It has been a while since I have had a pure turn-based combat game to review. Legends of Kingdom Rush plopped on my desk almost a month ago and we have had an on-again, off-again relationship. This turn-based combat game has a colorful palette, a cute and amusing collection of characters, a simple combat system to work from, and a somewhat Plants vs. Zombies vibe that keeps the frustration nearly at bay. While these might be positives, the negatives come in an unbalanced and random combat system that might frustrate even the most dedicated turn-based fan out there.
Let’s get to it.
Fun Narratives
The beginning of the game has you break out of prison and storm your way outside of the enemy’s castle. There is a good bit of evil in the world taking over and you’re the only hero to vanquish it. Yes, we’ve heard this story before, but it still feels fun and fresh, and most of all simple. Along the way, you meet companions that want to join your quest and you keep drudging through wave after wave of enemies until you reach a destination where a marvelous boss awaits you.
I give the folks at Ironhide Game Studio some major kudos for making this an over-the-top narrative with some charm. That alone helps to push beyond the typical ‘hero saving the day’ storyline that has been used since the dawn of video games. The devs make the characters fun, give them great dialogue, even if it’s corny sometimes, and put them on a path that will motivate any player wanting to simply go on an adventure. That type of story with those types of characters makes for a marvelous time.
Does that make for good gameplay? Yeah. For the most part.
The good, the bad, the frustrating
Legends of Kingdom Rush is a fun turn-based game at its core. It does everything right but stumbles in a few areas. Let’s start with the positives.
The game has iOS written all over it, and that’s expected considering where it was born (guess). The controls are simple (mouse usage is your main point of contact), the decision-making in the game is quick, and when you perish in the game, you can get right back into the action. These are the attributes of a successful iOS game. The developers don’t want you to put down that iPad or iPhone. The faster you get back from failure, the more you’ll keep playing. And that translates just fine to PC. Sometimes you want a simple game that works well enough to enjoy in small doses. Plants vs. Zombies was that type of game, and it was huge on the PC when it came out. Heck, my kids still play that damn game. Anyway, it proves that simplicity is fine.
Sticking with simplicity, the game’s backend carries those same traits. As you progress in the game and fight enemies, you gain XP, which leads to upgrading your characters and opening new skills. The longer you play the game, the further you get, and the more skills you unlock. The upgrades are so easy to obtain, as they can come from battle and other areas. They’re simple and quick to claim.
A big positive about the upgrades is that there are cool skills that you get access to, and they dictate how you develop your strategy of approach. They come in all shapes and sizes. For example, there is a skill with my mage where he can cast a large fireball down on enemies, engulfing those who are standing next to each other. The coolest upgrade for the mage is the disintegration of an enemy (or hurting them really-really bad). Each set of skills for each character is unique to who they are and plays off of that character’s class. That is a neat and engaging part of the Legends of Kingdom Rush gameplay. It hooks you in that respect. It wants you to explore and unlock as many upgrades as you can with each character by simply making them gradually powerful and more importantly interesting. That plays into the overall strategy of the game as well. Skills are important for winning the game. For example, if my archer is dealing tremendous damage with a new skill, I want to keep him at sniper’s distance the entire fight. Losing his skills and damage will only hurt the team. That strategy and use of skills/characters is everything to me in a turn-based combat game and Legends of Kingdom Rush does this smashingly.
For such a big positive, what is the negative? Well, should you die in the game, those skills reset. Should you conquer a certain section of the evil kingdom, those skills reset. There is a lot of resetting and restarting going on with skills that either you’re going to enjoy the challenge of building up your characters again or you’re going to feel like you’ve accomplished nothing other than unlocking a new kingdom when you conquer one. For me, once I conquered a land and vanquished a boss, I was disheartened to find out that I lost all my skills and that I had to build up my team again to unlock those same skills from before. I spent a good 20-30 minutes for every two fights and building those characters in specific ways with unique skills to help the team was a joy. Losing it all for no reason was a bit disappointing. I get that the devs want you to get to a point, do it again, and wash-rinse-repeat, but it’s disappointing. If I earned something, I should expect to keep it. That’s modern gaming, even when you have turn-based combat going on. For Legends of Kingdom Rush, this is a low unbalanced blow that is difficult to appreciate. Unless you enjoy games like this and Dark Souls. There are plenty of you out there that enjoy that type of torture.
