Kingdom Rush - Tower Defense Get ready for an epic journey to defend your kingdom against hordes of orcs, trolls, evil wizards and other nasty fiends using a vast arsenal of towers and spells at your command!Fight on forests, mountains and wastelands, customizing your defensive strategy with different tower upgrades and specializations! Kingdom Rush is a criminally great package for just $2.99. After clearing the 12-mission campaign, players can return to each stage to complete special challenges, adding hours of replay. Kingdom Rush Origins PC Gameplay 1080P 60FPS. Kingdom Rush Frontiers is the second instalment in the highly acclaimed Kingdom Rush series, which actually came out in 2016 for PC, but like always, I’m late to the party.
Kingdom Rush Origins is a tower defense title by publisher Ironhide Game Studio. It is the third installment in the Kingdom Rush series and is available for PC, Android, and iOS. Gameplay is traditional tower defense bread and butter, with each map having branching paths that funnel enemies from one end to another. Your goal is to defend your end of the path by building towers in specified locations and micromanaging them throughout the course of several waves.
First Impressions
My first impression of Kingdom Rush Origins is that it is done extremely well. The details are very finely polished, the mechanics are solid and intuitive, and the maps are interesting and detailed. Players are encouraged to look beyond their towers and take it all in by discovering little secrets. On one map, there is a gnome sitting on a toadstool near a set of four colored toadstools. Clicking on this little guy while the waves are coming prompts him to challenge you to an old-school memory game in the style of Simon. Successfully clicking the toadstools in the right order will award you coins and allow you to try again with a longer sequence. There are secrets to be discovered on almost every level. Some unlock mini-games, others include special towers you can utilize, some act as special abilities, and others yet are just quirky fun. Taking the time to explore each map is always rewarding in Kingdom Rush Origins.
Complex, Not Complicated
Gameplay options in Kingdom Rush Origins seem to hit a perfect sweet spot. There are four towers to choose from: melee, ranged, spellcaster, and druid. Each tower offers a different form of defense and each can be upgraded. At the fourth upgrade, towers offer a choice between two specializations. The Archer tower, for instance, allows you to choose between a high damage, slow tower with great range, or a medium damage, medium speed tower that reduces enemy magic resistance. Each choice offers a different benefit, and each specialization comes with two unique abilities players can purchase.
Players are also given an upgrade tree that they can slot into by earning stars from successful missions. The tree allows you to upgrade the different towers as you see fit, as well as purchase upgrades for your two special abilities: a summon reinforcements call and a powerful lightning bolt. The tree is fairly linear and eventually you will be able to unlock every slot, so there isn’t a whole lot in the way of customization to be had. You can reset the tree at any time, which does allow you to tailor your choices to the level at hand until you can purchase all upgrades at once.
Aside from towers and the skill tree, players are also given gameplay options in the form of a hero. The hero is a controllable unit who can move anywhere on the map and gains experience the more you use them. Each hero has their own skill tree, which allows you to spec into different abilities for them, including a third global ability that goes alongside your two special abilities. Hero skill trees are all unique and helpful in different situations. My only complaint is that each hero levels individually, greatly reducing your incentive to swap heroes. Coupled with the fact that new heroes start at a higher level than older ones, it leads to players feeling far too incentivized to abandon older heroes and never return to them. Kingdom Rush Origins is not the kind of game that feels rewarding to grind out levels in. Heroes can fight and stop enemies, and can be defeated, causing them to go on a respawn timer. They are great for reinforcing tough choke points, taking out key enemies such as catapults, or chasing down single enemies that break through the lines.
Difficult to a Fault
Kingdom Rush Origins is difficult — insanely, frustratingly difficult. I tend to stray away from the tower defense genre for the exact opposite reason; I find most of its games are far too easy. A game isn’t fun when you can breeze through on the hardest difficulty setting or gimp the system to guarantee success, but a game also isn’t fun when you can follow a walkthrough to the letter and still lose a level on a normal difficulty setting, often due to some silly issue like your units being half a centimeter too far to the left. Part of this is a technical issue: units will sometimes ignore enemies that are clearly close enough to attack, but it’s also a design issue. Being bombarded by an impossible number of flying enemies and not having the funds to protect against them is frustrating, not challenging. The game is extremely enticing and keeps me coming back for more, but has an incredibly hard time striking a good balance between challenge and torture, even for a tower defense veteran.
Not Without Flaw
As I said before, Kingdom Rush Origins is extremely well polished, but not perfectly so. I’ve already mentioned that I had some issues with ground units not attacking enemies within their range, and there were a few other small details that felt missing or imperfect. One of my biggest complaints is the time it takes to progress through the game. Most tower defense games will have an option to move the game forward at a higher speed, but Kingdom Rush Origins does not. This is particularly frustrating when you are playing a level with a tricky gameplay hook in the last few waves such as a new path or a powerful enemy. Each time you restart, you are forced to play through a part of the level you have already mastered and take no joy in, at a glacial and painful speed. Any one of these imperfections is tolerable on its own, but together they make a merciless cocktail: playing a difficult level to near completion, losing three-star status because your unit let someone go they shouldn’t have, and being forced to play all the way through again at paint-drying speeds. The few flaws that did exist in the game were frustrating enough to sour me on a second playthrough.
Conclusion
Kingdom Rush Origins is a must-play for fans of the genre and series as well as newcomers. It is enticing, fun, and fluid. While it has a few key flaws that do detract from the gameplay experience, it is still well worth the time invested. I would not recommend binging on it, however. It is a great game to enjoy in small spurts.
The one thing I cannot recommend is the price. At $14.99 for the full PC version and potentially much, much more on mobile, it is a bit steep for what it is — a casual tower defense game built for mobile devices. If tower defense isn’t your all-time favorite genre, I would not advocate paying full price for this title. Wait for it to go on Steam Sale and catch it at a more reasonable $4.99 or similar. I cannot speak for the mobile versions of the game, but I have read reviews that state the cost to unlock all the content in the game would be close to $45, with the option to continue buying consumables afterward. That is reprehensible and unethical. I cannot advocate paying that price for this game in any form, or even paying for it at all on mobile with the missing content.
Four years after Kingdom Rush: Origins, Ironhide Game Studio is back with the fourth installment in the Kingdom Rush series. In Kingdom Rush: Vengeance, the tables have turned, as you play as the evil resurrected wizard Vez’nan in his quest for revenge on the forces of good.
On the surface this might seem like a simple orc-and-goblin reskin of the four standard tower types fans of the series are familiar with: ranged, magic, artillery, and troops. However, the tower defense genre has evolved since finding a home on mobile devices, and Ironhide Game Studio has a few tricks up its sleeve to keep things fresh.
Is it enough to justify spending $5? Read on to find out!
Flipping the script
The first few minutes of Kingdom Rush: Vengeance set the scene for the rest of the game. The evil wizard Vez’nan is resurrected to find his castle turned into an amusement park for curious elves and dwarves. This kicks off a campaign to reconquer his land with the help of orcs, goblins, demons, skeletons, and other baddies.
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance will feel familiar to fans of the series. This is a good thing, since tutorial essentially finishes halfway through the first stage. You start with the four tower archetypes, and unlock more as you progress through the game’s 17 levels.
With 15 waves and no autosaving between waves, play sessions feel a bit too long for mobile
Early stages are pretty short, with five to ten waves of enemies, increasing to 15 waves round halfway through the game. Combined with not having an option to speed up the action other than calling waves early, later levels feel long. It’s not a game you can pick up and play in short bursts. Kingdom Rush: Vengeance is a game you’ll want to sit down and play for at least 30 minutes at a time, which is unusual for a mobile game.
Games like Bloons TD 6 get around this with an autosave feature between waves. This was left out of Kingdom Rush: Vengeance — there isn’t even a pause between waves. Keep that in mind before you start playing so you don’t lose your progress.
Commanding the dark army
One of the features the Kingdom Rush series adds to the tower defense genre is its hero system. In addition to plopping down turrets in strategic locations, you need to move your hero around the map to slow down sudden surges of enemies.
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance leans hard into this gameplay, which is far more interactive than similar titles. Halfway through any level a new path might open up in a spot where you haven’t built a single tower. Later, enemy heroes might shower arrows on your defenders at random intervals in the match. Clever use of your hero, spells, and items are the best way to survive these hectic situations.
Six of the game's nine heroes are locked behind a paywall
Throughout the campaign you can unlock three heroes in total, with another six heroes locked behind a paywall. Each hero has their own abilities and ultimate (the third spell you can use), and they level up as they gain experience.
At no point is it necessary to pay for heroes, as usual for the series or the genre as a whole. Still, a paid game with in-app purchases might put off some users. This is only made worse by the decision to lock away a full two thirds of the game’s heroes behind $3 to $8 micro-transactions.
Unique tower customization
The biggest departure in Kingdom Rush: Vengeance from its predecessors is the upgrade paths for towers. Rather than four basic towers with upgrade paths that dramatically change their abilities halfway through a level, Vengeance opts for more basic towers with more linear upgrades.
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In practice, this means your Shadow Archer tower is always a simple archer tower. This sounds lame until you unlock other towers that fulfill a similar role, like the boomerang wielding Goblirangs, or the bone tossing Bone Flingers. They don’t change much, but these towers and their unique mechanics are available from the start of each match.
This adds an extra level of strategy before the match even begins, since you have to choose just five towers to take with you. You may find yourself hopping out of matches after a few waves if you’ve made the wrong choice.
With 11 towers available as the game progresses, there’s no lack of variety despite the simplified upgrade paths. For those with deep pockets, there are an additional five towers available for purchased. Like paid heroes, the purchasable towers are in no way necessary to complete the game, and in most cases other towers fulfill a similar or identical role.
Paid towers are not required to complete the game, but their presence may turn away some users
Still, that brings the number of in-app purchase types to three, with gems, heroes, and now towers available behind a paywall. To some it might sound like Ironhide has embraced the evil nature of Kingdom Rush: Vengeance with this level of monetization, but it’s par for the course in the mobile market. Developers have to eat too, and a game as polished and balanced as this deserves a full course meal.
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance review – Conclusion
Kingdom Rush Origins Pc
Despite its potentially controversial in-app purchases, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance is an excellent game. Fans of the previous games in the series will not regret picking this one up. Those new to the series and on the fence can always try out the first game, Kingdom Rush, which is free to play.
Kingdom Rush Download
Click the link below to download the game from the Google Play Store, and let us know in the comments what you think of it!