iPhone Fieldrunners Review

An iPhone and iPod-Touch App to keep you happy for ages.

by Shadow Wave:

©2008 Ben Cadwallader:

Fieldrunners is quite frankly one the best no-nonsense games to hit the iTunes App Store since its launch. At it’s core it is basically a simple theme. Stopping enemies from running across a field and getting to the other side. To do this the player builds attacking towers on the field to prevent the opposition from reaching their destination.

It’s a genre’ made famous by the likes of Warcraft 3 and Desktop Tower Defence, where hundreds of ‘Tower Defense’ games were made. Some to compete with other people, to work as a team, or even to do by yourself.

It became a very addictive genre’ because of its flexibility. Especially in how you could always take on a different strategy which could be completely different than your previous attempt. Fieldrunners is a single player version of the genre’ for your iPhones or iPod-Touches.

As mentioned, you simply build towers on the field to stop creatures from getting to the other side. This is accomplished by using money you earn from stopping those creatures. You have 4 towers to build, all of which can be upgraded. A standard single shot tower, a slowing tower, a cannon tower, and a lightning ultimate tower.

The four basic towers & how to use them:

• 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.

Each tower has different effects which need to be combined to create an effective force to kill these creatures.  Most beginners will put towers randomly on the map that will shoot enemies as they pass by. A strategy that will only get you so far through the game, which consists of 100 ‘waves’ of creatures. A group of enemies is sent out each wave once the previous wave has been killed or reached the other side of the field.

But once you understand the basic principles of the game, you will learn to build a maze with your towers, which the enemies will be forced to run through to get to the other side. Of course there is always the occasional flying creature that will simply ignore your maze.  And this is where it really becomes fun.

You can be extremely creative with your designs so that they become very effective. This is essential, because each successive wave of enemies is harder than the previous one and you will need to get your best towers up quickly to attack the same enemy as many times as possible. By using a maze you can get your enemies to run up and down the field many times. With each pass they will be faced with your best towers again and again, whittling down their numbers and eventually killing them all.

While this in itself would make a fantastic game, Fieldrunner becomes even better because it saves your progress to exactly where you were up to when you hit the Home button, which is a great little feature indeed. Plus it has an easy to find pause button to aid you in this task – neat.

This means you can easily play for a short periods of time while in transit, without thinking it’s a waste of time and that you will have to start all over again later on.

Graphically the game is very clean. Using a simple artistic design which looks amazing on your iPhone/iPod-Touch, which alllows the details to be exceptionally clear and generally look great. You can both zoom in and way out, and the only thing it’s missing is the ability to rotate your view to look at a different angle. But that really is a very minor negative point. Basically, I have no complaints.

Now this may be my own personal preference, but I prefer my iPhone games that do not use motion/tilt controls. As I find these more annoying than fun.  This is what I like about Fieldrunners, it uses simple buttons that are easy to press, while keeping it easy and simple to play. You can play on the bus without looking strange, or play secretly in class (oopss I didn’t say that) or in some other place, as this game has no motion controls which keep the puzzle genre’ right where it needs to be.

Fieldrunners does have a few shortcomings of course, what game doesn’t.  Such as currently not having any sound, plus the range of towers to select from is a bit small. The creators have promised that sound, new towers, maps, and much more is coming very soon. That this game will also have community support that hopefully should keep this game very entertaining for a long time to come on your iPhone or iPod-Touch.

Fieldrunners retails on iTunes for just $5.99 AUD

“9.5/10

©2008 Ben Cadwallader:

Share us

Filed under: iPhone Reviews Tagged: | "iPhone games", Apple iPhone games, Apple iPod, ipod touch, iTouch