Played: Kingdom Rush

Michael here. This is the first in what (I hope) will become a series of articles on games I’ve played that I believe you will enjoy playing as well (assuming you haven’t already discovered them on your own, of course). Now, before I launch into this initial review, I feel a little background is in order as to the method behind the madness.

I play games for two reasons. The first is for entertainment. The second is to take my mind off my work when things just aren’t clicking creatively (for some reason my mind does great work when I’m not thinking about said work). Ideally, a game meets both of those goals at the same time. So I look for games that:

1. Are web-based (hey, I spend a lot of time on the computer – see my bio)
2. Don’t require a lot of time to complete an objective/level/the game itself
3. Don’t require heavy strategizing, complex controls, or anything else that would keep me from effectively jumping right in
4. I can pick up right where I left off
5. Are challenging without being frustrating
6. Free (not free-to-play, which in many cases might as well be called “fee-to-play”)

In short, something a bit more involved than casual games but less involved than more complex games such as MMORPGs, RTSs, and such. If you’d like an example of the kind of game I like, check out my nostalgia piece on Spybot: The Nightfall Incident.

Alright, enough of that, let’s get on into this first review.

Name: Kingdom Rush
Genre: Real Time Strategy
SubGenre: Tower Defense
Atmosphere: Fantasy
Websites: Kingdom Rush, Armor Games, Kongregate
Rating: 5/5

Gameplay
At the risk of boring those of you already familiar with tower defense games, I’m going to give a brief explanation. Tower defense games are games where you place towers with varying capabilities on a map to try and stop waves of enemies that enter the map at one or more locations from exiting the map. It’s one of my favorite genres (oops, subgenres) because it meets my game criteria perfectly as you will see.

Among the many tower defense games, Kingdom Rush is one of my all-time favorites, a fact substantiated by the high ratings it has received on both Armor Games and Kongregate as well as the host of imitators it has spawned since its debut in late 2011.

In Kingdom Rush you are King Denas’ General tasked with defending the realm from an incursion of bad guys. You accomplish this through a series of campaigns that take you from the bucolic countryside through the mysterious elven forests and the icy mountains to the great volcanic plain until finally . . . well, I won’t spoil the ending for you.

The individual battles within a campaign consist of a series of maps where you build your towers along the road(s) the enemy will travel on in the hopes of killing your foes before they exit. Unlike in some TD games, Kingdom Rush limits where you can build your towers to specific areas, but this is not a problem at all.

To build a tower, simply click on the location, select from one of the four towers (Archer, Dwarven Bombard, Barracks, or Mages), and click to build (provided you have enough money). Then once you’ve got everything you can afford in place, send in the first wave. The towers themselves have distinctive abilities. The Archers are fast with good range, the Dwarven Bombards are slow but cause area damage, the Barracks put troops on the road that physically impede the enemy (at least the ones who can’t fly), and the Mages blast away with their magic.

As you kill enemies you will receive gold. This gold can be used to purchase more towers or, in every level but the first, to upgrade existing towers to more powerful ones. As you advance through the campaigns the level to which you can upgrade the towers increases, revealing all manner of special abilities.

You also have a couple of powers you can call on periodically to help even the odds in your favor. The first is Call Reinforcements, which allows you to put a couple of peasants anywhere on the road to impede the progress of ground-based enemies. The other is Rain of Fire, which rains down hell on an area of the road you choose. Spam the reinforcements, but take note of the long cooldown time on Rain of Fire.

You have 20 lives per battle with every enemy who exits taking one (sometimes more) of those lives with it. Depending on how well you do, you’ll earn from one to three stars for your efforts. Also, once you complete a battle you can replay that battle as a Heroic Challenge and an Iron Challenge, earning one additional star for each. These stars can be used to upgrade aspects of your towers and abilities or, if you’ve got enough of them, to buy a hero.

Note that heroes are a recent addition to the game; when Kingdom Rush first came out, there were no heroes. As a result, heroes are not necessary to win the game at all, but they can sure be fun to play as they are quite powerful and can be moved all over the map. Of course, the stars you spend on heroes are not available to upgrade your towers/abilities, so choose wisely!

Individual battles can be quite challenging and you often have to play them more than once to get the full three stars, tweaking your upgrades/heroes in the process. That being said, there are no impossible levels and even the final battle is not too hard once you figure out which towers to use.

That’s all I’m going to say about the gameplay as Kingdom Rush really takes care of teaching you the game all on its own: the first mission serves as a tutorial, any time something new is introduced there’s a pop-out from the left side of the screen that explains things to you, and if all that fails, there’s always the Encyclopedia.

What Makes The Game Worth Playing
Aside from the gameplay, Kingdom Rush is at the top of the heap for a number of reasons, not the least of which is: it’s adorable! Sorry, I just couldn’t think of a better adjective here. From the cute graphics to the towers’ catchphrases to the fact that every poor cannon fodder you put on the road has a name, there’s just so much neat detail put into the game that you’ll simply have to play it to see what I mean; I still get a kick out of upgrading the Archer tower until it’s filled with Rangers shooting out of their canopy fort while an old bearded Druid stands at the base of the trunk periodically calling forth entangling (and thorny!) vines on the advancing foe. And speaking of foes, so many classic enemies are here: orcs, goblins, ogres, hordes of skeletons, dark knights, winter wolves, elementals, giant spiders, and many more. And it’s all free! Well, not all of it. Only a couple of the heroes are available to you and while the main game is completely free, there is an additional campaign you can purchase. And I don’t see a problem with that at all. The additional campaign is completely separate from the actual game and the inaccessibility of the additional heroes in no way keeps you from wining the game or in any way makes it more difficult.

What Makes The Game Not Worth Playing
Kingdom Rush has only one glaring weakness (and it’s jarring precisely because the game is so good): a lack of a fast-forward option. Except for the ability to call waves early, there is no ability to speed up the advance of the enemy. This is an unusual omission for this kind of game and can, especially on maps with many waves, be somewhat frustrating if you have good enough defenses in place to where you really don’t need to do much to destroy the enemy. Still, this is a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent game.

So what are you waiting for? The kingdom needs you!