Kingdom Rush

The Good
To be honest, I didn't expect much from this game. When I first set eyes on it I saw that it only has four basic towers with straightforward upgrades, towers can only be built in designated areas and you barely have two spells to help you on your way. All in all this looked like a poor selection for a tower defense, but then something remarkable happened - I just couldn't let go of the game!

The genius of KR is the perfect balance in which everything is played. The seemingly poor variety of defenders is contrasted with about thirty different attackers - from kamikaze demons that detonate upon death killing your fighters to healers to shooters and other support units. Your four towers perform very distinct roles: You need barracks to produce melee fighters that hold your enemies at bay, archers to pepper unarmored opponents, mages to punch through armored foes and artillery to damage a wide area. The challenge is how to counter the many possible enemy waves (armored walkers with healers? many fast walkers with fliers? skeletons spawning at your rear for each dead enemy?) with limited resources, limited tower selection and limited placing. This gives the game a puzzle-like quality as you try to plan ahead on maps that contain multiple routes for enemies to follow and shortcuts through your base. KR also lacks almost any luck factor so you know that any failure is a result of bad strategy and not a poor roll of the digital dice.

While strategy is central to KR, it also requires clever tactics. The two spells are summon meteor shower and reinforcement. They both have different reload times and serve different purposes - one deals large direct damage, while the other places additional distractions for your enemies to bite. One is immediate, the other is active for some time. Since enemies often come from different locations and don't all take the same route you are forced to decide when and where to use each spell - is it better to reinforce a location or does the situation requires a fast and fiery solution? And if it does, what will you do against the monsters on the other path? Additionally, barrack troops are movable and can be rushed from crossing to crossing to cut off enemy advancement, as long as they remain in the barrack's range. This combination of tactics and strategy means that there isn't a dull moment in the game and that even the best fortification cannot be left for long to its own devices. Any line can be breached and it's up to you to keep a close eye on the battlefield at any time.

Mercifully KR provides two difficulty settings for each map, as well as three game modes. It isn't necessary to finish each level on the hardest difficulty with the maximum number of lives remaining to unlock the next level. It could be done, in which case you'll receive extra upgrade points that strengthen your towers or spells, and which can be redistributed at will to better prepare you for specific maps. The extra game modes themselves are deigned to truly test your capabilities as they not only change the monster waves that attack you, not only force you to slay every single enemy without allowing any to pass, but also add additional restrictions like disabling one or more tower types and restricting the use of upgrade points.

I said at the start that at first I was disappointed with the low tower selection, but later in the game (when you reach a point when you can upgrade your towers to their third level) youcan choose between two distinct upgrade paths for each tower, each path with two to four additional purchasable abilities. This drastically changes the gameplay from one where all towers had their own unique roles to one where any tower can potentially take the role of a different tower (making building-restricted modes even more interesting). Would you upgrade your barracks to barbarian halls that could eventually provide you with additional defense against fliers or will you upgrade them into paladin orders to provide even better melee protection? Or will you instead upgrade your mages to sorcerers with the ability to summon golems, thus making barracks less important? Again, limited resources (you never get enough gold in missions to upgrade all of your towers to the max) and other restrictions actually increase your options instead of reducing them.

Finally a word must be said about the art and the general feel of the game. Everything is drawn in a cartoonish manner and a lot of attention is paid to every detail: You'll see dwarfs spinning electric generators to fire off their Tesla cannons, a boss enemy grabbing a handful of your fighters and stuffing them into its mouth and you could even catch fish jumping in a nearby river. Defenders are voiced with funny lines and one boss monster will continuously taunt you with cheesy one-liners and pop-culture references that blend well with the comical atmosphere of the game.

The Bad
The title says it all, really - the main problem with this game is that it's just too short. Other good tower defense games may have from thirty to fifty different missions (often with similar three modes for each mission) while KR has only a dozen maps and the premium package adds only a couple more (as of now). It's hardly enough, especially if you take into account that the final tower upgrades are unlocked gradually over the last half of the game (the last upgrade, the Tesla tower, is unlocked only in the 10th mission). This means you don't have enough time to play around with your most powerful towers, which is rather disappointing.

Other than that I'm only left with nitpicking: The game could use speed settings, but is generally fast paced enough to not really need them. KR has about fifty achievements, but those do nothing for the game - it would be nice if they provided at least a minor bonus to your structures or spells. The in-game encyclopedia is very well made with exact figures for some monster/defender characteristics, but only vague descriptions for others (like "slow speed" or "medium armor").

Try as I might, I can't think of any other good criticism for this game. Compared to others of its genre, it appears to do everything right.

The Bottom Line
This game is immaculately made and will provide a few hours of fun. The only downside is that it couldn't provide even more hours of fun.