Most people and I included know the Kingdom Rush franchise for its being a franchise of tower defense games. It was a huge and unexpected surprise for all of us when Ironhide Game Studio announced their upcoming title, Legends of Kingdom Rush, moves away from the tower defense template. Unlike the previous Kingdom Rush titles, Legends of Kingdom Rush is restructured into a turn-based RPG with some rogue-like elements and lots of bad jokes.
Legends of Kingdom Rush‘s story isn’t that much different from your barebone, classic trope of a fantasy story: your kingdom is in great peril as an unprecedented foe has appeared – one who you simply won’t be able to defeat alone. Due to that, you have to embark on a grand quest across varied biomes while expanding your party, adventuring, and of course, fighting monsters that stand in your way.
Gameplay, Legends of Kingdom Rush took a different direction from the rest of the previous installments. The main focus of the game is on turn-based fights instead of the ol’ classic tower defense. It introduces a party system that allows you to assemble/mix-match a party of heroes into the battlefield that fits your need or a particular playstyle using a system said to be “easy to learn but hard to master”. Your party will mainly comprise of a Leader, 2 Companions, and 4th random member that will join you through each run and will face off against the enemy, using action points for movement, attacks, and support. The core classes are melee, ranged, and magic. Anyone familiar with the series will recognize the heroes and supporting characters now that they’ve descended from their towers.
As of right now, Legends of Kingdom Rush offers a total of 18 playable characters (6 Leaders and 12 Companions). Even though initially, you only started with 3 characters, but over time, you will expand your roster with more characters by doing certain tasks or unlocking achievements such as: defeating all the Dark Knights at a checkpoint without suffering any casualty to unlock the Dark Knight.
Each character has its role-based traits and accompanying actions to choose from. Agile characters maneuvered the battlefield better. The core classes are melee, ranged, and magic. Then there are role-specific characters: Tanks were slower, durable frontliners. Mages were glass cannons with armor-piercing properties. Crafters specialized in area-of-effect damage and summoning entities.
The world of Legends of Kingdom Rush isn’t that special either, instead, it causes you a lot of frustration. Each level starts with you at a starting point and there are different routes to get to the final boss with different encounters on each route. Encounters could be fights, shops, dice rolls, or make-your-choice events that could reward or harm the party’s resources, such as loot, extra companions, upgrades, and status effects.
Graphically, Legends of Kingdom Rush brings back the same aesthetic from the previous installments but fine-tunes it here and there. Nothing is amazing about it but for long-time Kingdom Rush players, it’s a great joy to see that the old looks are brought back and treated with respect. The UI is a huge mess and it’s not displaying important information from time to time doesn’t help either, I’m not sure if it’s just my game but sometimes hit points aren’t shown, and health bars won’t appear (hard to know if a character was targetable or not). Measuring distance was the biggest hassle for a game that solely depends on positioning as a core gameplay mechanic. Another concern is the occasional visual overload, especially in boss battles, Bosses love to use big AoE spells that explode everywhere and make it so clustered on your screen.
All characters take turns fighting on a hex-grid based on the initiative order shown at the top of the screen. Ninety percent of the environment was repetitively irrelevant to the combat. The thrill of learning patterns and proper positioning was limited to only boss encounters. The boss fights were a short-lived reprieve from a tiring journey even on the “casual” difficulty. Regardless of victory or defeat, progress was always reset after a run.
The content, however, started to feel incredibly similar after about… three or four runs. Without a variety, instead, we are offered reskinned enemies, similarly-built arenas, and repeating encounter/encounter outcomes, the game lacks the dynamism, replayability, change, and randomness that a good roguelike needs. Starting over was an excruciating process, which was extremely unfortunate when the game is bugged and you have to forfeit, then proceed to start all over again.
Overall, Legends of Kingdom Rush is trying to undo the “don’t fix what’s not broken” and making big-boy decisions without doing its big-boy due diligence. Despite that, the game is a lot of fun to play, but its port to PC doesn’t hit the mark and is underwhelming, especially without any graphic changes and the lack of controller support for such a mechanically simple game is pretty lazy. I gotta give credits where they are due, Legends of Kingdom Rush has enjoyable gameplay, and a nice sense of style and progression feels somewhat rewarding despite the repetition from time to time!
Score: 6 out of 10
Reviewed on PC