Steam has a schedule for upcoming games, but it ultimately just does what it wants to. As a happy surprise, you can now get what many rated as the best tower defence game on iOS last year (if not the best iOS game, period) on PC.
I’m not much of an iOS gamer, or mobile at all for that matter, but last year it was hard to avoid seeing the amount of articles and awards praising this game. I have an iPad that I never use, the product of an aborted venture to review iPad games, and I had even recalled it from a friend I’d lent it to just to see what the Fieldrunners 2 fuss was all about. But when it unexpectedly popped up on Steam, I jumped on it.
Fieldrunners 2 is very complete. It’s a mix of “maze” levels, in which you shape the paths of enemies with your towers as they try to charge past you, and “trench” levels, in which you have no control over their paths. True to convention, enemies get stronger with every wave, and a variety of fast, strong, grouped and spread out enemies will blindly charge forward.
But mazing can be detrimental — the basic, cheap tower turns out to be financially inefficient in the late game, and upgrading in Fieldrunners 2 is always more efficient than new towers. Some levels also have a time limit, meaning giving enemies the longest distance to their goal is not a good idea. Every once in a while you’ll unlock a puzzle level that challenges you to manipulate enemy path-finding with limited towers.
There are lots of fun kinds of towers on top of your standard fare, such as towers that can be built in pairs to create a field of death between them, and you’ll find yourself frantically looking for a window where you can save up enough coins to build that next expensive tower that you’ll need later. Many of the more fun towers need to be unlocked through play, which can be sped up by sharing your progress on Facebook or Twitter.
The only downside (some might consider it an upside) is that Fieldrunners 2 takes a long time to play. Some of the levels we’ve come across have 70 separate waves coming at you, each winding their way through your mazey gauntlet, taking longer and longer each wave to die. Unlike other tower defence games, Fieldrunners 2 actually encourages changing enemy paths mid-wave by selling towers. It costs money and time, but when you see the crazy amounts of footsoldiers running at you, you get desperate. It’s part of the fun. I’ve already spent 30 minutes on one mission though, which contrasts with the game’s iOS bite-sized image. At least you can quickly dump out of the game and resume at any time.
You’ll also be paying double price for the PC version, for something that works ever-so-slightly better with touchscreen controls. But after the first group of levels, I’m already counting it up there with the best tower defence games I’ve played recently.
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