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Tower Defense for the iPhone: Fieldrunners

Fieldrunners

See, the basic principles of games like (Desktop) Tower Defense are what make them so addicting. As such, tower defense’s rules are simple to understand: build a maze of different weapons which the enemy – in case of Fieldrunners a varying number of ground and air units – has to walk through or fly over.

In Fieldrunners there are four different weapons at your disposal, which can be upgraded numerous times:

  • Gatling Tower – short range, cheap
  • Goo Tower – slows enemy down
  • Missile Tower – long range, good against air units
  • Tesla Tower – powerful, expensive

In its current status, Fieldrunners is really simple and only gives you three different diffulty levels you can choose from. There’s only a single map yet, but the developer is promising new maps, new towers and, of course, new enemy types, called Fieldrunners. Update: Yesterday I got an update for Fieldrunners which adds a second map and what I believe to be new Fieldrunners.

FieldrunnersThe game makes good use of the touchscreen which you can use to move over the map and zoom into using the usual finger gestures. Even when there are many units on the screen, there’s no noticeable lag. The game runs perfectly smooth.

One nice detail other games didn’t do right is always saving last game’s state, even when you just hit the home button. When you restart the game it just starts where you left off. As with every other game that is graphics intensive it’ll eat through your battery rather quickly.

Something I’m missing from the good ol’ flash DTD (Desktop Tower Defense) is the ability to call in more enemies at once. After a while I was getting annoyed by waiting for new Fieldrunners to arrive on the virtual battlefield. Also I’d like to get in more enemies in one round to gain more points at a time. This way it also wouldn’t take ages to finish a single match.

Overall Fieldrunners is a really addicting game, maybe not quite as addicting as DTD once, but I’m sure the developers are actively working on that.

Here are the quick facts:
Price: 3,99 € (4.99 USD)
App Store: Fieldrunners
Developer: Subatomic Studios

Screenshot gallery:

Video of the game in action: