Back in late October, the excellent Fieldrunners 2 HD ($4.99) 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) 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.
