The coolest thing about strategy games is that they can come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Some are contemplative, lean back style experiences. Others are fast and reflex-y. Some strategy games do a little bit of everything as far as pacing goes. We see a nice mix across the board on the App Store.

In 2012, we saw a lot of killer strategy games across iPhone and iPad. Some of the best didn't just toe genre lines -- they steamrolled them. Fieldrunners 2, for example, is more than just a competent tower defense game. It's a product of a studio that has a mastery of the art and it used its vast knowledge to inform some of the tightest, most well-balanced action we've ever seen in a TD game.

Our top strategy games of the year celebrates the titles we've seen that do a little more than the rest of their competition. Each has a unique hook or a quality that other similar games don't have.

Fieldrunners 2, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - [TA Plays] - Fieldrunners 2 is the ultimate iterative game. It improves upon the original in a lot of smart ways. The action is crisper and more challenging. The look is more polished, much more refined. And the new world map and turret constructs feel perfectly paired with the tower defense action, which, again, is remarkably good. You can't go wrong with this.

The Walking Dead: Assault, $2.99 - [Forum Thread] - [ TA Plays ] - Walking Dead: Assault takes the 3D, turn-based strategy action game model to the next level by dropping the over-used arena model and, instead, using compelling scenarios that have you escorting, scavenging, and eliminating things in the Walking Dead universe. Great use of color, solid touch controls, and neat hooks push this over.

Plague Inc., $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - This game has blown up in a way we didn't think it could, but the attention is deserved. Plague Inc. is all about creating a plague that can wipe out the entire planet. Your job is to GM the plague -- to make it stronger, faster, and deadlier as it travels the globe and scientists scramble to cure it. It's a fascinating game with deep systems with a lot of neat perks that you unlock as you play.

Outwitters, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - While looking dangerously simple on the surface, Outwitters is one of the most tactical online asynchronous strategy games around. Every move requires careful thought and foresight, and one wrong move can allow your opponent to bury you. Outwitters also does a good job at realizing it's a game designed for mobile, with a clean interface and relatively small maps which make for quick games while on the go.

Bad Hotel, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - With a strong look and killer sound, Bad Hotel leaves a powerful first impression. The action is what'll hook you, though. This is a tower defense game where you defend your towers as you frantically build turrets to fend off suicidal birds. Neat grid mechanics keep the action simple enough, but smart scenario design keeps you on your toes.

Hero Academy, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Hero Academy takes the whole "one more turn" thing to the next level. It's a brilliant, 2D strategy game perfectly catered for people who love asynchronous games. The balance between the teams is phenomenal considering the scale of the task, and the strategy is wildly diverse.

Hunters 2, $4.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Hunters 2 is everything the original Hunters was, except bigger, badder, and longer. The game's campaign weaves in a good story on top of the turn-based action, while the mobile feature set -- like buying weapons in a real-time market -- keep you coming back for more and more.

Monster Wars, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Liv Games took all the genre-blending of their previous hit Legendary Wars and flipped it around to let you play through the same universe from the bad guys' perspective. I love when games do that. Monster Wars offered up an incredible amount of content and a variety of different gameplay styles, all wrapped up in a cohesive art style that tied together very nicely with Legendary Wars' story and universe.

Brainsss, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - What could have been just another zombie game ended up being one of the fresher takes on a top-down strategy title. Lead a group of zombies around in search of helpless survivors to turn into the undead and add to your numbers. As your zombie horde grows, strategically split them off into smaller groups to search out even more victims.

It seems like Subatomic and Halfbrick are on the same page lately, as both companies released an update last week for the iPad versions of their game which have finally come to the iPhone versions this week. One week ago today, Fieldrunners 2 HD [$4.99 (HD) / Free (HD)] was updated with a couple of new towers as well as two new Christmas-themed power-ups. Today those items have come to Fieldrunners 2 [$2.99 / Free] on the iPhone, along with widescreen support for the iPhone 5.

I get unreasonably excited when my favorite games get widescreen support. I totally appreciate the fact that non-widescreen games can run on the iPhone 5 with borders rather than not run at all, but just like with playing iPhone games in 2x on the iPad it gets old not having a truly native version of a game or app for your device. And it seems like every day my list grows longer for games I wish to get widescreen updates.

