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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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Luis
Your review stinks!! This game is at least 8.5
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
I see that Kelsey has already responded to you. As he indicated, we are certainly happy to discuss the merits of any game (or review, for that matter), but request that you be more specific in your criticisms so that we might open a dialog.
It’s certainly your right to disagree. Seeing as you took the time to come here and post about it, though, I can only imagine you feel the need to persuade us. So far, we aren’t able to discuss anything as you haven’t identified specific criticisms.
Kelsey
I’m happy to hear you enjoy Kingdom Rush! Since you didn’t take issue with any particular claims from the review, my guess is that we agree on the reasons it doesn’t warrant a 10, and those reasons are more important to me than to you. But it’s doing very well in the App Store and garnering generally quite positive reviews, so it seems that lots of people have priorities more like yours than like mine. So long as the text of the review makes it clear what factors mattered to me and why, it’ll help people make informed buying decisions, which is my principle goal.
Daniel
Thanks for reviewing ‘Kingdom Rush’ and sorry it didn’t live up to your expectations. We love constructive criticism and will try and improve the next iteration of the game.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
Daniel, please know that we try to use the entire review scale and that we do not consider a 6.9 to be a bad game. In fact, based on the things that Kelsey said in his review, I am interested to try it myself. Admittedly, our tastes do not perfectly overlap. We do stand by his review and his opinion, but we also understand that reviews are subjective.
Thank you for your polite and professional comment.
Luis
Well, i don’t really know where to start, so first I will leave to the other readers links to the rest of the reviews.
Slide to play
http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/kingdom-rush-ipad-review
Gamezebo
http://www.gamezebo.com/games/kingdom-rush/review
Touch Arcade
http://toucharcade.com/2011/12/30/kingdom-rush-ipad-review/
Pocket Gamer
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPad/Kingdom+Rush/review.asp?c=36437
148 Apps
http://www.148apps.com/reviews/kingdom-rush-review/
This one’s I took it from metacritic, the place I saw yours.
Today IGN made a review (Editor’s choice)
http://wireless.ign.com/articles/121/1217601p1.html
http://itunes.apple.com/app/kingdom-rush/id489265199?mt=8
If you take a look it’s 5/5 at the appstore.
It’s 4.93/5 on Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Ironhidegames/kingdom-rush
9.7/10 on Armor Games
http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush
4.43/5 on Newgrounds
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/587194
9.9 user score on Metacritic
http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/kingdom-rush
The only bad review in the whole world wide web, it’s this one.
You only speak bad things about the game, you didn’t mention anything good about it.
You try to underrate things like aesthetics, saying “The aesthetic vision is lighthearted”, when it’s very detailed in every aspect, animation, backgrounds, towers and enemies, the little details, like cracks in the ground when a bomb from the artillery hits it.
When you said “The sound effects are annoyingly repetitive and not especially interesting”, came on, really??? Are you hearing impaired? (deaf or hard-of-hearing like you people said). The sound is AWESOME. Every sound it’s great, with lots of movie and video game references.
I’m sorry if it was too difficult for you, like you said in the 4th paragraph, but if you pay attention, almost every path have its patterns, so in a side you put mages and the other rangers, that easy.
Going back to the beggining, millions of people think the game is great, you said decent, and I hope it’s a bias review (don’t know who pay the guy to make this bad review).
For the readers, you can play the game for free in all the portals I mention before, you don’t have to pay to try it (it’s freemium on the web, you have to pay for extra stuff there).
Best wishes to Kelsey Rinella who sucks at reviewing videogames.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
Your tone is completely uncalled for. You disagree with Kelsey, that’s completely fair. However, to say that he “sucks at reviewing videogames” is both rude and childish.
Perhaps you should read OUR review scale and understand what a 6.9 means to us. A 6.9 is NOT a bad game. Since you are a big fan of copying and pasting, I’ll do you a favor…
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.
There ARE going to be times when you disagree with reviewers and there ARE going to be instances when a single score differs from the pack. That’s normal. You are hearing one voice, and if you expect every gamer to have the exact same tastes or value the same features in every , I might suggest that you haven’t had enough interactions with people willing to challenge your own opinions.
