Anomaly Korea

Anomaly Korea is a standalone expansion campaign built on top of Anomaly Warzone Earth, and it keeps the idea that made that first game interesting: you’re not defending against the tower rush, you’re the one pushing a convoy through it. 11 bit studios takes the same reverse tower defense concept and drops it into Korea, throwing new enemy types and a fresh set of tools at you while asking you to do the one thing tower offense games always ask: get your squad from one end of a hostile map to the other in one piece.

How it plays

You’re commanding a unit moving through streets lined with enemy towers, watching the fight unfold from a top-down view while you make decisions in something closer to real time strategy than shooter reflexes. Before a mission starts, and often mid-mission, you’re plotting the safest route across a tactical map, weighing which streets expose you to the least fire. Once your squad is moving, you’re spending resources on new units, calling in powers like Boost to push your convoy through a rough patch faster, and reacting when the road ahead turns out to be worse than expected. The campaign runs across 12 missions, and there’s a separate Art of War mode built specifically to test how well you’ve actually learned to lead a squad rather than just muscle through with brute force.

Who it’s for

If you like tower defense but have always wondered what it would feel like from the other side of the map, this scratches that itch directly. It also suits anyone who enjoys tight, mission-based strategy games that don’t demand a huge time investment, since campaigns like this are built around discrete, replayable levels rather than a sprawling open structure. If you need flashy production values or a huge roster of systems to stay engaged, this is a more modest, focused game and you should size your expectations accordingly. And since it’s an expansion campaign rather than a full standalone experience, it makes the most sense to people who already have some interest in the Anomaly series or want more of that specific format after finishing the base game.

Is it worth grabbing?

For what it is, a compact strategy campaign with a genuinely different angle on a familiar genre, it’s an easy thing to add to a library, especially when the cost of entry is nothing. You’re not committing to a massive campaign or a live service grind, just a handful of focused missions that ask you to think about pathing and resource timing in a way most strategy games don’t. Strategy fans who like short, replayable mission structures will get the most mileage here, particularly anyone chasing better performance through the Art of War trials rather than just clearing the story once.

Quick facts

Genre: Action, Strategy. Developer and publisher: 11 bit studios. Platform: PC (Steam). Release date: November 6, 2013.