Anyway, if you've been holding out on digging into Fieldrunners 2 waiting for widescreen support to come (I know some of you out there have been), then now is the time to update and get to playing. Oh, and one of the two new towers will run you an unusually high price to unlock in-game, but with good reason. Just like with the iPad version, Subatomic has a new lite version of Fieldrunners 2, and if you download and install it you can unlock the new Polymorph Tower totally for free. So be sure to do that and save yourself some in-game scratch.

One more thing. As a special bonus both the iPhone and iPad versions of Fieldrunners 2 are currently on sale, with the former available for 99¢ rather than its normal $2.99 and the latter down to $2.99 from its regular $7.99. Be sure to take advantage of these sales while they last, and hit up our Fieldrunners 2 review or the thread in our forums for more on this fantastic tower defense game.

Back in late October, the excellent Fieldrunners 2 HD [$4.99 (HD) / Free (HD)] for the iPad received an update which added a new Halloween-themed tower into the mix, as well as some technical improvements. On the iPhone that same update came to the regular Fieldrunners 2 [$2.99] shortly after, and notably it also added a fairly controversial IAP Coin Store where you could trade in your real money for the virtual kind.

That option has come to Fieldrunners 2 HD in a new update today, along with two new towers and a couple of Christmas-themed items. For some reason the Coin Store doesn't seem to be functional as of this writing, saying it can't connect to the App Store. The iPhone Fieldrunners 2 IAP works fine, so who knows. Maybe somebody forgot to flip a switch or something.

Anyway, as for the new towers the first is called the Polymorph Tower and it'll turn the Fieldrunners into various animals, which temporarily slows them down. The basic Fieldrunner soldier gets zapped into a sheep, larger vehicles become cows, and I'm pretty sure I saw a helicopter get turned into an eagle. It's pretty crazy. The other new tower is a Napalm Tower which causes a "lingering burning sensation."

The new Polymorph Tower will run you a pretty steep 15k coins to unlock, but here's a pro tip: download the just-released Fieldrunners 2 HD Free [Free (HD)] and that tower will unlock in both versions automatically. The lite version is good at doing normal lite version stuff too, like letting you try out the game to see if you like it. It comes with a sampling of levels to play through, but no endless modes.

On the new items front, the Santa Strike lets you call in an airstrike from the Jolly Man himself courtesy of his magical flying reindeer and sled, and a whole lot of explosives. Meanwhile, the Frostinator is an item you can throw down in the field and it acts sort of like a mine, so when a Fieldrunner runs over it it turns him and anyone in the vicinity into Frosty the Snowmen, hopping along as slowly as you can probably imagine a snowman would.

Hopefully the in-app purchasing fixes itself soon, but everything else about this update is pretty cool. The iPhone version of Fieldrunners 2 is set to get a long-awaited iPhone 5 widescreen update, and I'd imagine it will get these new towers and items at the same time too. Maybe even its own lite version. But if you have an iPad and don't have Fieldrunners 2, check out the new lite version as it is simply one of the best games in the App Store.

Halloween, of all things, has come to Fieldrunners 2 HD [$4.99 (HD)]. In the tower defense title's latest update, creator Subatomic Studios has added the BOOM-kin Tower. Basically, it's a pumpkin equipped with two cannons. Alec Shobin, Subatomic PR dude and TouchArcade forums public enemy number one, tells us that it's a "super cool" addition to the game. He would.

This update also takes care of a few technical things. Numerous bugs have been addressed and iCloud support has been added in. Here's a link to the patch notes if you're into this sort of thing.

Fieldrunners 2 on iPhone and iPod touch [$2.99] will be getting these features in its own update within the next few hours. This update will include a notable extra: IAP.

Earlier this morning, Eli and I checked out Blade Guardian [$0.99]. It's a Mistwalker-designed tower defense game with what theoretically should be a hot hook: a randomly spawning roving tower that can morph into a ball and roll through creeps. In practice, it's not so cool. In addition to wrecking enemies, these balls also demolish your towers, setting you up to get rocked by anything that spawns after the initial destruction.

On a macro-level, we're pretty surprised by just how uninspired Blade Guardian is. Tower defense is a crowded genre that's full of games with cooler hooks, scenario design, and way better art and sound production values all clawing for our attention. Blade Guardian strikes us as a game that isn't informed by the titles before it, and it suffers for not taking any notes.