This review is not biased. No one paid us anything. Really. It’s true. No one draws a single dollar from anything written on this site.
Once again, we are thrilled that you enjoy the game. That’s the most important thing. Wouldn’t you rather be playing it than complaining about our reviewer’s opinion?
FrustratedFury
Opinions! I love them! Excuse me, I hate them! Well, except for mine, of course. I am always right because the majority of people have the same opinion as I do.
Stop being so childish in a comment section of a video game review. Grow up, and maybe, just maybe, one day people will actually care about what you have to say. As of right now, you sound like a 12 year old over Xbox Live yelling at other people on what’s better: Halo or Call of Duty.
Am I acting childish right now? Of course I am. You have to come down to their level just to talk to them. Great…now I just lost brain cells by acting this way. How do you do it all the time?
You may think Kelsey sucks at reviewing video games but you, my friend, suck at life.
Grow up.
Kelsey
Thanks for giving me more insight into our differences! Here’s one way in which you’re absolutely right that I suck at reviewing video games: I’m ill-educated about art. I lack the vocabulary to express exactly what I think is good and bad about the art in Kingdom Rush. I agree the level of detail is high, and I regard that as a signal of an impressive amount of development. I suspect that what struck me as less impressive about it has to do with shading. Some areas are of uniform color where you’d expect a gradient, or have a steady gradient where you’d expect something more complex. That’s about the best I can do, and it’s awkward enough that I didn’t put it in the review. But I think that’s what’s going on when I see this game and it strikes my eye as looking like a surprisingly complicated implementation of an art style which reminds me of cheap flash games.
It’s a little bit like watching someone create a large and intricate mural with crayons. You might be amazed at how far someone could go with just crayons, but at some point you start thinking all that time would have been better spent learning to use a better tool and applying it, instead. Now, this might be a good analogy–it’s possible that early versions of Kingdom Rush were built with simple flash graphics, and that consistency with those earlier builds made it necessary to continue working in that style even though the artists’ skill and willingness to put in time had progressed beyond the point at which that best showcased what they could do. But, as I said, one of the ways in which I suck as a reviewer is that I don’t know whether such a scenario is plausible at all, because I’ve never worked with the relevant tools.
As for sounds–I don’t know what to say. The same awesome video game reference for the 80th time grates. I make no apologies, but I didn’t care that much; I just turned off the sound.
Difficulty is an interesting case, though. You mention there are patterns; I did notice that. Trouble is, there’s no way to know them when you start placing towers; you have some information, but not enough. My experience toward the end of the game was that I’d play a level once just to find out what the patterns were, then I’d play it two or three more times, tweaking my positioning and upgrade order and going longer and longer each time. Now, I’m not entirely opposed to this sort of trial-and-error learning, but it’s important to give rewards on a reasonable schedule. This is where the various problems I had with the game reinforce each other negatively. If the art was enjoyable, or there were all sorts of little nods to an interesting backstory and quirks in the setting, or there was substantial novelty to the gameplay, I might feel like I was willing to sit through that process. Instead, I resented being made to play the same early bits several times. The later levels end up being long enough that it’s not as well-suited to the iPad as to a desktop computer. People use these devices differently in some subtle ways, and Kingdom Rush suffers slightly in the translation.
Given these, the biggest reason for the score is what we mean by the seven range here at ZTGD, which involves a recommendation that fans of the genre play it. I feel exactly the opposite about Kingdom Rush–I highly recommend it for people who aren’t fans of the genre. For those who are, I don’t think they’re going to see much that’s especially new, so they might as well skip it.
Daniel
Thanks for sticking up for the game and I along with the 19 million people who have played the game on ArmorGames agree with you as well.
I’ve played 1,000’s of games in my life and ‘Kingdom Rush’, IMO is no way generic, repetitive or boring.
Every level was hand drawn to be unique and the level of polish in the game is some of the best I’ve ever seen.
Keep an eye out for the sequel to come out this year.
Daniel
If the score is out of 10, then 6.9 in my opinion isn’t a game I’d recommend. Iron Hide strived to create the best game they could and I think there’s a reason it won ‘Game of the Year’ on Jayisgames.com. I’ve played a ton of ‘Tower Defense’ games in my day and ‘Kingdom Rush’ is easily in my top-5 favorite games of all time.
