Anarchy 2087

Some surprisingly ferocious debates occur during our frequent roundtable discussions about mobile games. Voices are raised, tables slapped, ties flicked, snacks flung and noses, invariably, are bloodied.

However, we generally agree about two things: one, the mobile phone is a perfect platform for real-time strategy games; and two, there are no decent real-time strategy games on the mobile phone.

Having produced the excellent Townsmen series of mobile god-sims, HandyGames was always bound to make the sideways move into RTS, and, although several developers have already dabbled in the genre, nobody is better qualified to make a proper go of it.

Anarchy 2087 is the result. Set in the eponymous year, the game uses the familiar post-apocalyptic world as its backdrop. Where nuclear war was once the projected reason for mankind's fall, however, the cause célèbre is now environmental catastrophe. Global warming has caused sea-levels to rise, and in the struggle to occupy the increasingly limited dry land, humankind has descended into war and barbarism.

In a pleasingly expansive set of help pages, HandyGames explains that in the tumultuous period following a series of natural disasters, a body called the European Crisis Team was established to impose order. Too heavy-handed, it managed to alienate much of the surviving population, and so a second group called the Free Survivors – 'refugees of diverse provenance' – was formed to oppose it.

Aside from a brief training exercise, there are two game modes: Campaign and Skirmish. The latter drops you in one of four scenarios and challenges you to fight your way out, but there's not much longevity in this fairly meagre range, and the skirmishes work far better as ancillary training modules than as a game mode.

All of Anarchy's meat is in the Campaign mode, then, which places you at the helm of Bloody Mary's rebel force and pitches you against the ordered might of the ECT in a narrative that contains struggle, espionage, abduction, defection, dotty scientists, and daring escapes.

You begin with a limited number of buildings to construct and units to deploy. Each base requires a wind farm and an oil well in order to generate power, and to recruit troops you need to create training facilities, while tents increase the personnel capacity of your camp.

All of these commands are available through a context-sensitive menu that pops up when you press '5'. Since a single button enables you to control units, conduct research, create buildings, and basically do more or less everything, Anarchy's interface is remarkably economical.

As you progress through the game's twisting narrative, you uncover the means to build a reserve fuel tank, a landing zone for vehicles, watchtowers, and a host of other vital edifices, all of which you can repair as they sustain damage, move to another spot, or dismantle entirely in exchange for a boost in oil.

This last option proves particularly valuable in the later stages of a battle, when your oil well is dry, and the outcome of many confrontations is determined by your success at fevered micro-management under pressure. HandyGames has made an excellent job of balancing Anarchy's gameplay, and the difficulty curve is well-judged, never overwhelming you with new technology or daunting numbers.

Is it perfect? No – far from it. While you can group your mobile units together, there's no option to select all hovercraft, say, or all mercenaries. While you can assign hotkeys to your buildings, you can't assign them to your units, meaning that every time you want to carve up your army for whatever reason, you have to do it manually.

While it becomes possible to build lookout posts, you can't instruct your units to hold positions, so sometimes when an enemy appears your tanks and infantrymen tear off after him and get threshed to bits in their reckless rabble, leaving your base undermanned and exposed. In short, Anarchy gets all the basics right except one: never stop at the basics.

However, these are minor criticisms. In a landscape as barren as the mobile real-time strategy genre, Anarchy struts uncontested, and we suspect it'll be chasing off the competition for quite a while yet.