We might have more on this in the future, but if you're looking for some video of the game in action, we've got some right here:

For better or worse, it's not uncommon to see at least one zombie themed game on our radar during the weekly release cycle. This week sees the launch of Dead Stop [$0.99], the latest from Chillingo and Techland (maker of Dead Island) and the most recent entry into the tower defense genre. While Dead Stop does a great job with its overall presentation and gameplay, an uneven difficulty curve along with a subsequent reliance on premium/IAP currency make the game more frustrating than it needs to be.

Dead Stop puts you in the role of a makeshift assistant to a wild-eyed scientist trying to save humanity from the impending undead invasion. Each mission has the scientist creating various inventions with your task being to put them on the field of play in order to take out the baddies.

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Blue Dragon and Party Wave creator Mistwalker is finishing up another iPhone and iPad title, the studio announced this morning. The game? It's a tower defense title dubbed Blade Guardian.

In Guardian, you'll build towers and control rolling spherical "maneuvering units" called BLADEs in an effort kill aliens and also eradicate their nests because, reasons. Interestingly, you'll control BLADEs directly via tilt, which should prove to be a cool action element if everything comes together and plays well.

It'll be neat to see if Mistwalker can pull this off, as most tower defense games lack an actual, action-y element outside of direct targeting with turrets. We've got a few images of the game below, too, if you want a peek.

Blade Guardian is due out October 1 across iPhone and iPad.

Back in December of last year, Ironhide Games released an iPad version of their hugely popular tower defense Flash game Kingdom Rush HD [$2.99 (HD)]. It didn’t drastically reinvent the tower defense genre or anything, but its production values were at a really high level and the game exuded a very likable kind of charm. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it had fun and challenging gameplay, either.

One major bummer though was that it was iPad only, but this past June Ironhide let everyone with iPhones and iPod touches in on the fun when they released a small-screened version simply called Kingdom Rush [$0.99]. And for the next week or so, you can grab this version of the game totally for free.

Be sure to check out our original review of the iPad version, and know that since then both the iPad and iPhone versions have been updated pretty heavily, most recently adding a new 2-level campaign, a new hero type, and a new in-game shop to buy different goodies. You can also visit our forums for discussion or help with Kingdom Rush, but for free it’s pretty much a must download if you like these kinds of games in any way.

Earlier this morning, Eli and I spent some time with Fieldrunners 2 HD, the iPad version of Fieldrunners 2. In a nutshell, it's a bigger, sharper version of the game, as it supports new iPad resolution. It also rocks a few new features, including five new towers, iCloud support, and over an hour of developer commentary.

It's weird, but maybe the coolest thing about this version is just the fact that it's on a tablet. Regular Fieldrunners 2 scenarios can run pretty long, which can be a bummer because sometimes you don't want to spend 20 minutes on your phone. But on a tablet? That's almost a perfect amount of time for a great, lean-back experience.

Hopefully, you'll notice the work on the game's assets in our video. They're gorgeously detailed and realized, adding to the overall polish of an already awesome tower defense title.

Fieldrunners 2 HD will be available on iPad later tonight, as releases worm their way across the globe. Look for it.

One thing that I wasn't expecting to see yesterday was an update to the original Fieldrunners [$0.99] on iPhone, but just a couple of months removed from the launch of its critically acclaimed sequel Fieldrunners 2 [$2.99], that’s exactly what Subatomic Studios has delivered. And it’s a great one.

First off, all of the artwork in the game has been redrawn to support the Retina Display, and it looks really fantastic now. Everything from the in-game graphics to the menu artwork just pops off the screen. In addition if you’ve got at least an iPhone 4 or later device the game will run in a 32-bit mode for a more vibrant look.

The second big chunk of this update includes a full soundtrack to bop your head to while playing, which is awesome because things could get kind of quiet during those long stretches of gameplay. There have also been control optimizations to make everything more precise, and a general tightening up of the overall performance of the game.

It’s been a good long while since I’ve really dumped any significant time into Fieldrunners, but I have to say it almost feels like new again and I’m having a lot of fun playing through all the original maps. I’m still totally hooked on Fieldrunners 2 though too, so it’s almost like an overload of Fieldrunners goodness. Not a bad thing by any means.

It’s not clear if Fieldrunners for iPad [$2.99 (HD)] will get a similar sort of update treatment at some point, but speaking of the iPad I’ve heard that we’ll be finding out about the release of the iPad version of Fieldrunners 2 sometime early next week. In the meantime check out the new update for the original Fieldrunners with its fancy new look and sound, or if you’ve somehow not gotten around grabbing Fieldrunners before you can currently nab it on sale for just 99¢.

