Console games have made repeated trips to the World War II-themed tower-defense genre with diminishing returns, but Subatomic Studios easily blows most of them away by lobbing Fieldrunners at iPhone gamers.
The premise is simple: Enemy soldiers try to run from the left side of the battlefield to the right, and your job is to prevent that by constructing machine-gun turrets, cruise-missile stations and Tesla coils to slaughter increasingly tougher waves of the enemy red army’s units. Every soldier, tank or motorcycle-riding enemy that meets their untimely end at your lines of defense nets you more cash to build more or upgrade what you’ve already planted. Every foe that succeeds in infiltration takes away one of your hit points.
Fieldrunners is straightforward, and that’s what makes it so refreshing and addictive, not to mention challenging.
While you can’t out-and-out obstruct the enemy’s path to their goal, you can build rows upon rows of guns to blast at them, which is also hilarious.
Without any blood and guts, there’s a cartoonish quality to Fieldrunners that doesn’t even make you think twice about the bizarre war economy reality of the game where a turret runs $5—slightly more than the game itself costs.
