iPhonefreak width="190"

Price: $4.99
Links: Developer | iTunes

A few days ago I saw a friend mention this iPhone game he’d been hooked on called “FieldRunners” and decided to try it out for myself.

Basically, the premise of this game is to build towers with special abilities to keep enemies from crossing from their base to enter yours. You can choose from four different towers, each of which can be upgraded twice, and build them anywhere on the field for a certain amount of money. The tower types are machine gun, goo (which slows enemies down without damaging them), rocket, and electricity.

In a typical game you’ll start with an empty field, a small amount of cash, and twenty lives. You’ll then have to build towers to fight off 100 waves of enemies, losing a life each time one reaches your base. You’ll also earn cash for each enemy killed, allowing you to build more and better towers as the waves of enemies get tougher.

I haven’t really been paying attention to the tower defense game craze, so it actually took me a few days to realize that this game was one. Once that was clear, I purposely hunted down and played other tower defense games on my computer to give me some perspective. It turned out that FieldRunners was easily my favorite. The graphics are amazing and the controls are well though out. Towers are built by simply dragging the corresponding tower icon at the bottom of the screen to the desired location.

Unlike many other tower defense games, FieldRunners doesn’t limit enemies to a set path. Therefore the player must either spread their towers all over the map or form ‘walls’ of towers to herd enemies along certain routes.

There are, of course, a few drawbacks to FieldRunners. I’ve already had the app crash on me a few times, wiping out my current game in the process. Thankfully this doesn’t happen often, but it’s still annoying. You might wish to restart your iPhone before playing to minimize the risk of a crash.

The game also includes only 2 maps to play at the moment (more may come with updates). While these maps offer countless scenarios to play out to win, the lack of more playing fields is an inexcusable fault in an otherwise great application.