I think I’m creeping up on a record for the number of Kingdom Rush games reviewed within a six-month span. It’s a record I would gladly hold, of course, as I have thoroughly if not addictively enjoyed the series so far on the Xbox. It might be the best Xbox game/series that I have played in 2023. Hmmm.
Anyway! The good folks at Ironhide Game Studio have been churning them out lately, and the latest release is Kingdom Rush Origins, which is the third installment of the series. Having more of a Lord of the Rings theme to it, the game features a lot of bow action, plenty of attack and defense options, and a helluva lot more trickiness that spikes the difficulty up more than the last two.
Set your defenses up and let’s dive right into this.
Addictive gameplay with a sprinkle of frustration
If you have played any of the Kingdom Rush games in the past, then you know how the series likes to start easy and accommodating, but gradually ramp up the difficulty as you progress. In past games, the difficulty spike would be offset by the introduction of new upgrades and add-ons during gameplay. Having that balance helps to keep the gameplay engaging and pro-player rather than turning the experience into Dark Souls. Before we get into the difficulty of the game, let’s talk about what makes it fun – add-ons, weapons, and enemies. ,
As you get to about the third or fourth stage in Kingdom Rush Origins, you get bulkier add-ons and on-map attacks that aren’t readily available in your arsenal. You might get a greedy gnome that freezes enemies to steal money. You might also arm a catapult that fires brutally into an onset of enemies. The game does its best to put you in a good situation to handle difficulty through new ways of disposing of enemies.
Aside from non-controllable upgrades, the game also opens upgrades with existing weapons, such as the case of the rock thrower. This offensive attack can eventually be upgraded to either throwing a trio of rocks or launching a bear to destroy enemies. I know, the bear thing threw me off, but it certainly helped during the latter stages of gameplay. Anyway, these upgrades go along with your success and help to balance the difficulty spike and fair, gameplay options. Again, the difficulty part of this review is coming.
To keep the gameplay interesting, the game did some creative work with the enemies, as well as their weaponry. The enemies in this game featured a lot of rock monsters, some new types of dogs that ran through heroes rather than stop and fight, and a bevy of different baddies that were more speedy than brutal. That’s not to say you won’t occasionally find an impossible baddy to figure out, like Djinn-like purple creatures that don’t easily die as the other large badasses, but during my review session, it felt like KRO was more about speed than it was brutality. It’s a change-up from previous games, which I can respect.
The only downer in the enemy category was the bosses. Unlike the previous KR games, the bosses in Origins seemed rushed, easy to kill, and not nearly as strategically tricky as previous bosses in the series. For example, the two big bosses before the main were easy to figure out with their patterns and allowed me to build up my army quickly enough to bring some big firepower to the final fight, which ended up lasting not long at all. The last boss was a bit more brutal and all over the place, but nothing like the final boss in the first Kingdom Rush game, which was multi-form tricky, and tough to bring down. While the KRO boss did take some strategy, I got him down on the first try. The post-campaign bosses are a lot tougher, but that’s typical of this series.
Shifting gears just slightly, the maps in Kingdom Rush Origins were some of the more creative structures in the series. The lanes in KRO were perfectly spaced out so the game could throw you a few loops along the way to keep you guessing on the best weapon placement strategy and proper trail choking defense How the enemies react on these maps and how some of the maps evolved meant the experience. While a lot of the maps didn’t have caves or shortcuts for creatures, something present in the previous two games, to throw you different attacks, they did have good shapes and balanced parts where enemies could hide and sneak up on you via cutting through a field. The maps in KRO seemed far more simplified than in previous iterations, but at the same time, they contained a hint of sneakiness and complication. The devs seem to find new ways to keep the experience with the maps engaging through evolving the landscape. I liked the balance that was done to the maps and gameplay. I think that Ironhide Game Studio nailed this part of the gameplay design and brought a new variety of trickiness through the maps to gamers.