The other negative of this game is that everything feels a bit unbalanced and random. I appreciate that no adventure is going to be the same and that enemies will be mixed up and whatnot (sans bosses) along the way to conquering a land. That said, the game really ups the random enough that even when you’re all-powerful, there is a random chance you could lose quickly. What that does is take away any hope of earning enough skill to walk into a fight with pure confidence that you’re going to take down your enemy. For example, I was about three-fourths of the way through the second kingdom, my characters were powerful as hell and ready to raise it, and I was taken out by A.I. quickly and without regret. The CPU simply and randomly became powerful enough to overwhelm my powerful team. And those enemies were plain, but their strategy was surprisingly on for this match, which was baffling considering what point I was on the progression arc. It shouldn’t have ratcheted things up to 11. It was just so random and the progression arc that you see with turn-based games where you can walk into a place knowing that you’re more powerful than your opponent is hit or miss in Legends of Kingdom Rush. That just begs the question of why you’re trying to build up your team for a random roll at success? That’s not a consistent issue within the game, but when it happens it is frustrating. It’s like playing NBA JAM at times where no lead is safe.
Staying with random, one big positive is random events that you see along the way. When your characters are in a kingdom walking a path that leads from camp A to camp B, sometimes in the middle of the path you will get a random occurrence. Sometimes it’s an event where you must roll a star dice to see if you dodged ice/boulders/blasts, and sometimes the event is a stranger wanting to join your party. Other times it can be someone you can trade with to buy items or upgrade current characters. This part of the game is fascinating and fun. It makes you want to travel around to all the points just to see how far the developers have taken these random occurrences (and the answer is – really far).
Another positive of the game, and a big one, is the variety of characters you get to choose from to make up your team. They have every type of imaginable character under the sun, including a whacky sasquatch, a mad witch of the woods, and several other characters with unique backgrounds and powers. It seems like Ironhide spent a lot of time creating these interesting creatures that contain their own types of power moves, and that time was well spent. The character variety is a huge part of the game and acts as a wonderful distraction from the game’s unbalanced randomness. When you unlock characters, you truly want to put them to the test immediately to see how good they are with your team of three (you get more on the road). For this part of the gameplay design, it was a huge plus.
Staying with characters, when they enter the battlefield, they move in a limited hexagon fashion. It’s a typical style for turn-based combat games. The limited spacing plays together with the character types, where you need to really think about how you want to approach enemies with a particular team of characters. For me, I was more balanced with two sword swingers and two snipers (mage and archer). Having different character types means that you can approach the game differently each time. Since the game is so quick and circular, you can try out certain combinations on the battlefield. Knowing how the spacing works, and knowing what the environments consist of (exploding barrels, hungry plants, stinky sulfur thingies, etc.) will determine how you approach your character selection. This portion of the game is absolutely brilliant because this is the reason why there are so many different types of characters. It is a huge positive.
The powers that the characters carry with them are balanced and play well with the gameplay when it’s not oddly random. Building up the skills to unload on enemies and dispose of them quickly is so satisfying. It’s a huge plus for this type of game. As I stated before, the big downer is losing all of that strategy, power, and build-up when you die or when the land you’re fighting in is conquered. Maybe the developers didn’t want the players to be perpetually powerful, but that can be rectified with more difficult enemies. There should be a balance and there should be some carry-over reward for all the efforts in strategizing and utilizing characters.
Okay, I’ll let this part go now.
Another positive that helps with the above is that the game is big. When you travel paths in the game, you have multiple options. There is no option for turning around on a path, as you must always press forward. While that seems like a negative, it is a positive because the game does encourage you to go back and try new routes. Each route has its own type of enemies and friendlies, and sometimes the routes go to mini-boss fights. Regardless, the game is huge, and it will encourage revisiting areas. And you’ll want to do just that, depending on your patience.
Overall, there are some great moments with Legends of Kingdom Rush and some questionable parts that maybe need to be addressed in future updates. The core gameplay is fun, quick, and simple, but some of the elements around it bring down some amount of fun.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
If you can deal with the randomness of enemy rolls and somewhat unbalanced gameplay resulting from that randomness, then you will find an entertaining and quick game with Legends of Kingdom Rush that does enough to keep your attention but isn’t meant for large bites of your time.
