Anomaly: Warzone Earth

Once inside the anomaly, mild disappointment at the lack of alien disco-tech soon gives way to grim determination. The fiends are turning earth's cities into warzones, studded with various flavours of turret.

The basic variety is a fast-tracking laser cannon – not too threatening alone, but dangerous in clusters. You soon encounter more specialised kinds such as the scorcher, which can't rotate but fires a searing heat-ray at long range down a single road. Then there's the behemoth, which pumps out massive AOE damage.

Here's where on-the-fly unit management becomes paramount. There's a single key target on each map to destroy, but the last thing you want to do is face a scorcher head-on down the main strip. Re-pathing when such threats appear is crucial so you can set your column up for a side-on approach.

In addition, you need to keep your commander out of the enemy's kill-zones. If his health is reduced to zero he becomes stunned for seven seconds, leaving him unable to support the column. This can easily lead to a wipeout.

To make things extra-interesting your vehicles collect resources on the road which your commander is unable to pick up. You can then pause the game and spend these in the upgrade menu to improve specific abilities.

This can lead to some interesting choices with meaningful outcomes: do you head down the more dangerous road for the sake of the resources that lie along it, risking failure for the reward of added toughness and firepower?

With 14 missions to play through, 11 bit tell us that main story-game will last around six hours. There's an extra 'endless' mode to tackle afterwards. This involves entering an anomaly and trying to destroy a key target within five minutes while turrets spawn semi-randomly to keep things fruity.

Upon completion a new target appears, the timer is reset, and turrets begin respawning in a more prolific fashion. The levels intensify in this way until the player's forces are wiped out, or his brain explodes.

Six hours of story-missions doesn't sound like a lot, but that's reflected in the 10-15 Euro price point slated for this download-only game. 11 bit has yet to announce which digital services they'll partner with for the PC version.

The studio is also working on a rather tidy-looking iPhone version, with an intelligent rejig to the UI and control system to reflect touch-control, and a higher-resolution iteration for the iPad.

The ultimate aim is to release Anomaly on Xbox Live and PSN as well, but 11 bit informs us these deals aren't yet in place. Here's hoping they do get sorted out as those platforms could be the perfect home for what's shaping up to be a fun, pleasingly tactical reinterpretation of tower defence principles.