All the above said, a word of caution to anyone who thinks this will be a cakewalk game. This is the most difficult and frustrating Kingdom Rush of the bunch so far on the Xbox. I cannot understate that enough, as the difficulty is certainly ramped up to 11, sometimes unnecessarily.
As you progress through higher levels of gameplay, reaching the end of the campaign, you will be thrown enemies during later stages that are nearly impossible to beat without letting some pass. For example, there is a map that has a lake in the middle. During this stage, there are initially four ways enemies can get at you, two paths from the top, and two from the side. Eventually, as you get further in this stage, one more enemy entry point opens on the left side and an additional route for enemies to go to ding your heart score (every time you allow an enemy to penetrate your defenses, you lose a heart) opens at the bottom. Towards the latter part of this stage, you will face gigantic rolling porcupines. They must be stopped in their tracks to bring them down, though you can occasionally, through a mage, destroy them altogether with one hit (it’s random, so you can’t count on it). To stop them, you must get people in the way of their path, like a champion or soldiers from barracks. When you get two of these creatures coming at you, the game gets tricky. When you get three? Remember that getting angry at a video game is not a healthy way to live. And the trio of porcupine bastards doesn’t show itself until the end of the stage, which is where difficulty and frustration peak.
This stage contains 15 waves of enemies, and each time I completed the fourteenth stage, I was greeted by three rolling porcupines coming at me. Now, each time I played this stage, I was one stage away from having a perfect heart score (20). The game felt the need to go from zero to 180mph with its difficulty in the final stage. Up to that point, I had never run into this type of attack formation before, so stopping three porcupines at a time, and they take quite a few hits to bring them down, so it wasn’t a short killing process, is a near impossibility. I did eventually accomplish this, but going from tough difficulty to impossible was, well, quite unfair. Not to mention frustrating to the point where curse words made their way out and vowing not to give a ‘sh*t’ about being perfect in the game, the latter of which is a total lie, as that isn’t my style. Anyway, this type of difficulty should never happen in KR. There is no reason for this.
Now, the difficulty didn’t stop there. Most of the gameplay had one champion guarding multiple exits for enemies. I could see this multiple-exit thing as something that exists in near-campaign completion levels, but it hung on like a tick on a dog/cat/person from early in the game to late. There was so much to juggle when it came to tower defense stretching across multiple paths with only a single champion to account for it all. Even the latter stages after the campaign, it contained the same multi-path structure, where you would have to bounce back and forth between lanes just to protect your star count (18-20 hearts = three stars, 11 – 17 = two stars, 10 below = one star). Granted there were a few that contained a secondary champion after the campaign had ended, but the enemy difficulty just balanced that out where it was a different type of chaos. I don’t know what bee got in the game’s design bonnet, but I had less fun with Kingdom Rush Origins because the difficulty swing was so quick and so high. Maybe Ironhide Game Studio wanted more longevity to their title through this, as that would be a classic 80s arcade owner move to ramp up the difficulty to keep the players coming back, but it took away from the enjoyment.
Anyway, my point here is that the game spikes up the difficulty unexpectedly in a frustrating manner. Towards the end of the campaign, it was incredibly difficult to walk away saying I enjoyed the experience as much as I did the previous two games.
Overall, most of what you get with Kingdom Rush Origins, as it relates to gameplay, is either the same as you’re used to from previous KR titles, or it’s new and innovative. The gameplay experience won’t feel like a wash, rinse, and repeat, as it does contain new designs and ways to play the game strategically. The gameplay also brings a new level of challenge to the player, which may not sit well with those who love the series. I know I have struggled to enjoy at least half my time with KRO thanks to difficulty but have powered through most of the frustration. No one should have to ‘power through’ a game unless it’s made by FromSoftware.
On that note, let’s wrap this sucker up.
Conclusion
Kingdom Rush Origins from Ironhide Game Studio is a step up with creativity, enemy, and hero design/execution, and with how clever the series’ maps can get. Unfortunately, the difficulty has also stepped up and can create a frustrating time that may hurt the positive parts of this latest Kingdom Rush game.
