Fieldrunners

• Rating: 5

Fieldrunners
Developer: Subatomic Studios, LLC

Rated: 9+

Price: $2.99 Download

Developer:

Subatomic Studios isn’t known for much. In fact, they’re only known for one single game. Which just so happens to be one of the all time best selling iDevice games on the App Store. A testament to its quality gameplay and design, fieldrunners was ported to the console environment, and if you thought it wouldn’t do so well, a score of 81% at Metacritic would like to disagree.

Graphics:

The game’s graphics are amazingly simple. Most tower defense games are the same, it’s usually the theme of the game, coupled with the graphics that makes it either a hit or miss. Subatomic Studios went with a brightly colored approach, that struck gold. The environment is shiny and extremely beautiful eye candy, without detracting from the gameplay. The enemy models contrast with that, having slightly darker colors. This helps the game’s graphics achieve a very nice balance of color.

The animations are extremely well thought of. The tower attacks are fun and impressive for a hand held device tower defense game. Your screen will be covered with rockets, fire, lasers, etc. without it ever becoming TOO crowded. A lot of work obviously went into the design of the enemy models as well. Subatomic Studios managed to do something a lot of such tower defense game developers fail to do. Give the enemies personalities. From the way they look, to the sounds they make, and to the movements of each type of enemy, there’s an abundance of personality coming from each type of enemy.

Gameplay:

The game isn’t JUST addictive. It’s absolutely entrancing. Having moved away from the age old tower defense model of “enemies move on a set path, place towers here, here and here”, Fieldrunners offers the player the choice of where the enemies will go.

You can create “paths” for the enemies using towers as walls, cutting off routes, making the road to the exit point as long as possible, and just generally giving them as much trouble as possible. Keep in mind though that the game won’t allow you to do anything silly like completely shutting off their route. Even so, the sense of freedom is indeed palpable, as you have no one but yourself to blame if you can’t get past a level.

Fieldrunners sports several types of towers, ranging from your basic run-of-the-mill Gatling Tower, to the massive damage Mortar Tower. You can ugrade any tower, but this will cost you, so if you planned to buy a new tower, think twice before upgrading your existing ones.

Each tower has a different ability and attack method, some specializing in long range attack, others in slowing down enemies (mandatory to have a few of these), others specialized in anti-air attacks.

Either way, in order to master the levels, you will need to not just figure out a good tower layout, but to choose WHICH towers to use so as to inflict the maximum amount of damage. This adds a new level of strategy that most other tower defense games (and just general strategy games) seem to lack.

UI:

The UI is built in the same WW2-style that the rest of the game is built in, but it doesn’t go as far as being “gritty”.

It’s extremely simple, but effective. Overall, it could probably be made a bit more attractive, but obviously any gamers’ main interest concerning a tower defense game is in the gameplay.

Innovation:

Detracting from the usual tower defense model, using a non-medieval game setting and offering fun original levels is what gives Fieldrunners the cake. Had it not included all of these elements it would have simply sunk to the bottom of the tower defense pile.

Verdict:

An amazing game, that was extremely successful not only on iDevices but also on the console market, Fieldrunners mixes great artwork, with terrific ideas, enemies filled with personality and addictive gameplay.