The pressure to create an entirely new version of Fieldrunners must have been unbearable. In the four years that have passed since Fieldrunners' release, the tower defense genre has evolved more swiftly than the space program during the Cold War. Anomaly: Warzone Earth reversed the concept. Orcs Must Die! dumped us in the thick of the rush. Games like Shad'O even tried to elevate the standard gameplay toward something approaching art. On paper, at least, Fieldrunners feels as dated as the first Legend of Zelda against all that innovation.
And yet the fact stands that both remain fun to play, and thus it's hard to slam the many ways in which Fieldrunners 2 looks and feels much like the first. Indeed, apart from a lush world map and smirk-worthy loading screens, it's hard to tell what's changed after booting it up. The playful art style still delivers a welcome counterbalance to an often punishing difficulty level, and the spherical turrets and Tesla coils might as well have been copied and pasted from the original. The titular fieldrunners still cavort about in their crimson jackets, and you still drag towers into the field from the bottom of the screen. Subatomic's philosophy here is thus one of refinement over reinvention. The overarching message that Fieldrunners 2 relates is that a good tower defense game doesn't need all the doodads that developers and modders have been tacking on ever since the first Warcraft III tower defense mods, and the finesse demanded by its gameplay goes a long way toward proving that point.
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