Anomaly President Early Access Review: Dead Cells Meets Fallout Shelter

Hello one and all and welcome to AI and Games. This is a short issue really given I am currently out in Cologne for Gamescom and don’t have the headspace or frankly the time to write anything substantial. But some quick updates on things happening in and around the event:

The Gamescom Dev AI tracks hosted by the AI and Games Conference team have gone down really well thus far.
I had a great time being part of a panel at the leadership summit track yesterday. Had some very interesting conversations off the back of that.
Cologne is enjoying a nice bout of Scottish summer: it’s a wee bit warm, largely overcast and occasionally wet. Glorious!
I have already ate too much Currywurst…

For daily updates on what’s happening here I’d recommend reading the which is publishing an issue every day of Gamescom and reporting on what’s happening here throughout the week. In fact, this morning’s edition is an interview with me summarising a lot of the big issues we’ve reported on in the past year. So yeah, if' you’re missing your regular dose of Tommy’s musings, go check it out!

Video Games Industry Memo

The state of AI in Games, with Tommy Thompson - VGIM Daily, 25/08/2026

2 months ago · 8 likes · George E. Osborn

For this issue of AI and Games I’m posting a couple of reviews for some new indie games that were sent our way. Getting more and more press codes for games these days and we’ve gotta couple bigger AA/AAA titles for you next month. While you’re waiting don’t forget to check in on the latest episode of the podcast that dropped on Friday with our guest Andy Kelly talking about the updated version of his Alien: Isolation companion ‘Perfect Organism - The Assembly Cut’.

Enjoy, and we’ll be back next week with a proper Gamescom round-up!

Please note, each game was reviewed courtesy of a review key provided by the publisher.

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Review: Anomaly President

Phew Phew Games / Steam / Currently in Early Access

It’s not often you find a game that can clearly be defined in one line as a mash-up of two established concepts. I must have spent all of 30 minutes with Anomaly President when I realised this is what happens when you mash Dead Cells with Fallout Shelter.

The premise has players enter a literal election race, with the enemy in this instance being the incumbent president. The world is rife with corruption and the crime syndicates are working with the president to keep it that way. You (and your father) work to turn the tables and have the people vote for you in an effort to turn the tide and wipe out your opponents through what a slighted skewed interpretation of democracy.

The game breaks down into two phases: by day you’re running the presidential campaign bus, which is the Fallout Shelter-esque base-building phase, and by night you’re a vigilante going out to earn votes by literally killing the competition in a rogue-like combat game that wears its Dead Cells influences on its sleeve. The game is building on the existing setup and structure of the studio’s previous game Anomaly Agent, which was a fast-paced platformer with beat-em-up combat. In both games the emphasis is on having the player constantly move around the space and deliver damage where they can. Enemies have a variety of regular, parryable, and unblockable attacks and it’s down to you to know when to try to interrupt, parry, or dodge and deal as much damage as possible. Throughout a given run players create their build with a variety of upgrades to weapons, plus special abilities, elemental effects and assist ‘fluffies’: wee critters that appear to be aligned with your side in the broader political landscape.

Combat has a lot of range courtesy of different weapons, status effects, and enemy archetypes.

On death, the player restarts back on the bus the following morning, and the resources accumulated through the run - be it cash, ancillary fluffies, or resources from killed enemies - are then used to help expand the bus and build new carriages that either unlock skill trees, provide passive resources, or support the maintenance of the bus itself. While the bus works for you, you also need to work for it. Ensure food supplies, storage capacity, and sleeping space for staff is made available otherwise the bus stops functioning as intended.

Overall the combat is fairly engaging and well put together. It feels fluid in the moment and gives players the freedom to act and respond to threats. The range of enemy NPCs varies the farther you go into the game, and each room you visit in a given level can have a variety of archetypes in a single encounter. This gets quite complicated over time as the farther you progress in the overall narrative, encounters begin to shift and new archetypes that appear in future levels might start emerging in earlier scenarios. Boss battles often feel challening on first attempt, but with repeat runs you build both the knowledge of the behaviour patterns and the muscle memory and what feels challenging on attempt 1 becomes a breeze by attempt 4.

Levels are broken down into rooms with a core overarching structure, but then each room has some procedural variation. The one influence you have in the run is at the end of one room you can decide what upgrade you earn at the end of the next room. A fluffy will be standing by to tell you the two or three options you have (e.g. weapon upgrade, fluffy upgrade, elemental upgrade, resources) and needs to be selected before entering the next room.

Encounters are procedurally generated, and continue to evolve the farther you progress.

