Legends of Kingdom Rush Review (Steam)

 

Written by Thomas G.J. Sharpe

I recall a period of time I spent unemployed and found myself on Newgrounds playing Ironhide’s flagship series Kingdom Rush. I know some stand by Bloons TD, but the best tower defence for me was Kingdom Rush. I whiled away the expanses of a few days between job applications and the inevitable wall of silence that prospective employers feel entitled to supply. The light-hearted world building, comic cutscenes, and accessible learning curve scratched all the itches. It was good casual gaming done with style. Ironhide have started to branch out into new territory after testing a non-fantasy setting with Iron Marines, a “casual RTS” as they put it. With a follow-up to this and some sort of post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-type title coming out, the towers seem to be receding into the background.

Legends of Kingdom Rush is set in the world of KR but is a strategy roguelite that takes an X-Com angle on it’s gameplay. While fun and seated firmly in all the trappings of what we can expect now from Ironhide in the way of tone, aesthetic, fun, and accessibility, LoKR falls slightly shorter than the good times of the tower defence titles. A hard standard to maintain, if I’ll be honest, and the Steam reviews do reflect that this hasn’t quite hit the same mark.

With a light, story that lines each run, you accrue a motley band of familiar heroes to fight the current evil of the day, encountering different events along the adventure. Sort of like the things you’d meet on the road in the euphoric silliness of Death Road to Canada. Do I want to rest at the campfire or search the area? Go fishing or tell a story. That sort of thing. As expected, there isn’t the depth of the encounters of Darkest Dungeon, but the characters till develop and level up as you go. It is an enjoyable process to customise these heroes, and it isn’t overwhelming. None of LoKR is, and this is a strength, broadly speaking.

The combat, between encounters, makes up much of the game. Little hex-arenas that pit your squad against some wee beasties and some not-so-wee beasties. The learning curve is ok, the difficulty is just ahead of you. Using your various spells from mages, cleaving strikes from knights, and volleys of arrows, you must consider positioning, thinking (a bit) ahead, and item usage to survive the day.

The first knock against this is the sheer amount of time the runs take. I almost would have preferred a full little RPG-lite, rather than a roguelite system. The characters are enjoyable and well-written enough to carry something like that, I would offer. Further, once you start to realise that certain playstyles expose a lack of balance, the scope to want to try other combinations feels a bit uninviting. A couple of goes through, I’d settled into what I learned to be a bit of a cheesy strategy, and this always feels underwhelming. I just didn’t really have much desire to go back to it, however much I enjoyed it.

The developer, however, is up-front with players about being a primarily a non-desktop, casual and accessible game. I read some opinions of the GUI being quite clunky on desktops, and I must say that this was on my mind, but certainly wasn’t game breaking for me. I’ve always quite enjoyed Ironhide’s big clunky buttons, but perhaps there are some inelegancies to the clicking you have to do.

All in all, I enjoyed LoKR, but I think not for as long as the game was designed to be enjoyed for. I’m going to mark this one down, for myself, as an interesting foray into another bit of KR-world fun, but one that I won’t return to over KR tower defence titles. This may land better with more patient players, however, and especially those who are looking for a touch more of the gorgeous comicky world filled with detail and joy.

Overall 6/10

Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate Review (PC)

Here at Retro 101 we are long-time fans of just about everything that the Pixel Junk team has produced. They just seems to have a way of taking a genre that has been done to death and then adding something new to make it fresh and vibrant again. Now Monsters is making its way onto the PC and we are absolutely delighted to have it around for those lunch time sessions.

What we have here is effectively the original game and the extra content added through Monsters Encore and the PSP version. The game also has online multiplayer modes and a lovely higher resolution graphical style. The island that lets you create random levels by typing in words is also unlocked right from the start. So if you’re a fan you can stop reading this review right here, log into Steam and purchase it.  For those that want a bit more detail then read on.

For those new to the series this is a tower defence style game where your little Tikiman must run around the screen upgrading trees into different types of defensive structures. And yes, you do still move the Tikiman around rather than just point and click on trees with the mouse. Wave upon wave of monsters then pour into the level from various points and head towards the village hut (normally located in the middle of the stage).  Around the hut are a number of baby Tiki’s and once the monsters have made off with all of them you lose.

It’s a concept we’ve seen many times before but it’s hard to remember when it has been accomplished with so much style and flair. You start off with three basic towers which covers attacking land monsters, air monsters and one that does both. The towers all have different damage outputs, speed of fire and targeting radius. Once a monster enters the targeting radius the towers will fire on them automatically. Killing monsters provides gold to upgrade more trees and gems which are stored in the village hut and can be used to upgrade the strength of towers or unlock new types to use.

The extra towers do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. You can get ice towers to slow monsters down, mortars to cause massive damage, lasers to knock flying enemies down and electricity pylons to hit creatures with area effect attacks and the list goes on. It’s with these towers that the game begins to come into its own as you will need to know the strengths and weaknesses of them all in order to succeed. You can’t just lay out your defences and hope for the best here, you have to continually move around the field and change the type of towers to win the day.

PixelJunk Monsters can be a bone crushingly tough game, especially for newcomers to the genre. It takes time to learn that you really should be selling certain towers at certain times and changing from anti-air to ground and back again for certain waves of attack. It’s the sort of game where you may be stuck on a stage for ages but then have a breakthrough and clear three or four in one go. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing and constantly keep an eye on what the next wave of marauding nasty’s will be.

One memorable level ended with a frantic scramble around the stage to clear all the anti-air guns as the final boss stomped on and proceeded to be able to almost walk straight to the babies without taking a hit. Stress like that is what you’re going to have to deal with to come out on top and it’ll happen all the time.

Away from the main game there are a host of other options and things to do. You can play Co-op in online modes and this allows two Tiki men to run around to defend the village. There are also tons of challenge levels which require you to complete stages under certain conditions. The criteria is always different and can range from anything from only using a certain type of tower to making sure you don’t let monsters cross certain parts of the level. As if the game wasn’t difficult enough this will test even the best strategy fans out there.

We’ve established the game is hard, but it always fair and the funny thing is it doesn’t really seem to matter. The sense of achievement from completing a level will always have you coming back for just one more go. You’ll find yourself thinking about levels in your everyday life and coming up with strategies while you should be doing other things. Then you’ll return and try it out and maybe it’ll work and bring you onto the next challenge. It’s perfect for formulating a strategy during the morning and then testing it out in a lunch break.

Overall, this is the definitive version of an already excellent game. The core mechanics are strong and work wonderfully when added to the flair and charm of it all. There is very little reason not to recommend it to fans of genre and gamers looking for something a little different. The difficulty may be too much for some but it’s a great version of a great game and it should really be in your collection.

Overall 8/10