Kingdom Rush Review

Kelsey Rinella

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Classic Tower Defense, in both the “refined” and “old-fashioned” senses.

If you’ve ever watched a classic movie only to discover that you’ve already seen movies that build on its basic premise in various ways, you have a pretty good sense for how I feel about Kingdom Rush. Basically, it’s a good game – a paradigm example of the tower defense genre. Sadly, the familiar elements of that genre are now so familiar that it’s hard to judge the game on its own merits. For me, that meant it was hard to maintain interest in the game, and I dropped to the easy difficulty for the last couple of levels just to see if it was saving its surprises for the end. Nope.

Kingdom Rush began life as a popular Flash game before Armor Games brought it to iOS, and it exhibits the hallmarks of a game intended to reach a broad, casual audience. The setting is instantly recognizable as generic fantasy. You’re playing right away with a very brief tutorial and gradual increases in complexity thereafter. The aesthetic vision is lighthearted, and the control mechanism is very simple, involving tapping on whatever you want to interact with. All of this makes it an excellent fit for iOS.


The mechanics will be familiar to tower defense veterans: your job is to prevent enemies who arrive in waves from reaching their target. These enemies must follow a pre-set path, along which are locations on which you can build four types of towers with different virtues. You also have two powers with brief refractory periods. You can use these to directly influence the action by either sending in some reinforcement troops to engage in melee combat or drop a few meteors on the heads of your enemies. Kills earn you money you can use to upgrade your towers to inflict more damage, fire farther, cause instant death, etc.

On its own, there’s very little to complain about. The sound effects are annoyingly repetitive and not especially interesting. For example, you use the “send reinforcements” power perhaps every ten seconds, and every time they’ll yell, “Reinforce!” Early missions are nice and short, but later missions get a good deal longer. This exacerbates the problem that the game is largely trial-and-error–you get information about your enemies only one wave in advance, so you’re left with a lot of choices about what to build with very little on which to base that decision. You find out the deficiencies in your arbitrary choice by failing, but there’s no way to save your state within a level. With later levels having upwards of fifteen waves, that learning process can be unpleasantly slow. Level design is lackluster, but there’s not really much you can do with limited space for paths; like my other complaints, it’s not that big an issue.


The real trouble with Kingdom Rush is just that it lacks character. That helps keep it easy to grasp quickly and extraneous crap from getting in the way, but it also leaves the game feeling like it has no identity. In a year or two, if I remember it at all, it’ll be just another tower defense game, perhaps distinguished by its very generic nature. By contrast, games like Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Plants vs. Zombies seem like they’re starting from the same place, but changing some of the mechanics in interesting ways and setting the game in quirky or interesting settings. Part of the joy of progressing in a game of this nature is seeing what the developers have done with the design space – in Kingdom Rush, there just isn’t much of that suspense and sense of discovery, because the genre is familiar enough to most of us that we already know what sorts of things they might be introducing later. The most interesting element in my eyes was a necromancer who could raise skeleton allies. Since the first book without pictures I ever read was Lloyd Alexander’s The High King (yes, I know I started at the end), even that wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.

If you’ve never tried tower defense and you want a great introduction to the genre, Kingdom Rush is perfect. If you’re devoted to the genre and want to play the prominent examples of it, this is absolutely up your street. But if you’ve played one or two prototypical tower defense games and are looking for something new, Kingdom Rush doesn’t have much to offer.

Review copy of the game provided by publisher.
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Written by
Kelsey is a well-versed individual who loves games that make him think. He mostly handles iOS titles but will also tackle anything that exercises his noggin.

34 Comments

  1. I’ll like the game for a free shirt. Instead of waisting your time here arguing that the review isn’t what you want it to be, how about take some of the constructive criticism and improve the next game? Not everyone is always going to love your game. Be happy they took the time to play it and provide honest feedback.

    • Read my initial comment. I clearly stated that I appreciated the constructive criticism.

  2. Re-reading this comment thread and seeing the new comments have done two things to me. One, weep for humanity that people really are arguing over a “Decent” review of a iOS game. Two, gave me such a migraine to the point I put a gun to my head to relieve the pain, but the police showed up and shot my legs to keep me from killing myself. Congratulations Internet, you have officially broken me. Now, if you would please shut up, I would like to enjoy my misery in peace.

    • It’s not a “Decent” review of a iOS game.
      It’s a crappy review of the BEST TOWER DEFENCE on iOS.

      And all your talk about the internet, I don’t know why you are so surprised? It’s been like this since I knew it.

      I know we all been a little harsh over Kelsey, since he is a newbie. I think he wrote about 4 or 5 reviews.

      The only thing he is doing wrong right now, it’s not admitting he was wrong in the review.

      It’s just like a movie critic, who loves dramas and goes to see a sci-fi movie and says it is horrible. Of course, he doesn’t like this kind of movies.

      It seems that Kelsey doesn’t like Tower Defense games.
      He also call the names of Pop cap’s “Plant vs. Zombies” and 11bit studio’s Anomaly Warzone Earth.

      Two awesome games. I think that bring PopCap to the table is cheap, since they are one of the best in the industry, and PvZ in iOS is a port of a PC game. They not that indie like 11bit studio, also AWE is game for the masses, PC, MAC, iOS, android, Xbla.
      So ok, 2 games that seems to be better games than KR (AWE is not a Tower Defence). I hope he doesn’t review one of these games because he will find them to hard, try to search for the easy mode for the review (who does that? Who play games in easy?, not even my grandmother)

      • From our review guidelines:
        -=-=-=-=-
        8.0 – 8.9 (Great)
        This score represents a game that excels at doing what it set out to do very well. If you enjoy the genre this game is likely a must-own and we recommend dropping the cash.