PopCap’s beloved take on tower defense Plants vs. Zombies [$0.99] and its iPad counterpart Plants vs. Zombies HD [$0.99 (HD)] have both received updates today. A “Last Stand” game pack offers up 5 brand new levels as well as an endless level, and there are 3 new achievements to unlock as well. A new Mallet pack will let you swing on your zombie enemies while in Survival or Last Stand.

Besides the new content pack, owners of the new iPad are treated to Retina Display support, and let me tell you it looks fan-freaking-tastic. Such a huge improvement over the pre-update visuals. And finally, there’s an in-game link to the PopCap store so you can deck yourself out in PvZ gear if that's your sort of thing.

If you’re craving some fresh botanically-induced zombie slaughtering in what has become an iOS classic in Plants vs. Zombies, then get to the App Store and update away, especially if you’re an owner of the newest iPad.

As much as I love tower defense games, I have to admit that there's currently an issue of over-saturation within the genre. As such, I'm always looking for games that differentiate themselves from the pack. Bulkypix's Bug Invasion [$1.99] attempts to do so with its emphasis on nature's smaller denizens. Unfortunately, while battling for food supremacy offers a different take on tower defense, Bug Invasion falters in basic genre staples, leading to an overall generic experience.

As its name implies, Bug Invasion puts you in the role of a young protagonist as he wages war against an army of creepy crawlies that have come for the sugar. You'll help defend the sugar utilizing standard tower defense mechanics. Bugs come down pre-determined lanes in specific waves while you defend against them with a variety of strange towers. While placing a Soda Tower or Blender seems neat, you'll quickly realize that most towers are easily classified in the usual TD nomenclature (i.e. Siege, Anti-air, e.t.c.).

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Back in July, Subatomic Studios released Fieldrunners 2 [$2.99], the highly anticipated sequel to the first real breakout success tower defense game on the App Store. It was nearly four years in the making, but worth the wait, as Fieldrunners 2 delivered everything we’d hoped it would and then some in our review.

However, there were a couple of kinks in the initial release that could have used some massaging. Most notably it was the unbalanced difficulty of certain levels that were nigh impossible to complete with 3-stars and how some levels took far too long to complete for a mobile-centric game.

Yesterday, Fieldrunners 2 received its first update that looks to address these larger issues as well as some other more minor things. Some of the more difficult levels have been toned down and some of the longer ones have been trimmed in an attempt to make things more even across the board. There’s also a new time trial map called Flash Fire to check out.

One interesting thing about Fieldrunners 2 was that it was designed with a currency system that would typically be a perfect fit for a freemium title, yet it had no in-app purchases. Instead you had to grind for coins if you needed them, the old-fashioned way. With this update Subatomic as added the ability to earn coins through posting scores to Twitter or Facebook.

I thought that was a neat idea that lets people earn a little extra scratch by bragging about their exploits, and at the same time it spread the good word of Fieldrunners 2 across social media. All without having to add in-app purchase coin bundles. Pretty cool.

Along with the re-balancing and new level, there’s a bunch of other bug fixes and tweaks in this latest update. Fieldrunners 2 was pretty solid to begin with, but it’s always nice to tighten things up when possible. I look forward to having even more new maps and other content down the road, and hopefully an iPad version in the near future.

We were totally crazy about Anomaly Warzone Earth [$1.99 / $3.99] when it first launched, as if that wasn't evident by our glowing five star review. Over the last year, the topic has come up several times in discussion of how badly we wanted more. Well, the sequel was announced last week, while don't have any more specifics, we do have this radical teaser trailer:

Stay tuned for more updates.

Lucky Frame's music/tower defense hybrid Bad Hotel [$0.99] is the best kind of weird there is, the kind that makes you wonder exactly what the developers were thinking and if there's anything you can do to encourage them to keep going down that Rabbit Hole. More attuned towards its tower defense roots than its musical background, Bad Hotel will have you doing what few tower defense games have ever attempted to do before: defend towers.

Sort of. In theory, you only really need to protect the little hotel you're given at the beginning of every stage from the evil machinations of the game's antagonist Tarnation Tadstock. If that falls, you're going to have to restart the round. However, in order to defend that precious spot of real estate, you're going to cultivate a nice little collection of healing rooms, turrets, money-generating quarters and more.

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