This was my very first foray into tower defense games and it was introduced to me by a friend who had an Ipad back when those were something new and fresh. Tablet were barely a thing at the time and I had never thought I would ever buy an Ipad or anything Apple manufactured. I still didn't actually but a friend of mine had an old one that they gave to me so what the hell right?
Fieldrunners 2 is a game that I don't think anyone has improved upon even though tons of tower defense games have been released since then.
If you are unfamiliar with what "tower defense" means it is pretty much in the name. Rather than moving around the screen controlling a "hero" or something like that you build various defenses, normally in particular positions that the oncoming enemies will walk past and get shot at by.
Early on in the game it is pretty evident where these towers should be placed because the enemies are only coming from one side of the screen progressing towards the other side. As the levels progress it becomes less and less obvious where the individual "towers" should be placed as the screens start to become more open and also enemies will come from various, or all, sides of the screen.
When you get to these points it becomes necessary to build a maze of sorts to maximize the amount of time that your guns get to have a crack at the oncoming horde. Since the towers themselves can not be destroyed, it is not allowed to create a maze with no exit. You can build dead ends but this is a waste of time since the marching soldiers will always choose the shortest path to the exit.
It is possible to "cheat" like in the image above where the enemy will need to run the gauntlet to get to the end of that maze down the middle but as soon as they get near the end you simply close one path while opening another thus necessitating all the troops to return back through the gauntlet back to the start. There has to be at least ONE possible way for the enemy to progress forward, but you can move where that actually is while the game is going on. So it seems like this would be really easy to manipulate and the enemy would never be able to win, right? Well, in theory i guess but the computer throws wave after wave of enemies at you and eventually, they will break through no matter what strategy you use.
I once played on "open" where the waves are meant to never end and made it to 99 waves and honestly, i was pretty bored of it by then :)
This is a casual game that is probably best played on a smartphone or tablet, but it is possible to play it on PC as well and there are many ways of obtaining it for free but since it is in fact piracy, I am not going to detail how to do that here. I'm sure you can figure it out if you want to. However, it is only like $2-$3 now to purchase and honestly, it is worth twice that much at least.
I have tried many tower defense games since the day I first played Fieldrunners and later Fieldrunners 2 and while some of them are pretty great, in my mind there is only one kind of the tower defense genre and that king is Fieldrunners.
For casual gamers like myself who don't really get into the complexities of memorizing combos on a 20 button controller this is a perfect time sink. It is simple, fun, challenging but yet not too difficult. I think it is a good all around game and probably ranks in my top 20 of all time.