I actually haven't played much tower defense, have I? I beat Plants vs. Zombies, which was a lovely, easy little game. I messed around with variations of the genre in Dungeon Defenders and Anomaly Warzone Earth. But I've never played Kingdom Rush or Desktop Tower Defense or whichever the popular ones are. The genre hasn't called out to me for one reason or another.
And I've also never played Fieldrunners, even though it's on my Steam list. Look, I got this one with a humble indie bundle, and I still have unplayed games that I deliberately PAID for during Steam sales. So picking up the sequel here was going to mean more than just checking out a new game - I was also going to have to learn the basic vocabulary of the genre.
The seventh-ish stage of Fieldrunners 2 is just an 11x19 grid. You start with a few bucks, you get more money every time you kill something, now start building a maze. I stumbled through this level several times, just learning tactics. What do you build during the first few waves? When do you focus on building weapons as opposed to building a maze to make those weapons more effective? How do you survive early on while preparing a master plan for later? Where do you put single-direction towers to best kill groups of mobs?
After several failures on medium difficulty, I broke out a spreadsheet and drew a long-term plan on a grid. I expected something casual and easy from a brightly colored casual game and hadn't appreciated just how much architectural aptitude this would require. Granted, I could've just cranked the difficulty down to easy, but I beat most of Super Meat Boy, so no stupid tile-based game is going to keep me down. Although those hardcore platformers don't have levels that can take an hour to complete. This one freeform grid level throws SEVENTY waves at you. I have had few things happen to me in all of videogaming that are as frustrating as playing all the way to the 70th wave out of 70 and losing to the one helicopter that made it through when I had no bombs left. Screw you, copter.
I eventually switched weapons out and found a winning strategy - a few missile towers for the first waves, pathways that circle around a close-blast fire tower, lasers lining the path, and heavy single-target pods at the exit to catch copters. After finally clearing the stage, I went back to try beating a time trial level on hard difficulty. That ended when I went to bed after two hours of banging my head against a turret without a victory. I then moved on to the next unplayed level, which had defined walk paths for the minions, and having spent so much brain energy on efficient open-grid planning, I was able to clean the level without taking any damage, so I think I demonstrated an ability to learn.
….Now then, where was I? Oh right, this was supposed to be a game review.
Is Fieldrunners 2 a good game? I don't know if I can call it one of the best things since unlimited download caps. The core of the game doesn't feel much different from other tower defenses - or at least, that's what my limited experience with the genre tells me. I still recognize many of the genre's tropes, and the designers aren't reinventing any wheels with this one. You get some new weapons to play with, some new level paths, some differences in minion types, and you go at it.
So Fieldrunners 2 is just a new tower defense game. A new tower defense game that happens to have both set-path and freeform levels, varied levels for time trials and survival and puzzles, sharp graphic design, plenty of challenges for veterans of the genre, a clean and intuitive interface, and decent load times (I swear this game launches faster than any other game I've bought on Steam in a year). For a game that feels like I've been there and done that already, it's got a lot of variety on those tropes, and I don't have anything bad to say about it, save for maybe checkpoints on those hour-long maps so I could fall back halfway after losing to that one copter.
What Fieldrunners 2 is doing for tower defense is kinda like what the new Super Mario games are doing for 2D platformers - it's not new, but it's very well polished. There's enough content in here that it could just about be the only game you buy for the year while you spend time running around in Endless mode. However, the next time I spend two hours trying to beat a single level, remind me that I still have other games to play this year.
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Reviewing every indie Steam game of 2013 at http://deancleansoff.blogspot.com/ !