Anomaly President

The president's PR chief has the power of HEART, which makes people fall in love with her. Beat her, and it's your power.

That's Anomaly President's hook, and it's a good one. You're running for office in a country falling apart, which means canvassing, building a campaign team and winning people over by day — and going out at night to dismantle the criminal networks the incumbent runs. The vice-presidential bosses each embody an anomaly, and the campaign and the violence feed each other.

It launched into Early Access yesterday. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Read the score before you read the score

Anomaly President sits at 97% positive across 437 reviews, which would normally be an emphatic recommendation. It needs context.

Of the hundred reviews I sampled across all languages, 87 are Turkish, and a substantial share of the highest-voted ones are not really about the game. The most-upvoted review on the page is a comic rant about Turkish players' taste. The second is a joke about the game fixing the writer's marriage and getting him promoted. Several others are direct tributes to Phew Phew Games' founder, who is a well-known Turkish YouTuber with a devoted following.

None of that is illegitimate. A creator's audience buying and championing their studio's game is ordinary, and plenty of those same reviewers make substantive points. But it does mean the 97% is measuring enthusiasm for a studio as much as quality of a product, and the English-language corpus — 37 reviews — is far too small to correct for it.

So I've done what the number can't: read the entire negative corpus in the original languages, and the substantive positives alongside it. What follows is drawn from that rather than from the badge.

What's genuinely good

The parry. Almost every detailed positive review lands on it, and it's the mechanic the combat is built around — well-timed defence that opens enemies up rather than merely negating damage.

The anomaly powers land too. Players describe them as weighty, helped by proper screen shake and effects, and the structural idea of taking a boss's signature ability is a stronger progression hook than another damage percentage. Combat is more varied than the studio's previous game, combos are more rewarding, and money and items earned inside a run give it a shape.

The comparison to Anomaly Agent recurs constantly and always in the same direction. Multiple reviewers who bounced off the first game for feeling stiff say this one fixed it; one estimates the studio has improved on it fivefold. That's a meaningful signal from an audience that knows the previous work.

The Fluffies — the oppressed creatures you recruit and assign to campaign departments — are the most interesting untapped idea here. When they work, they tie the daytime campaign to the nighttime fighting. Several players say they can't tell what they're doing yet.

What a day-old Early Access game looks like

The negative reviews are short, specific and consistent, which is what you want from an EA launch.

Ultrawide is broken. Two separate reports, one at 5120×1440 and one at 21:9, describe the game either stretching or cutting off part of the screen, plus heavy stuttering. Worse, the resolution setting applies the moment you touch it rather than on confirm, and one player crashed the game finding that out. If you're on an ultrawide, wait.

The interface reads as placeholder. The font is repeatedly singled out as looking like it came from a mobile game and clashing with the pixel art. The main menu draws the same complaint.

The enemies don't understand the levels. They can't move up or down between platforms, so encounters resolve into standing on a ledge. Density is erratic — one enemy in a large arena, seven in a corridor.

Inputs collide. Interactive crates sit next to climbing pipes and ziplines, all sharing a button, so combat stalls while you fight the prompt. Ziplines themselves get called redundant given you have a double jump, and the horizontal ones especially.

Level layouts repeat. More than one player describes the sensation of looping through the same room, which for a roguelike is the thing that must be fixed first.

There's also a design tension worth flagging, raised by a player who liked the first game: this one piles on systems — posture damage, items, Fluffies, buffs — faster than it explains them, and the result is that some players click through choices without knowing what they've picked. The word one used, translated, is "soup." The predecessor was simpler and hit harder.

7.0 out of 10. Rated 7.0 out of 10.

I like this a lot more than the list of faults suggests, because every one of those faults is the kind that gets fixed and none of them touches the core idea. A roguelike where you rob bosses of their powers while running an election is a genuinely new shape, the parrying is already good, and nineteen dollars is a fair price for something this early from a studio that patched its demo three times in a fortnight.

What stops it going higher is simply that it is one day old and shows it — a placeholder-grade front end, broken support for common monitors, enemies that can't use the terrain, and repetition already visible at two hours of play. That's an honest Early Access seven, not a disappointment.

Buy it if you want to back the idea early. If you'd rather arrive when it's finished, put it on the list and check back after a couple of content patches — and either way, judge it on what's in this review rather than on that 97%.