Just completed Anomaly story

[Pizzarugi]

I should add that I do play the game with mods so my experience will have been a lot easier than most people's.

I gotta say, I really enjoyed the amount of thought the devs put into this DLC. They didn't just add new threats you can defeat by simply luring them into a killbox, you have to study them and identify their weaknesses. Your risk of losing the colony doesn't come from bad RNG of enough enemies packing doomsday rockets, it came from too many pawns infected by metalhorrors or allowing the map to be overrun by flesh.

I absolutely loved the endgame phase of the story where you have to activate void monoliths. It felt a lot more active and indepth compared to previous DLCs that boiled down to "just defend against increased raid frequency for a few days". You had to venture outside of the safety of your fortress colony to interact with heavily defended structures that conjured waves of monsters once activated. It even has a second phase where you now had to deal with darkness that can harm you for being in it. I thought that was pretty cool.

I also like a number of the new psychic rituals. As someone who uses Transhumanist memes in my ideology, I really don't like how my pawns must dunk themselves in a biosculptor pod annually or risk being permanently upset. Now I can use my future organ donor prisoners to steal their age, turn my pawns into teenagers, and never have to worry about it for several years or until I can get lucky and find an ageless gene. Training skills is difficult and skilltrainers are rare, so philophage ritual is terrific to help speed that up. Colony is being besieged? Throw a horde of fleshbeasts at them via ritual! Needless to say, I can see myself getting some mileage out of some of these.

I know some people regard Royalty as one of the best DLCs, but I personally put Anomaly on the top of the list.