        7.0 – 7.9 (Good)
        This is the famous middle ground where the game is definitely enjoyable, but that full price tag may scare you. Don’t let it, this game is definitely worth checking out if you enjoy the style.

        6.0 – 6.9 (Decent)
        These games are fun but still miss something that makes them stand out from the pack. These are the kinds of games you might want to either rent for the weekend or pickup on a sweet deal or trade-in.
        -=-=-=-=-

        Missing something which makes it stand out from the pack does a good job of describing how I feel about Kingdom Rush. If you think about what it sets out to do as translate the flash game, it accomplishes what it sets out to do very well. So I can see an argument that it ought to be in the 8 range as having some support, as well as one that it ought to be in the 6 range. Ultimately, I don’t think the game is worth checking out if you enjoy the style–those who know they enjoy the style generally have already played enough games like this that it’s a plausible purchase, but not a necessary one. So I chose to give it the highest score I could without feeling as though I was telling people who knew they liked tower defense that they needed to check it out.

        A big part of the reason I started writing for this site was to get myself used to doing things to other people’s standards again. So it would be important to me to respect our review guidelines even if I didn’t think they were the best scale. As it happens, though, I’ve long been frustrated by the use of ten-point scales in reviews, where people interpret an even 8 as a marginal score, and anything below that is reserved for bad games. I think the ZTGD scale does a good job of using more of the scale, while still having the average game I’d actually play sit substantially above 5, so not totally abusing the scoring system. ZTGD is pretty clear about what it means by its numbers–when we want to call a game “decent”, the first digit you’ll see is 6.

        The reason I compared KR to PvZ and AWE is that they were the two most similar games I’ve played on iOS with wide appeal. A comparison to an obscure game has little communicative value. I was a little surprised to see that you think comparisons to PopCap are cheap–if you think the devs of KR don’t want to be considered to be in the same league as PopCap, you have a lower opinion of them than I. In any case, both PvZ and AWE deviate from what I think of as the standard tower defense model in substantial ways; the fact that I really value that level of structural innovation is a big part of why KR seemed weaker in concept than in execution. I think tower defense offers substantial unexplored design space, and I like the genre enough to want to see it explored. But perhaps this all simply nuance; if what you’re saying is that I don’t like tower defense enough to enjoy playing numerous TD games with similar underlying structures, you’re absolutely right.

        I do think there’s an argument to be made against using the scale as we do which is stronger than what I’ve seen offered so far. I think that’s a position worth taking seriously, so here’s my attempt at making your argument for you:

        Metacritic’s use as a meaningful metric has severely altered the way that reviews matter. Because it makes comparison across sites compelling, many of the readers of any given review will tend to interpret review scores on the basis of a brief snippet of text from the review and its score, and will rarely if ever check the review guidelines of any particular site. So the idea that readers will actually understand a 6.9 to mean what we say it means on a completely different page which few readers ever visit ignores how this media is actually consumed. Instead, we should realize that, for good or ill, Metacritic has helped catalyze a consensus on what review scores mean, and we should use these numbers the way other people do if we actually care about communicating. Worse, ZTGD review scores are actually higher than those from other publications substantially more often than they are lower. So the claim that we use more of the scale and that a low score from us isn’t really a low score is just false.

        Does that seem like it fairly represents your thinking on the issue? Have I, in attempting to capture the objection, missed an important element or written something with which you wouldn’t agree?

      • Just to be clear, your argument is that this game should be scaled differently because it didn’t come from a studio that’s as good as PopCap or 11bit?

        I think you just invalidated any credibility your argument had. We don’t grade on a curve, and we don’t score games based on who made them. We’ve scored bad games from well-known developers low and great games from unknown studios high.

        Kelsey has gone into a lot of detail and taken a lot of time to respond. Honestly, you should be grateful. As a reviewer, if anyone demanded that I apologize for a review that was factually intact and simply a difference of opinion, I wouldn’t give that commenter the time of day.

        One of my roles here, as the Community Manager, is to help address valid concerns or legitimate questions. Your particular choice of argument is offensive and shows a true lack of understanding about journalistic integrity.

  3. I’m sorry if I was misunderstood, he compare a game for the iPad, with games that start on the PC, that was what i meant.
    I think that he found this fun, as is an advertisment for himself, that’s the reason of his answers.
    I don’t care what you think or what he thinks about what I said.
    He and you, know that the review is wrong, it is so wrong, that he tries to grab from every little aspect of the review rating to prove me wrong, when he is doing the opposite.
    This is my last answer to this, since It’s kind of stupid to continue with the same.

    I found a quote from Amos Bronson Alcott that fit wells

    “To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”

    • I’m not sure why it would be illegitimate to compare an iOS native game to a port from the PC, but even if it were, Kingdom Rush started on the PC, too.

      I enjoy argument, and tend to explore the available legitimate avenues of defending myself from criticism, but I’m certainly not against admitting I could do better. For example, I wonder whether I should have done a better job within the text of the review providing the sort of connection to our review guidelines that I’ve provided in these comments. I’ve tried to show that I take seriously the idea that we may be doing something wrong in attempting to keep our own guidelines distinct from what seems to be a common trend of “grade inflation”. I’ve wondered whether there’s more innovation in KR than seemed true to me–it’s possible I’m misremembering the old flash games I played. I might be allowing my aesthetic preferences for a different artistic style to color my evaluation of the distinctiveness of the art. I’m not persuaded of any of that, but I do appreciate your contribution to my doubt.

  4. This piotsng knocked my socks off

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