Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD

I've been playing Kingdom Rush since it was a flash game on Armor Games. This is the first one I would not recommend. Terrible terrible map design, insane difficulty levels that are horrifically unbalanced. Towers are effectively useless until level 3 and even then they're garbage. Upgrades cost a fortune and upgrades are totally useless. The smallest mobs in the game have tank health. It's like they did no balancing during play testing and basically said it's fine. The first KR in particular was challenging but fair, this just feels like lazy game design. Breeding Chambers on iron is literal nightmare fuel. They give you the two worst towers in the game, stretch the map to three defense points, spam you with spiders that have more health than KR 1 mini bosses, block EVERY SINGLE NODE with a web and give you 900 gold. It takes 500 just to make 1 tower do enough damage to kill one enemy, let alone 5 at the same time. Edit:// Okay, I'm officially done with this and may not purchase another KR game ever again. Somehow the levels got even harder. I'm pretty good at these games. I've beaten every previous titles on the hardest level and in fact made it harder for myself by restricting myself to only using one type of tower per level as an extra challenge. This game is literally impossible on impossible mode. I decided to test it. I ran a trainer to cheat on the game giving myself infinite money, ran an iron mode challenge and had every slot from the beginning fully upgraded as a test. The enemies STILL ALMOST BROKE THROUGH. There is SERIOUS balancing issues with this game. I personally thin after reading the phone version reviews that they designed this for mobile monetization pay to win. You have super bombs and such on the phone version that you have to pay for with gems and real currency. They make the levels impossible without them to get money, when they ported the game they obviously didn't tune this for PC where you don't get those types of weapons and effectively made certain levels impossible to near impossible to beat. This particular level starts you with 900 gold, Towers are ineffective until level 4, mobs buff each other, AOE your troops and heros, etc mobs are fast, basic mobs have 360 HP, towers do 30-50 damage, that means they have to hit them a minimum of 7 times to kill them. 7 TIMES!. First wave comes, literally 500 mobs spawn, I'm not even joking ON THE FIRST WAVE with 900 gold to start! WTF!? Terrible game design and balance. This series has really gone down hill. Everything is designed around milking money now and the fun is gone.

Level design is atrocious: no chokepoints and no difficulty = no satisfaction. Most heroes are near-copies of one another, and therefore uninteresting. Some towers are fun, but footmen, for example, are almost unplayable. Overall, it amazes me that this game — the sequel to a very good series with clear successes — still fails to replicate, let alone improve, the formula. A true disappointment