Who Can Protect The Kingdom? – Kingdom Rush – Ironhide Game Studios

Kingdom Rush is a tower defense game, brought to us from Ironhide Game Studios, and released for play on Steam or even the app store on your mobile device. It puts the player into the role of mighty defender of the kingdom! You are responsible for protecting the king, while fighting off wave upon wave of monsters, with the difficulty increasing with every level you play.

I should start by saying I have never really been a fan of tower defence games. There is little to no plot, the game play itself gets stale, and I feel after you’ve played five or six levels, you really know what that game has to offer. That being said, this is not your typical tower defence. Well in some ways anyway, with others it is almost identical.

You do build towers, and you do face waves of monsters. You are given a certain amount of lives to try and survive, and you do earn between one to three stars for beating a level. The stars can be used to make the base abilities of towers stronger, in turn giving you better things to play around with, and even make the towers shoot further or faster.

You are given four different types of towers. You have a magic tower, an archery tower, guard tower, and a dwarven boom tower (essentially a large AOE cannon, which can eventually throw dynamite). Each tower can be increased to do more than its base (such as create paladins, death magic, teleportation, etc) so it gives you a lot of options as the game progresses. Still, all of this is fairly familiar with a tower defense game.

One of the key differences to me is that the game gives you a personal hero to control OUTSIDE of the other abilities you can use. You control one man or woman, who also levels while dealing damage, and can place them anywhere on the battlefield. You can assist in melee combat, or pick a ranged fighter and prevent them from breaking your lines. There are several to choose from (in the beginning, there is only one) and each one of them are completely unique. You can also swap back and forth anytime in the game to play as someone else.

Another difference (at least from the majority of tower games) is the ability to play an extra two challenges on each level. You can actually earn a total of five stars in one level, and each level will require a playthrough of three times before you can ace this game. It really adds a notch to the replay value, knowing that you will have to replay EVERY SINGLE LEVEL two more times.

Honestly, I was expecting to hate this game, and I would have been fine with it. It turns out the game really sucks you in, and causes you to rethink the idea behind tower defence games. Well, that and makes you realize you REALLY hate Yeti’s…