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Earlier this week, mobile game super-publisher Chillingo released Anomaly 2 for Macs, PCs and iOS. The game's creators are promising players "the next generation of tower offense."
It does the absolute best that it can to innovate. There are new vehicles, new abilities, new enemies. Now players can morph their units by double-tapping them, changing their form to better deal with various terrain and enemy types. The art is brilliant. The interface design is excellent.
It's so incredibly boring.
It's generally agreed upon that Atari's 1990 arcade game Rampart was the first tower defense game, but the genre didn't really catch on until about 2007, when Flash Element Tower Defense, Desktop Tower Defense and Bloons Tower Defense began dominating popular Flash game sites.
Bloons and its sequels were the first to catch my attention. My high school classmates and I clogged our computer lab, wasting hours watching "super monkeys" hurl thousands of darts at inexplicably sentient balloons. Kids would gather around monitors, offering advice about optimal tower placement and staring blankly as the game played itself.
We couldn't pull ourselves away. We eventually tired of Bloons and its ilk, but when later tower defense games added a fast-forward feature to speed up the action, the computer labs clogged up again with students relapsing into their addiction.
In the years since Bloons hooked me, I've played scores of games that evolve or riff on the tower defense genre, many of them in interesting, smart and totally worthwhile ways: Lock's Quest for the Nintendo DS did brilliant things by adding in elements from other genres, the Xbox Live Arcade game South Park Tower Defense is one of the most fun and intense cooperative strategy games for four players ever made, and who doesn't love Plants vs. Zombies?
When Anomaly: Warzone Earth was released in 2011, it blew everyone away. The concept was fresh, the touch controls were brilliant, and the game was fun. Apple gave the Mac version of the game its 2011 design award. The twist was that instead of playing defensively, you were the aggressor, strategically guiding and assisting a small convoy of units as they snaked through a maze, taking out entrenched enemy turrets. Reviewers everywhere gleefully latched onto the phrase "tower offense" to describe the game.
Now Anomaly 2 is here, and for all its forward-thinking additions to the genre, it is still primarily a game about watching slowly moving objects creep steadily down a track.
The game's developers included the fast-forward button from those beloved older tower defense games to help deal with some of the sluggishness, but it doesn't work here. This is a game that demands quick bursts of lightning fast decision-making and response time, and leaving the fast-forward button on is a sure way to flub a level – many of which take as long as 10 minutes to complete.
Don't get me wrong: Plenty of other game genres have also been done to death. But tower defense games have been so overdone that when a new one comes out, anything short of revolutionary design innovation causes it to fall flat.
If I were still a high school student who'd never encountered a tower defense game – if the last six years hadn't happened – I'd think Anomaly 2 was brilliant. I'd be hooked.
As I played Anomaly 2, I wondered if it's possible that anyone like that still exists. Is there anyone in the market for this game that hasn't yet seen a hundred other apps like it and gotten bored? Then I glanced at the top-10 sales charts on iTunes and spotted this. Some things never change.
