Apr 15, 2011 13:10 GMT  ·  By

Tower defense games are becoming extremely numerous in the last few years, as they present little problems from a programming standpoint, thus making the job much easier for independent game designers or small studios to get their name out there with a marketable product.

Sadly, except for a few big titles, including PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies or Defense Grid: The Awakening, not a lot of tower defense games reach decent sales, despite appearing for a variety of platforms, from the PC or consoles to mobile phones or tablets.

That's why 11 Bit Studios decided that a change was needed in order to make the genre viable for the recent Anomaly Warzone Earth title.

Instead of placing you in charge of a base that needs to be defended through a variety of different towers against an invading horde of enemies that are coming through predetermined paths, you are actually commanding the forces that need to defeat the towers.

Looking from the outside, you would believe that the genre reversal was pretty obvious, but, after playing a few rounds of Anomaly, you realize that the developer needed to really change some of the mechanics of the genre.

While all tower defense games require a lot of strategic skills, Anomaly takes it even further, as you need to factor in lots of things before going on the assault, like what route your troops need to take, what sort of units you need to have and how do you need to arrange them in formation, what sort of approaches you need to choose or what sort of powers you need to use.

Anomaly Warzone Earth, from a certain perspective, can even be regarded as taking the tower defense genre to a new level, by combining it with elements of dungeon crawlers, role-playing games or real time strategy ones.