| Fieldrunners - review |
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| Written by Alexis M. (Rivithed) | |
| Saturday, 07 November 2009 | |
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Fieldrunners
Fieldrunners PSP minis review Fieldrunners is a tower defense game where you fight off waves of soldiers, as well as land and air combat vehicles. You start out in an open field with little funds. You'll need to defeat waves of incoming enemies to earn more funds and protect your base. Towers you can use against enemies include gatling towers, goo towers, tesla towers, flame towers, mortar towers, laser towers and ice towers. Each one of the towers have various attack ranges (short, medium, long) and can be upgraded. You'll have to adopt some kind of strategy to planting the towers too. Making a winding, maze-like pattern is ideal for extending the path to your base's doorstep.  There are five levels included, where enemies come in at different entry points. This will challenge you to adapt the positioning of your defensive towers. Levels included are Grasslands, Crossroads, Drylands, Skyway and Frostbite. The different levels of difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard) makes Fieldrunners a fairly accessible game. As you improve and progress in Fieldrunners, you can choose from additional modes of play. You start with Classic mode (100 waves, 4 towers), and can then unlock Extended mode (100 waves, 6 towers) and Endless mode (unlimited waves, 6 towers). All of these simple gameplay variations add a lot of life to the game. A highscore table keeps track of your points and how many waves you survived, so you can always challenge yourself or friends. Fieldrunners has an nicely detailed and illustrated graphic look. Five different environments keep the gameplay area fresh. The colors are vivid and tower attacks look nicely animated. I wouldn't say animations are super detailed, but they work out fine for this game. You're moving around so much, you hardly will have time to sit back and watch them.  There are a few additional options in the PSPgo and PSP release that the iPhone/iPod touch version does not include. The PSP release includes two additional levels, Skyway and Frostbite. There's also new weapons to play with: a Laser Tower (shoots through multiple enemies at a time) and Ice Tower (slows multiple enemies with its circular burst). Load times on my PSP were quicker than the iPhone version as well. Some extra background music is in the PSP release too. The audio FX and music is just like the iPhone release. Initially when Fieldrunners was released on the iPhone, believe it or not, there was no music or effects. The music is an upbeat marching tempo that provides a nice backdrop to the gameplay. A couple of other minor differences is a game option which includes the choice of enabling a grid view, a music and sound effects volume setting, and a illustrated level select screen. The PSP and PSPgo don't have the advantage of the touch screen on the iPhone release, but the D-Pad and thumbstick controls work wonderfully. The L and R buttons help for quick selection of tower types. There's something nice about the tactile feel of it. It feels "snappy," something I miss in iPhone games.  Fieldrunners is a fairly easy game to jump into and play, and easy to pause, save and jump out of as well. Those things are important for the mobile gaming platform. It's a game that you can go back to and keep challenging yourself with. Fieldrunners won't take up much memory space from your PSP or PSPgo either, weighing in at only 28MB. If there's one must-have game from the new PSP minis collection, it's Fieldrunners. Even if you do have it on the iPhone of iPod touch, you'll appreciate it even more and be able to sink more time into the game with the extra touches in Fieldrunners on the PSP or PSPgo. Read how to get Fieldrunners from the PlayStation Network here.
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