Developer: Subatomic Studious
Steam Release: May 2012
Hours Played: 20 (+26.7 for Fieldrunners 2 )
Similar To: Bloons TD 5 / Defense Grid / Defense Zone 2 / Fieldrunners 2 / iBomber Defense
Rating: 3/5 Parsnips
*This review is included in place of Fieldrunners 2 as I have yet to do a review for that title.
If you’re up for a no-nonsense classic tower-defense game with no fancy bells or whistles but plenty of mayhem and madness then Fieldrunners will be the game for you. It is not too dissimilar to iBomber Defense but in this case creeps travel through an open map rather than set paths. Creating winding paths with your towers while exposing creeps to maximum damage is the order of the day. Once you select a map you're taken to the battleground screen. You place your first cheap, basic towers and watch them do their thing as the creeps approach from their entry points. Knowing from where and how many is important so you'll often be opening the tab nestled on the far right of the screen for this information. Watching the creeps get destroyed is only part of the fun as you have to plan which towers to place in which location carefully.
There are 100 waves of enemies per game making timely upgrading crucial but you can pause time and give orders whenever you want. The idea is to prevent 20 of the creeps from getting to the exit points at the edge of the screen. If they do, it's game over. There may only be 8 maps but there is plenty of variety in store; some have the creeps coming at you in criss-cross fashion; some have more numerous flying enemies while others have enemies trundling along a track etc. In Classic mode you are only given four different towers to place but there is so much planning to do that this is ample. As the waves keep coming, the action gets very hectic and you will be kept very busy. Unlike iBomber Defense, Fieldrunners is more hardcore and doesn't allow you to go back one wave to redo your set-up. If you balls it up, that's just tough luck baby!
The game was originally a mobile game so everything runs solidly on PC. The variety of soldiers, tanks, aircraft and trains are cheekily designed in a cartoon-like style and die in humourous ways to show the game has been done in the name of fun. Music-wise you get pleasant and purposeful military marching music in the menus, while in the game each map comes with its own musical score all of which drive the game forward in style. My favourite is the galloping Egyptian-esque little number for the Drylands map. Sound for explosions, placement of towers etc is all top-notch. Clicking on Play from the home-screen brings up a Map Selection screen where 8 maps, represented by cartoon-like icons, appear for you to select in hyper-efficient carousel-like fashion. Menus are solid with each click coinciding with a satisfying mechanical clunk.
You are given the choice to play 7 different game modes for each map on easy, medium or hard so there are many ways to play the game although Classic will be where you'll spend most of your time.The Map Selection screen only allows you to play the easy levels at first. Once completed, the previously locked and greyed out list of modes for the next difficulty lights up becoming available. Clicking Scores in the starting screen will bring up your own high score chart and show you your top 10 scores for each map but also, more meaningfully, which round you managed to reach. Unfortunately, and this is my only gripe about the game, you are not told at which difficulty level those said scores were achieved. Perhaps just typing easy, medium or hard when entering your name might be a way of keeping yourself more accurately informed.
Fieldrunners is the quintessential tower defense game that encompasses all the basic elements that a game of this genre should have and it implements those features extremely well. If you are a beginner or new to this type of game and feel like you might want to see what all the fuss is about then the game will serve as an excellent introduction. For the geeks and the nerds, of which fans of this genre number many, then you probably already know about this title. If not, rest assured it has your craving for challenging levels and statistical facts well and truly covered. What's more it has a fantastic sequel in Fieldrunners 2 which is arguably even better!
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