Kingdom Rush

Original of the series, the only backdraw is horrible balancing of difficulty. Playing in "casual" is anything but. Still, a nice game enough to enjoy.

This is the original Kingdom Rush - the first game in the series, which started out as a Flash game. It's what all of us fell in love with and so lovingly remember. Many in the Kingdom Rush community say it's the best entry, but I personally don't agree. Still, the game is absolutely a Kingdom Rush game and therefore nothing less than greatness. The original trilogy (Kingdom Rush, KR Frontiers, KR Origins) has a system with 4 towers where you get to pick out of 2 different tier 4 upgrades. This was great at the time but is now what divides the community. I am of the thought that all the games after this trilogy have a far better system where you have that much more to choose from and adapt to each stage, but I digress. My suggestion is to play all the games in the trilogy I just mentioned before moving on to the newer games. Specifically because of the tower system I've already mentioned on top of the expected graphical upgrades over time. On top of that, this game has a very different hero system (heroes level from 1 each stage instead of keeping progress), so I'd suggest starting with this game, then moving on to either Frontiers or Origins (doesn't really matter) and then after having played both, move on to either Vengeance or Alliance (order again doesn't really matter) and then finally Genesis (if I forget to update this review when newer games come out, I'd probably end up putting them after Genesis). Neither the gameplay or the graphics are bad in this game, but I'd say the balance of both towers and heroes suffers a bit. The tier 4 artillery tower (Tesla) is so busted that you're griefing yourself if you don't build it on every single stage after having it unlocked, while the other tier 4 artillery tower is pretty bad, to the point where there is no reason to build it. I'm also personally not a fan of one of the tier 4 archer towers (Musketeers) and end up not building it very often, but this one is not that much of an outlier. Both barracks and Mage towers are amazing, but have different uses. As for heroes, there are a few really good heroes, but Tenshi is so good that there really isn't much of a point to using any other hero, as he really just does it all. This game used to be probably the hardest entry in the series, but then Genesis came out and crushed it with the difficulty. One thing I will give the fans of the older games is that the wave composition feels very smooth, you're basically always looking at most if not all towers shooting without any wait time between waves. This is something the newer games kind of struggle with. And even though I'm not as much of a fan of this game as many others in the community, I still like it and definitely will be recommending it to anyone looking for a Tower Defense game. I really would suggest following my suggested order of games though, as I've recently struggled with wanting to come back the older games after having played the newer ones, but that's definitely up to personal preference.

Cool game. I suck at it, hard locked at 19 stars. 2 levels ironed, 5 levels 3 starred. Can't clear the 6th after multiple attempts, try to hero the 3rd, can't do that either. Shuffle masteries, shuffle towers, and it just seems to get worse. Game cooks, but I'm left without a fork.