Kingdom Rush HD

Title: Kingdom Rush HD
Platform Played On: iPad
Release Date: December 19, 2011
Date Played: Spring 2012
Time Played: 6 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5

Opinion:
Tower defense genre is perhaps the best adapted genre on the touch screen devices. By it's nature it works really well. However because of this the market has been flooded with tower defense games one after another to the point where I dont even want to hear about them. Kingdom Rush HD though is one worth making an exception for.

Firstly Kingdom Rush is an absolute eyegasm to look at. The art looks hand drawn, rich in color and very detailed. The animations are smooth and characters both good and evil are plentiful. Bottom line, the game looks great!

The mechanics are exactly what you would expect from a tower defense game. You have 4 basic tower types, each upgradable in variety of ways, including branching and specialization. Which does add multiple layers of strategy. Where Kingdom Rush separates itself from others is the addition of skill trees and heroes. As you make your way through the campaign you earn stars, which you can spend to upgrade the different towers and unlock heroes. You never have enough points to get everything, so everyone's game is a bit different based on what they chose to upgrade. Personally I opted out of using heroes and instead spent the extra points on upgrading the towers.

Kingdom Rush does suffer from one very frustrating thing though, and that is it's difficulty. This game is soooo freaking hard after the first 5 levels or so. It becomes almost impossible to get 3 stars on missions without using a precise strategy. This throws everything that is great about the game (customizing your own strategy via the skill trees and tower upgrades), because in order to succeed you need to use the one and only strategy. Needless to say this makes the fun meter drop significantly.

For the most part Kingdom Rush is a great looking and playing tower defense game. Probably the best I have played on the iPad. It is a shame that the developers could not do a better job at balancing the difficulty. Perhaps in a future update? Nonetheless Kingdom Rush is a fun game and a must check out for anyone that finds tower defense games fun.