Ah, review time. I recently purchased Field Runners at $4.99 for my iTouch, one of the few apps I have actually had to pay cash for. I think aside from this game, I have only ever purchased Monkey Ball (thumbs up, but thumbs sideways for difficulty) and CroMag Rally (thumbs up for a nice racer, but thumbs down for bad controls), though I have about 75 other apps and games that have come from the FREE world.
As an avid fan of
Desktop Tower Defense, I have been waiting for a "tower defense" style game for the iTouch/iPhone....and man, is this thing the ticket!
Although the game seems to initially only come with two maps, one that sends bad guys from left to right while the other sends them left to right and up to down, I believe that if you master the 3 levels of easy, medium, and hard, perhaps you will open the door for more maps.
There are only 4 types of towers, where as the web version of DTD has a handful more, the 4 types of towers in this game seem to do the trick in terms of fun. First is a cannon barrel that when upgraded for $4 (per each upgrade of two, per each piece of equipment) fires double bullets at the bad guys. Second is a sort of squirter tower that shoots green globs of slow-down-ness at bad guys. Upgrades for this beast are $5 each, again a 2-time upgrade limit. Third is a rocket launcher that costs $20 to start and $15 to upgrade each of it's two times. Lastly is a lightning tower that really seems to blast the bad guys with bolts of blue death. Each upgrade for this $70 initial tower comes in at $50.
The strategy of DTD carries over just fine for Field Runners. It seems best to create a sort of diagonal zig zag forcing the bad guys to go back and forth between the same towers with each pass. Heavy upgrades in the center of the screen where the bad guys pass through will help to ensure that the flying helicopters that normally tend to kick my butt get knocked out of the sky before making it to the other side. Another thing to take into consideration, along with upgrading everything to the utmost, is that many of these things move fast in the small space of the field and even though you may zig zag the enemies through your maze of towers, slowing them down is key! Squirt towers, fully upgraded, mixed with fully upgraded rocket towers and lightning towers will be your best bet, using the cheapest cannon as blockers to create your zig zag around the edges.
On a scale of ten, in terms of value, time consumption, graphics, and fun, I have to give Field Runners from the Apple App Store for the iPhone or iTouch a 10 out of 10. Please note, though, this game is a BATTERY HOG. After about 1.5 hours, you'll need to plug in your iPhone or iTouch.