In January, I dove into Kingdom Rush. While the game was originally built from a flash platform, and eventually made it to mobile starting with the iPad in 2011, that didn’t prevent a good translation of it from appearing on the Xbox Series X some 10-plus years later. And while the concept has aged a bit, I found it to be quite addictive. The game was easy to play, easy to enjoy, and easy to put down and come back to later. Such a mobile, casual gameplay structure.
Fast forward two months later, and the Xbox Series X has been graced with another version of KR with Kingdom Rush: Frontiers, which totes the same gameplay structure but introduces new enemies and characters to dispose of them. And while I can’t say that it was incredibly new under the gameplay hood, the additional newbies to fight off the enemies made for a challenging, yet creative action-adventure to partake in.
Let’s rush into this.
The gameplay is weird as it is deep
The story, while mostly inconsequential to the gamer, is all about protecting lands and defeating creative and cantankerous creatures. You don’t read a story to justify this game’s existence, but it’s nice to know you might be on the right side of justice when it comes to laying down the law. Anyway, and I say this rarely, the story here truly doesn’t matter. You need a reason to go after baddies, and protecting the lands is just that reason. And it’s just that simple.
The true joy of this experience comes with the tower defense gameplay structure. Much like its January brethren, the goal of this game is to prevent enemy progression and build towers to wipe baddies out. The more enemies you take out, the more gold you obtain, and the more upgrades you can provide your existing towers to fight more enemies. It’s a lovely repetitive process that changes with a few gameplay elements.
One of those first elements is the variety of enemies. For every part of the land you conquer, you’re put into a new battle with new enemies…mostly. For example, the game staoff with simple soldiers invading your lands haveu having to dispose of them. Once you progress towards the sea, the game throws sailors, ships, and sorcerers at you, each bringing a different style of attack with them. Once you progress past those enemies, the world shifts to a jungle and now you have to deal with giant apes, huge birds, and tiki-masked men with various abilities that prevent you from killing them easily. While the structure of attack and building towers doesn’t change much, the variety of enemies and how they attack you is a cornucopia of creativity and variety. In other words, you won’t be bored with the attacks, as they will shift into new gears with every battle progression.
Another element of gameplay is how the levels change shape and how environments function. The enemies charge on paths and you have to build towers alongside those paths to protect your champion from being overrun (they are usually located at the end of the level). The variety of paths and how the environments work are brilliantly designed. Sometimes you will have enemies coming from the east, west, and north. Sometimes the enemy paths will change and meet at a fork in the road where you’ll have a massive attack coming at you. The paths aren’t stagnant, rather, they’re purposeful in their design to keep the game engaging. In that respect, they are fantastic.
On the environment side, sometimes you will have special environments that cater directly to the gameplay. For example, in the pirate/sailor level that was previously mentioned, you have a parked ship nearby that you can pay coins to and have them fire cannons at the oncoming enemies. That type of environment option isn’t available on all levels, but it’s neat to see it appear randomly when the design calls for it. And sometimes the additional action in the environment isn’t necessarily in the gamer’s favor. For example, there is a jungle level where you will randomly have to stop a tiki-dude from throwing a damsel in distress into a volcano. If you stop them, bravo. If you don’t, the poor lady will be sacrificed, and the volcano will spit rocks in your direction. Having that interactive environment keeps the game engaging and interesting. You will never fall asleep at the wheel with this one.
The last huge element that is worth mentioning with the gameplay design is the actual builds you have in this game. The structures you put up aren’t too far from the original game until you get into the weeds with upgrades. Once you start upgrading your towers, you start seeing major upgrades within those upgrades. For example, there is a moment in the game where you can upgrade a wizard tower and then hit a crossroads with the upgrades where you can have a castle with powerful wizards, or you can change them to voodoo-based wizards that conjure the undead. Once you get to this level of gameplay, the game allows you to upgrade those maxed-out towers with different abilities. Staying with the wizard castle upgrade, you can upgrade your wizard to throw a giant tornado or a giant fireball of magic. And there are three upgrade levels for each. Every tower has this ability, so you’re not just maxed out all the time with your towers. I think this addition is cool and it makes the gameplay much deeper. The voodoo towers are weird as hell, though, especially with how they shout at enemies.
The towers, lands, and environment uniqueness is only trumped by the number of characters, which can also be the game’s hiccup spot.
Such characters
The characters in this game come in a variety of flavors and personalities, all mainly from the enemy side. The characters controlled by the player are unique in some circumstances, such as the assassins with knight towers. The assassins are optional upgrades that can go stealth and kill enemies faster. They’re wonderful new upgrades to the series and are a tip-of-the-hat to the protagonist in the Assassin’s Creed games. There were quite a few enemies and characters that looked ‘familiar’ and related back to different movies and games. Watch for that Dune worm.
Anyway, the gameplay difficulty and style are driven solely by the enemies. And sometimes they can be incredibly overwhelming, even frustrating to the point of taking a break from the game for a day or so. For example, there is a jungle level where the enemies throw tiki-men, tiki-men with shields, tiki-voodoo shamans who can raise the dead, and massive amounts of zombies. And it’s just wave after wave of these things. It got so bad that I literally had to stop and come back to this level. It felt like there wasn’t a good combination or solution. Sometimes you will spend hours trying to get through one level. Sometimes it will take a day. Compared to the first game, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers has an incredible number of unique and terrible enemies and is also 2-3 times more difficult. You’ll feel the latter of this by the time you face the pirates. It has been a while since I threw curse words into the air because of a game, and this one filled the air like it was a cloudy day. Again, the enemies are sometimes overwhelming towards the end of levels in those final waves of enemies.
Difficulty aside, the variety of enemies are creatively made and well-placed. I just wish the game didn’t up the ante with the difficulty, as it sometimes took away from the beauty of the enemy’s creativity.
Odds and Backends
The backend upgrade system is intuitive. As you complete levels in Kingdom Rush: Frontiers, you gain XP which can be used to unlock abilities and upgrade your champion (and unlock new champions with new skills). The backend unlockables depend on progression in the game, so it’s almost always a guarantee that you’re going to get points from level completion. Of course, the devs didn’t want to give you everything at once in this game, so you do get tiny amounts of XP here and there without gigantic upgrade leaps. I believe the young folk call this a ‘grind’. It is grind-y.
Now, will that grind defer your motivation to keep playing? Honestly, no. The game is so much fun with finding a perfect defense strategy that it might cause you to become obsessed with getting it right. You won’t think about the XP scraps the game throws at you when you’re latching onto the game’s addictive gameplay.
Le sigh. It is quite addictive, even if it is incredibly frustrating at times.
Anyway, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is a good follow-up to the original game. It’s far more creative with enemies and protagonist characters, but also far more difficult. Regardless, the experience is more fun than not.
