If you enjoy shooting aliens out of the sky, getting some extra exercise, and protecting the Earth, welcome to Clandestine Anomaly. This game is one of the few that take into consideration: Data Plans, Player Safety, and Disability.
What is Clandestine Anomaly?
Clandestine Anomaly is like Starcraft, but for those who want some exercise. Your primary purpose is to defend or attack an alien race. The game makes you choose a location when you first start the game so that the alien can safely crash land. This is your home of operations and for the first few missions, you must defend it while learning how to play. After that, you have the option to go to locations and fight the enemy there or opting out of having some really powerful options in order to stay home. This will be to collect resources, complete missions, or to protect allies. Clandestine Anomaly is entirely one player based, so you don’t need to team up with other players to play it.
Graphics and Visuals Score 4/5
The game doesn’t seem that impressive until you get to use Recon Mode, which is where it shines. For the most part, you will be playing an application game like many of the space defending games on the market. When you enter Recon mode, though, you see the real world as your backdrop and you get to shoot the aliens coming in. This looks as realistic as it can get and Recon mode is a One-shot mode for the most part. Anything you shoot will die with one shot, but there’s a catch. In order to use Recon mode in Clandestine Anomaly, your physical location must be near the location of the enemy or you will be out of range.
Hardware Requirements Score 5/5
Any smartphone that has come out within the past five years should technically be good enough to play Clandestine Anomaly, provided that those smartphones were the medium or top smartphones of their time. Smartphones that are built cheap and don’t have a lot of power in them might not be able to play this game, but I have yet to find one that hasn’t been able to handle this game since the graphics are so low grade. Clandestine Anomaly is available for both iPhone and Android.
Fitness Score 3/5
The game takes a lot into consideration when encouraging exercise. While Recon mode is fantastic and you can only get some resources or complete some side missions by traveling to locations, it doesn’t force you to go there. The original intent was to make sure players stayed safe and those who couldn’t travel to those locations were still able to play Clandestine Anomaly. With that said, the game uses fitness as a secondary aspect of the game but encourages it nonetheless.
Gameplay Score 4/5
The gameplay is easy to understand and adapts to any player’s personal situation, which is not something done in normal augmented reality games today. It’s not the best, but Clandestine Anomaly certainly beats most of the games out there.
Overall Score 4/4
If you like traveling outside in the world, Clandestine Anomaly will be a fantastic addition and most of it will be playable on your phone. The developers of the game understood that with most games, the data plan usually determined how much the player would play the game. Therefore, they decided to make it a mostly native application.
–Tommy Mertel
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