Anomaly President Review – A Campaign to Die For [Early Access]

Anomaly President is a fast-paced action-platformer where you run for presidency by day and take to the streets and beat your comedically corrupt rival’s lackeys by night. It’s still in early access as I’m writing this, but it’s already laid the foundation for something great. Let’s talk about it!

NOTE: I received a review copy of the game, and these are my thoughts after a few deep runs (and a lot of… untimely deaths).

A Relatable Satirical Story

In Anomaly President, you play the role of Venty, a sort of “special agent” with superpowers who is working to overthrow a blatantly corrupt president. Along the way, you have to defeat other corrupt officials who are hard at work trying to brainwash the masses, oppress the Fluffy race, and other unspeakably evil stuff.

I’ll leave it at that to avoid any spoilers, as the game does have an actual story that also plays into its mechanics. For instance, there’s an actual in-universe reason why you can keep fighting the same bosses over and over again, and they do address it eventually.

It’s kinda like Hades in that regard, but with heavier emphasis on humor and cheesy action movie one-liners. They even have the same approach to early access as the original Hades did, if there are any OGs here who remember how its “ending” played out whenever you beat it back then.

Fast Gameplay, Slow Grind

Let’s start with what’s great about the actual gameplay loop. In a nutshell, it’s a high-octane platformer where you can chain basic attacks while weaving in charged specials and active abilities called “anomalies”. To defend yourself, you can dodge, parry, or even abuse i-frames by using certain attacks and/or abilities as enemies try to hit you.

It’s a simple combat system where your loadout evolves as you progress through a run and pick new weapons/powers or upgrade what you currently have. Despite its simplicity, the game gets increasingly difficult as you start encountering new enemy types with irregular attack timings, and the bosses of each zone can be brutal with how relentless they are.

An Obvious Difficulty Spike

Before I get into more detail for this point, I’d like to point out that the game does have an early access roadmap, and smoothing out the difficulty is one of the things they’re trying to fix. With that said, the game overall feels just a bit unbalanced with how new enemy types keep ramping up in intensity and damage while your power barely increases with all the sidegrades you’ll receive.

By the third zone, you’ll start getting piled on by an onslaught of painful melee and ranged attacks that practically force you to mash the parry button with how they spawn on top of you and immediately go ham. It’s not that bad once you learn how to abuse i-frames, but it doesn’t make it any less brutal.

You see, upgrades in the game are almost all minor stat increases or exactly what I mentioned earlier: sidegrades. You get rewarded with new stuff after clearing each screen and with every level up, but it hardly feels like you’re getting stronger because of how the amount of power you’re given doesn’t actually scale well with the stuff being thrown your way.

A Promising Meta-Progression System

Despite its flaws in the combat, the meta-progression system does already try to give you decent power-ups to make future runs start off faster. However, it takes a while for it to actually start ramping up, as the materials you need to get significant upgrades takes a bunch of runs to get apiece.

I suppose it’s not that bad of a grind, as I’ve seen far grindier systems in games like Arms of God and Lootbound, but it certainly feels slow because of how it’s tied to this unusual but not necessarily bad base-building system.

Basically, you have to build up your campaign bus as you progress further into the game, and my only real complaint about it is how tedious managing it can get as you start adding more rooms. It’s a fun concept that quickly turns into a tiresome chore with how you have to keep managing your food stores and picking up all the materials each room generates.

There are also a few minigames to unlock and participate in as you add more specialized rooms, though they admittedly get a little too repetitive after a while.

It’s an issue that’s not hard to fix, and it’s far from gamebreaking, so I don’t mind it too much. A bit of QoL would be nice though! Besides that, the type of upgrades you can unlock, including new powers and weapons, will definitely keep you coming back for more. It’s always a treat to mix and match the varying weapons you can get.

Overall, Flawed But Fun

Would I recommend Anomaly President in its current state? Yeah, I’d say it’s still worth checking out this early even if it gets a bit grindy. Just be ready to have your runs end unceremoniously early on, as you don’t really experience huge power spikes until you start upgrading your bus and racking up more materials per run.

It’s an incredibly slow burn to start with, but its humorous dialogue and imperfect but still noticeably present progression systems are solid enough to keep you hooked.

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