But everyone is entitled to their own opinion and the criticism Kelsey had against the game are points we hope to address in future updates of the game.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
So, just to be clear, regardless of the review score guidelines and established history of a publication using the entire 10-point scale, you would write every game that receives lower than a 7 off entirely?
There is a reason why we spend so much time writing the narrative of our reviews. We need to put that score in context. Kelsey had good things to say about the game. For him, it simply wasn’t in the top tier. However, a 6.9 means that, to him, it doesn’t stand out from the huge pack of TD games. He makes some additional great points below about the TD landscape and how difficult it must be to innovate in such a crowded genre.
He also talked a lot in the review (and in the comments) about his struggles with thinking that this is a perfect game for someone who ISN’T versed in TD games rather than people that have spent a great deal of time with them. All of that puts shape to an otherwise sterile number.
As reviewers, we fight every day against the impulse of gamers to look at a score and move on before understanding what that score really means to individual sites, writers and games.
Please, before you vilify us, recognize that a 6.9 to us doesn’t mean a horrible game. If that were the case, would he have had as many positive things to share about Kingdom Rush?
Daniel
I never vilified you. I simply have different feelings about Kingdom Rush as do most of the other reviewers and players.
I appreciate Kelsey’s diversity and I think the world would be a boring place if we all had the same opinion. :)
Pablo
Hi,
I’m Pablo one of the devs from Ironhide. There is no need to argue, everyone can have different opinions and we respect yours, like you said ‘lucky’ for us: “it’s doing very well in the App Store and garnering generally quite positive reviews, so it seems that lots of people have priorities more like yours than like mine”.
We are very happy with the game, we are an Indiestudio with only 3 guys so to have the currently #4 game on the US iPad App Store with a USER rating of 5/5 (If you look at the top 10 Only Where’s my water, great game by the way, has this rating) its quite positive for us. The game is #2 on UK too and it’s top 10 on 40 countries.
The only comment that I really didn’t like it is the one about flash games, maybe I got confuse but don’t despise flash games. Remember that a lot of big/medium/small companies rip-off “cheap” flash game ideas everyday.
Thanks for the constructive review, like we said: “ladran sancho, señal que cabalgamos”
Best,
Pablo
Kelsey
Now I’m feeling sheepish for having to google quotations from Don Quixote. :-)
I used to read JayIsGames frequently, and for a while cultivated a taste for flash games. I still treasure the relatively rapid, low-cost development it affords because, exactly as you suggest, it’s a wonderful incubator for fresh ideas. There’s something terrifically exciting about that, and I feel as though it’s had a very positive effect on the industry as a whole and probably helped advance mobile gaming dramatically. I didn’t intend to suggest that I despise flash games.
However, I think you’re probably picking up on some real expectations and biases I have with respect to flash games, to which you might understandably object. They seem like a lower division sporting league–lots of neat options first show up there, but if they’re actually promising, they usually mature into something better in the big leagues. Even if that just means a new coat of “paint”, I usually appreciate the upgrade enough to prefer it, while wishing there were a better way of recognizing the contributions of the indie devs who put themselves on the line to show that their ideas were worth putting serious money into. Kingdom Rush reminded me of an unusual player who seems like he ought to have been traded to a better team already.
With players in this situation, you wonder whether there’s a good reason for it–some feature of their play which makes them extremely effective in their current environment but unlikely to be successful should they be moved up. In gaming, that translates into speculations about limited design space. It might well be the case that there’s just no way to tweak tower defense such that there’d be enough variety or depth to make it worth doing something with high production values. Alternatively, the game might simply not be much improved by better graphics and more development time.
I look forward to seeing how Kingdom Rush 2 violates these expectations, and shows me that there are both interesting things still to be done with tower defense and also better ways of fitting that kind of experience into the shorter, more frequently interrupted bursts of use common in iOS devices.
Luis
Well, I really apreciatte that you answer all about the review and I’m sorry about my language.
I still disagree with you in all that you have written. Did you finish the game? (not the heroic or iron stages).
