With so many tower defense games flooding the market, the fact that the first two Anomaly games aimed for something wildly different made them far more exciting to dig into. In both of those games you played the role of the attackers, controlling a free-roaming human commander who laid power-ups and issued commands for your rolling armored convoy to obey as it snaked its way through the alien-infested battlefield. It offered brilliant little twists to spice up a genre that has grown stale. For all its sci-fi splendor and pulse-pounding challenge, Anomaly Defenders marks a big step backward from the innovation that made its predecessors so memorable. That's not quite enough to ruin the experience altogether, but it does wind down the series on a weak note.

Defenders takes the ongoing conflict to the alien homeworld, where the human forces are launching a massive counterattack. That means your role in battle is flip-flopped, however, placing you in the metallic skin of the aliens as you make a frantic attempt to hold back the human assault so your escape pods can launch to safety. The story-driven character interactions and surprises that drove the narrative between missions in the previous games have been stripped out, leaving a 24-mission campaign that plays more like a series of stand-alone war puzzles than the cohesive plot-centric encounters we've seen before. Changing things up yet again might have been a welcome move, if the shift didn't push the series into predictable territory.

Some of the game's more important nuances, like the distinct advantages of using specific towers against certain enemy types, easily get lost in the chaos. There's often so much going on at any given moment that absorbing the bombardment of info about which enemies are approaching and how to best thwart their attacks with the limited resources you can lay down is a dizzying task. The ability to pause the battle to zoom in and queue up tower placement and upgrades is certainly helpful, but it doesn't fully stave off the overwhelming deluge that strikes in the heat of battle.

Even with its few unique facets and puzzle-like focus, Defenders' bursts of stress-tinged fun stretch only so far. Remove the offensive hook of playing as the human commander in the two previous Anomaly games, and you're left with a serviceable tower defense game that doesn't shine as brightly as it predecessors. Earlier Anomaly games proved that a little innovation can go a long way, but you just don't see as much of that approach in action here, which results in an underwhelming and familiar return to the norm.