It doesn’t hurt that Kingdom Rush brings everything together seamlessly, with great style and aplomb. None of this is exactly new or ground-breaking for tower defense, even in combination, but it makes for a terrific game. The game also discourages conservatism by throwing in a monkey wrench here and there, such as dynamic paths and boss units.
Learning to place and upgrade your towers effectively is still puzzle-like in the sense that general strategies are encouraged by the game mechanics, but the leeway afforded by the upgrades and special abilities keeps it from falling into the formulaic. These elements combined allow for multiple approaches to the same problem, an awesome thing in any game but especially rare for tower defense. Spicing up your arsenal even more are the meteor shower and reinforcement abilities, as well as a hero unit. Do you upgrade your archer tower into fast-firing rangers, or long-ranged snipers? At these top tiers, further upgrades unlock even more tower-specific abilities, like poison arrows for said rangers, or explosive sniper shots. Higher upgrade levels branch off the tower varieties for yet more nuance. For example, artillery towers with an area of effect attack might be great for large groups of weak enemies, but a single armored baddie would be better handled by a mage tower, which does higher damage but fires slowly and at only one target. The rock-paper-scissors balance between enemies and your towers brings much-needed strategic depth to the gameplay. Each kill earns you gold, which is in turn used to build and upgrade towers to kill more effectively, and the cycle repeats itself until either you die or every wave of bad guys has been eliminated.įor Kingdom Rush, this basic formula is complicated by the variety of tower upgrades and enemy types. Along the sides of the path are empty building slots, where you can place a variety of towers. If the enemies reach their goal, they deplete your health.
Enemies spawn at one end of the path and mindlessly march towards an objective which the player defends with-you guessed it-towers. Kingdom Rush might not be all that innovative when it comes to core game concepts, but somehow it manages to fire on all cylinders, keeping things interesting and addictive from beginning to end.įor anyone who somehow completely avoided tower defense games up to now, here are the basics: the player is provided with a single scene of a path. Approaching Kingdom Rush with a skeptical eye, I was happy to find my expectations well exceeded. At worst, tower defense gameplay feels more like frantic managerial work than anything else. They take a portion of the gameplay and isolate it to be more approachable, but are less dynamic and interesting as a result. Even the best tower defense are to real-time strategy what a chess puzzle is to an actual game of chess.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not really a fan of tower defense.