And this i heard it in the Major Nelson Podcast, Eric Neustadter (e, the vowel), he says that Kingdom Rush is the Best Tower Defense he played, and that he played lots of TD games.
really I don’t get your 6.9. And I am not asking for a 10, since I don’t believe in perfect scores.
Best Wishes,
Luis
Daniel
Kingdom Rush is the best TD game I’ve ever played as well. Send me an e-mail (REMOVED BY MODERATOR) and we’ll mail you some free shirts, stickers and mug for being a fan.
ArmorGames and Iron Hide wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t have players like you who enjoyed our content.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
Daniel, I’ve edited your comment indicating that you would send t-shirts to this person for sticking up for the game and disagreeing with us.
This is wildly inappropriate as it encourages people to flood a review that you, personally, disagree with in hopes of getting free merchandise.
You have every right to disagree, but bribery will not be tolerated.
Daniel
Its not bribery, I clearly stated I was giving him free stuff for ‘Being a Fan’, nothing more. You clearly misinterpreted my comment.
This is my last post. Its been fun and I appreciate the active community on this site.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
Oh, I understand that. And when this fan tells his other friends who are fans (or just want free stuff)? That will just be rewarding them for speaking their mind, as well. Right?
I hope this explains exactly why this looks so bad.
I’m not sure who manages your Twitter account, but you might want to let him/her know there’s a conversation going on there about your offer.
Daniel
I never thought of it that way, but I can see your point. Giving away stuff to people who leave positive reviews could be seen as a way to get ‘overly positive’ comments from people who only want free stuff.
Thanks for pointing that out and I apologize.
Michael "PaladinXII" Futter
Thank you, Daniel.
Kelsey
For what it’s worth, this didn’t strike me as ill-willed at all. If it weren’t for the concern about its unintended effect on incentives, it would have been an example of caring about your fans the way we wish everyone did. I don’t mean to minimize that concern, but I wanted to temper the negativity associated with it by acknowledging that the motive was laudable.
Pablo
Kelsey,
I disagree a lot on what you are saying but I really don’t have the time to discuss it with you, it will be a non end discussion because it’s clearly that we have different opinions.
Maybe if you plan to go to GDC we can go out for some drinks and talk about it (Flash Game Industry, Game Design, Video Game Reviews, etc……yeah I disagree in all these).
Best,
Pablo
Kelsey
I did finish the game, though I dropped down to the easy difficulty to avoid the trial-and-error learning process which tended to get lengthy in those later levels. The process there was as follows: early on, it was no problem. Levels were short enough and forgiving enough that I could try something out and get feedback relatively quickly, and a poor performance in an early wave wasn’t doom. In later levels, the feedback came slower and slower as the number of waves climbed, which was frustrating. It felt like the cost of experimentation was unnecessarily high, and so for a while I only played the first wave or two until I felt like I had tuned my plan. Eventually, I realized the repetitiveness of that experience was sucking the fun out of the game for me, which is why I decided to finish on easy.
Thanks to all of the commenters so far for their time. One of the interesting themes so far has been the background assumption on the part of the ZTGD crew that our ratings mean what we say we mean by them (with an undercurrent of assertion that our way is preferable), while others have tended to think that there’s a consensus on how ratings are to be interpreted. While, in general, I think taking people to mean what they say they mean is obviously desirable, here are two ways of showing that things aren’t that simple: first, if we were to do something highly unusual like reversing the scale (such that the best games got 1s on our 10-point scale), that would seem like we were doing something wrong. Second, if we were to assign scores which poorly reflected the content of the review and which were outside mainstream thinking on the game, this would be simply a slightly less degenerate way of attention-whoring than actually writing a review which insincerely defended such a score. My intuition is that it would be entirely legitimate to criticize a review for either of these sorts of scoring, and I suspect there are other sins a score could commit. So I don’t dismiss complaints which focus purely on the score, though as a reviewer who wrote a bunch of words, too, it can be tempting. I can certainly understand the need to move on to more productive things like making games rather than engaging in the sort of abstract discussion of scoring in reviews which seems like it would be needed to either develop consensus or identify the fundamental disagreements involved. I feel I owe it to those who read what I’ve written on the subject to explore that in as much depth as you’d like, though, and I enjoy it, so I’m happy to continue the conversation however works well for all parties involved.