Kingdom Rush Battles Review

As I've shared before, I'm a massive fan of tower defense games, and especially of the Kingdom Rush franchise. I reviewed the original game, simply titled Kingdom Rush, a while back and recently I've been playing some of the other entries in the series. Kingdom Rush Battles is the franchise's first stab at a PvP-centric version of a tower defense game. You're probably wondering how that works, if you're a tower defense fan or if you're generally familiar with how they typically function. Well, Ironhide decided on a unique PvP format that feels fresh and inventive, while also feeling very familiar and comfortably fits into the wider Kingdom Rush franchise.

 

Kingdom Rush Battles takes the traditional tower defense format and shrinks it down to a micro-sized map. Above your arena, your opponent is playing on a mirrored version of the same map, facing identical waves of enemies. The key difference being in what arsenal of heroes, towers and spells that you both choose to bring into the battle. So you're still setting up your various towers and chokepoints on your map, while being able to see how your opponent is handling the myriad foes that the game throws at you both. With the beginning of each wave, a range of three options appears on the screen, and these can greatly alter the course of the remainder of the match. Those options can be either personal boons that positively affect your abilities, towers and gold earning potential, or they can be debuffs or hazards that you can throw at your opponent to augment their waves. For instance, you can add strong foes into your opponent's waves, and depending on how formidable their defenses are, sometimes these enemies can completely overwhelm them and net you an early victory.

 

You can also choose negative effects like having your opponent's towers freeze occasionally and not attack, or have some of their defeated enemies come back as ghosts who have to be killed again. Many of the different towers that you can unlock can also negatively affect your opponent in myriad ways. Like the Dwarven Artillery tower can fire missiles onto your opponent's map and damage his or her units, leaving them open for an enemy wave to move through unabated. Of course, your opponent can also do the same thing to you, and I've been totally bowled over by particularly ruthless opponents who always chose to debuff or weaken me, instead of boosting themselves.

 

You have a wide array of towers, heroes and spells to select from to create your deck. From what I gather, Ironhide pulled elements from across the span of Kingdom Rush games to comprise the various maps, enemies, abilities and units that you see in Kingdom Rush Battles. Most decks are comprised of a balance between ranged, melee, magic and artillery units to maximize your efficiency in battle, but depending on what towers you've unlocked, sometimes you have to adjust your strategy to something less orthodox, just to get through a tricky map, as the enemies that you encounter differ from map to map. For instance, I tried that balanced approach a million different ways and could not get past the first ice-themed stage. Finally, I decided to ditch my magic tower and opt for two different ranged towers that offer completely different abilities, and that was enough to finally get me through that map, after several hours of beating my head against the wall. If you go into Kingdom Rush Battles like you do any other tower defense game, expecting to theorize and experiment with diverse builds, you'll probably have a great deal of fun with this process.

 

There are a couple of unfortunate weak points with Kingdom Rush Battles that keep the game from true greatness. The main complaint is that the game can be pay-to-win, which is always frustrating. You won't encounter this with every opponent, but you'll no doubt come across players who opted to just purchase some expensive hero or tower bundle instead of going through the slow, yet satisfying natural process of unlocking them as you progress through the Ranked ladder. The vast majority of opponents that I've matched with were just using the normally obtainable set of heroes/towers, but a few times I encountered players who were using premium units who felt completely busted in regards to balance. Compared to the units that I had access to, they easily trounced every enemy that came into their lanes and even added incredibly frustrating negative effects to my towers with the specific units they were using.

 

The other complaint I have with Kingdom Rush Battles is that you're essentially locked into a purely ranked game mode, with no option for casual play. With a game like this, where you're often trying out new builds for your team, it's quite annoying to be restricted into a ranked ladder where you can lose progress. On that same note, I'm not a big fan of being confined to a specific map until you finally manage to move past it through repeated victories in ranked play. There are loads of different maps that you battle through as you climb the ranked ladder, but you leave them behind as you enter new brackets on the ladder. I think this is a missed opportunity to feature a casual game mode where you could potentially enjoy a rotation of all of these different maps, and experiment with different units without fear of losing ranked progress.

As a mega fan of the Kingdom Rush franchise, I can recommend Kingdom Rush Battles, even with its pay-to-win nonsense. The streamlined, intuitive tower defense gameplay is convivial and the game has an incredibly satisfying core loop of battling, upgrading and unlocking units, and using my brain to concoct all sorts of strategies to conquer my opponents and climb that ranked ladder. If you're able to just accept that you'll occasionally run into pay-to-win players, and not let that ruin the game for you, I genuinely think you'll find a lot to love here, especially if you're already a fan of the franchise or the tower defense genre. If Ironhide can add some components like a casual game mode, or ways to balance the game in favor of purely free-to-play players, Kingdom Rush Battles could really go head-to-head with some of the giant games in the mobile game space.

 

VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on Mobile