The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Anomaly 2
The first entry in the Anomaly series, Anomaly Warzone Earth ($1.99), blew our minds when it released for iPad back in August 2011. It took the idea of a tower defense game but turned it on its ear by putting the player in the seats of the creeps themselves, allowing you to choose your own path through a level and destroy the many types of defense turrets that had been set up to stop you. We loved Anomaly Warzone Earth so much that it was our runner up for Game of the Year that year, and it was only just barely edged out for the top spot. The “tower offense" formula resonated well with gamers too, and late last year a spinoff was released called Anomaly Korea ($3.99) which didn’t change too much from the original but added plenty of new content to play through. The headline for our review of Anomaly Korea was “If It Ain’t Broke…" and indeed the release proved that more of a great thing is never bad.
However, for Anomaly 2 ($4.99) developer 11bit Studios did want to change up the formula a bit adding new features and improvements to make this latest release a true sequel to the original masterpiece. Anomaly 2 has been out on Steam since earlier this year, but just this week launched for iOS. Even in our brief time with the game you can see just how far the game has been ramped up in terms of visuals and presentation. Anomaly 2 is a looker, and will easily be one of those showpiece games that can show off what your iOS device is capable of. The developers have also focused more on the story this time around, and added a slick new morphing mechanic that lets you transform your creeps on the fly in order to give you even more strategic options for dealing with the enemies the game throws at you.
We’ll continue putting Anomaly 2 through its paces to see how the entire package holds up, but even just in the couple of days since release it’s easy to see that this will be one of the top games released this year. There are some minor performance issues that 11bit is currently ironing out that seem to only affect certain iPad 3 and iPad 4 models, but with their previous track record I’m confident these issues will definitely be stamped out soon. If you enjoyed either of the first two Anomaly games, then you best get to insta-downloading Anomaly 2. It’s not everyday that such a robust, deep, and visually impressive title launches on the App Store, and for that reason we picked Anomaly 2 as our Game of the Week this week. Be sure to check out more impressions in our forums.
