Kingdom Rush HD

ower Defense games are everywhere. I remember spending hundreds of hours frantically trying to block creep waves with Desktop Tower Defense and thinking that nothing else would ever come close to that level of strategic simplicity. Then came the app stores and suddenly half the indie developers out there, and a few of the professional ones as well were outputting tower defense after tower defense game. Each one fairly similar and I tried out multitudes of them – on web browsers, on steam, on android and on iOS. Kingdom Rush comes as close to perfection as I’ve seen so far and rates my #1 Tower Defense.

In any tower defense game the most important thing to me is going to be gameplay. It has to be fun and entertaining yet challenging and with a genuine feeling that your strategy matters. You’ll get that with Kingdom Rush.

n each of the levels you have a set amount of building plots. On those plots you can choose from four different tower types. The barracks outputs soldiers to physically defend the path, the archer shoots arrows, the mage does magic damage and artillery focuses on aoe bombinb. Each can then be upgraded to four levels of tower; the fourth level being a choice of two different types of specialist tower. Each specialist tower then has a further two upgradeable special abilities. That’s quite an array of end-game differences and both the order in which you place your tower, and the upgrade path you take make a genuine difference to the gameplay.

The waves are action-packed with 45 different enemy types, with strengths, weaknesses and special abilities, including some seriously tough bosses.

You control an additional hero from a selection of heroes and can direct them, as well as additional summoning abilities on a cooldown, such as a giant meteor strike, or summoning reinforcements – giving you an extra element of control over the map and meaning you don’t just set your towers and sit back and wait, you need to be actively participating.

o it’s got gameplay – but does it have longevity? It really does. Each map has 3 stars assigned to it. Once you unlock 3 stars you unlock two additional game modes – Heroic and Iron Challenge. They add additional rules, such as a single life challenge, limited upgrades or only one type of tower and they are HARD. The stars that you earn are then spent in the upgrade tree as well as unlocking more heroes.

As if that wasn’t enough, it has super crisp cartoon-style graphics that look really good and even the audio is high quality and entertaining. I swear, I haven’t been paid to write this, it really is just genuinely good.

Basically, I can’t fault it. I’ve tried to think of downsides and I’m coming up blank. If you like the tower defense genre then I am 100% confident that you will love this game. Kingdom Rush is available on iPad, iPhone, and browser. The browser game is free to play with purchaseable premium content, so why you’re still here I really don’t know.