For me the biggest stumbling block is the bus management. While it adds an interesting layer to the gameplay, it also introduces some frustrations, in that failing to manage the bus effectively means rooms might go offline as the fluffies who staff it die out - from exhaustion, starvation, hard to tell. Sure, this is part of the management sim process, but I had several occasions arise where I lost rooms prior to a new run that lock off a useful function, notably the skill trees for weapons, and health where I unlock permanent unlocks. But this situation arose through no real fault of my own other than I opened too many rooms, and now the resources I’m accumulating on a given run are not sufficient to maintain the bus. But the game encourages me to extend the bus when I return to it. While I think the idea of using the bus/shelter means to expand permanent upgrades and features in the game is a nice one, when it hampers the ability to conduct the next run that feels frustrating. Particularly because the resources gathered in the run are passive. I don’t have a huge amount of influence over whether I earn most resources in a given run outside of whether I kill certain enemies or a resource is offered for a given room. It begins to kill the ‘just one more go’ loop that the night phase establishes so successfully. Given I now know the next run isn’t to progress, but just to get me back to where I was one or two runs prior.

Lastly, I am a little torn on the art style. The retro pixel art vibe apes classic indie games like McPixel or Fist of Awesome, but with flourishes in lighting to give it a little more depth. I felt it was rather hard to read at times, particularly in gauging the animations of characters which is important for parry/dodge behaviours. I noted however, that it looks a lot crisper in desktop mode with a higher resolution, but when rendered at the native resolution of a Steam Deck a lot of the art loses that sharpness, and as a result it’s a little muddy in spots.

Having played through the game for around 8-10 hours and working my way through several layers of expansion and unlocks - many of which I won’t spoil - the game continues to have charm and adds new flourishes to keep you engaged. When the core loop is working, it works well, but I do think it needs a bit more work just to tighten it up and refine that. That said, the game is still in early access, and already the devs have made several minor tweaks - patching the game several times during the launch window to address both bugs and minor feature adjustments - and provided a roadmap for their plans to build on the game in the coming months.

A healthy range of weapons and abilities help keep things fresh.

I think there’s most certainly an audience for this game, and the core roguelite combat loop is fairly strong. I think I’m going to sit on my save file for a few months and come back maybe towards the end of the year or early 2027 to see how it has evolved since then.

Interesting balance of base-building with roguelite combat runs.
Nice variety in weapon styles and upgrade paths.
Levels evolving as you progress further helps add novelty in future runs.
Art style proves a little muddy on the Steam Deck when compared to desktop.
Base-building doesn’t feel that engaging, and can impede broader progress.
Allowing for variety in the order of levels/bosses could prove quite engaging.

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Review: Akatori

Contrast Games / Steam, PlayStation 4/5, Switch, Xbox Series S|X

What struck me from the beginning of Akatori was the fun art style, a curious mix of classic pixel art with 3D environments designed and rendered in almost PS1-style aesthetics. As Mako, you walk between two worlds to save your people and the world around you from a danger brought by the amber storms, all with help of a mysterious companion that helps provide new abilities and mechanics the farther you progress.

The fun 2.5D art is often quite engaging and pleasant to look at throughout play.

Akatori seeks to strike a balance between action platformer and metroidvania but sadly never really succeeds at either. Mako has a variety of abilities that are built to support navigation of the world, but it never feels like these are sufficiently polished, nor that the game knows what type of challenge it wants to present. While there are often challenging platforming segments, and mechanics such as gliding, air-dashing and wall-jumping are added to help you overcome these hazards, it undercuts itself with a jump/double-jump system that feels overkill and often game-breaking. Meanwhile the world design itself is largely very linear, and doesn’t succeed where other metroidvania’s do of highlighting areas that are closed off for now that the player can subsequently revisit and exploit. From the very start of the game it feels like there’s an inconsistency between how the game handles, and how the the game is designed, and it never really recovers from this the farther the game progresses.

This is a shame given some aspects of Akatori hold a lot of promise. For one there is the chaos system, whereby you can earn upgrades through a currency accrued by dealing damage over time to enemies but without healing. Checkpoints are visible throughout the game map but using them at any time helps calm the players stress and in doing so it wipes your chaos meter. Hence you’re incentivised to play as long as possible without exploiting the healing mechanic, but the world doesn’t align sufficiently to give you opportunities to exploit this. The combat itself feels rather underdeveloped, which also undermines the incentive to participate in it, and often you can either do without it, or find an area within which to farm it rather than play the game as intended.

Sadly I failed to finish the game in time for this review given the pre-release build was updated a couple of times and led to my save files being wiped in the process. I wound up losing around 4 hours of playtime, during which I had seen more than half of the game based on my understanding. Unfortunately I didn’t feel compelled enough to swallow that and try and continue onwards. Rather I was happy to write it off as is and prepare the review. While it’s visually engaging and there are some fun aspects of gameplay, there are better examples in both the action-platformer and metroidvania genres for you to consider, and at best Akatori might be worth exploring during a sale, but as it stands it

Colourful and engaging art style.
Interesting risk/reward mechanic in the combat.
Platforming and combat are simple and far from engaging.
World design is lacking and mechanics need more polish.
Despite setting up an interesting premise, writing is rather poor.

Wrapping Up

Okay, thanks for tuning in for this slightly out-of-step issue. I mean we even released this on a Tuesday! So yeah, we’ll be back next week and hopefully we’ll be back in sync once again and able to talk a bit more about all things Gamescom. See you then!