there are eight types to choose from, from the simplest, the Stone Tower, to the powerful but expensive Lightning Tower.  Once the first wave of monsters have been dealt with, a second gate opens, with a second digger.. and the same with the third and fourth gates.

Rather than build a second maze, I made him cut a path to the start of the first, so the monsters pass by the towers I’ve already built.

After all the gates have been opened, the next waves allow for banking up some money.. and you should, as you want the Missile Tower or the Lightning Tower for dealing with the Titan 🙂

Later on there’s a level with many of these swarming in, and as they end up arriving in pairs, my defenses are proving inadequate.. I can take one down, but that leaves the next free to run to the middle and destroy it!  I may have to check out what others have done, as there are some seriously amazing scores on the leaderboard! 🙂