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• Price: $4.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0
• Developer: Subatomic Studios

Tower Defense games are all the rage on the internet. There’s even a website dedicated to collecting them and providing a one-stop portal to most of them. One of my favorites is the recently released Bloon Tower Defense 3. Previously we reviewed Mote Massacre, the first tower defense game to come to the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is when we realized that the tower defense subgenre of strategy games is just perfect for this platform.

Now comes along Fieldrunners from Subatomic Studios to throw their hat in the ring. Much like with any other tower defense game, you build towers in an empty field and try to take down creeps, in this case called fieldrunners, that come in waves (levels). There are 100 waves in total. Fieldrunners are mostly soldiers, and they will use motorcycles, jeeps, tanks, and even giant, biped mechs in a race to get to the exit. They even use helicopters to fly over all the towers, ignoring the path. Your goal is to use the towers to set up paths of destructions and prevent the fieldrunners from reaching the exit. They enter from the left side of the screen and exit on the far right.

The strategy lies in the path that you create with your towers. Some paths don’t work so great, while others is just downright devastating … if you’re smart. There are four towers that you can lay down, but only if you have enough money for any of them. You make money by killing fieldrunners. In order from cheapest to most expensive, the towers are:

• Gatling Tower ($5): Great tower for quickly constructing defenses. Dirt cheap and surprisingly powerful. What this tower lacks in range it makes up for in its low price and damage.
• Goo Tower ($10): This tower is a must for those sticky situations when you need to slow a fieldrunner down. This tower reduces enemy movement rate and the effect increases with each upgrade.
• Missile Tower ($20): A great defense against air units. The missile tower’s explosive damage hits multiple targets at once. This tower has a very long range.
• Lightning Tower ($70): An ultimate weapon of devastation. This tower fires a single bolt of lightning that incinerates most fieldrunners in seconds.

Every tower can be upgraded two times, with each upgrade making that tower bigger and more powerful. You purchase and lay down towers by dragging one of the four tower icons on the bottom-right of the screen and placing it where you want it to be, releasing your finger when done. To upgrade a tower, tap on it to bring up a circular menu, and two icons appear. The left dollar sign icon allows you to sell the tower, albeit at a slight loss of the original price, and the right up arrow icon upgrades the tower at a price slightly less than the original building cost. Areas you can build on are highlighted in green, and the green circle represents the range of fire for that tower. If it turns red, you cannot build there.

The game is over when either you reach the 100th wave or you run out of health. Each enemy that reaches the right side of the screen and escapes takes off 1 health point. You start off with 20 health points, represented by the heart icon on the upper-right of the screen. When either of these occur, you can enter your name for the high score, which is only a local scoreboard. A global one would be nicer to have, and the feature Mote Massacre has where it takes a snapshot of the tower strategy/path you used for that high score and displaying it on their website would be nice in Fieldrunners, too.

The game can be paused at any time, and if you quit the game or get a phone call, you can resume back to where you were. You can zoom in and out at whim using the by now familiar pinching gesture. A typical game can last an hour if you manage to get to the 100th wave, which is the last wave that can be reached. There are 3 difficulty modes; Easy, Medium, and Hard. Unfortunately there’s only one map to play on.

However, the one map does look good, as does the whole game. In fact, Fieldrunners is very polished and runs great. The animation is very smooth and the style is fantastic. The shadows of the fieldrunners and towers themselves is a nice, small touch.

A major drawback to Fieldrunners that stands out immediately is the lack of any sound or music. As polished as Fieldrunners is, it’s an odd decision to release the game without any sound at all. At least you can play your own music library for now.

The developer has promised on their website in an upcoming update to include new maps, sound effects and music, and new towers, but there’s no telling when this update will come. For now, though, Fieldrunners is a fun game that looks really good. If you can overlook the lack of sound and music and enjoy tower defense games, Fieldrunners is a must-buy, for the gameplay and visuals alone makes it worth it.

Tags: fieldrunners, reviews, strategy, subatomic studios, tower defense