The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s art style. The game looks hand-drawn, with towers and characters standing out as cartoon-looking assets.

Kingdom Rush (iPhone: $0.99) 

“Fight on forests, mountains and wastelands, customizing your defensive strategy with different tower upgrades and specializations! Rain fire upon your enemies, summon reinforcements, command your troops, recruit elven warriors and face legendary monsters on a quest to save the Kingdom from the forces of darkness!”

Presentation

One thing that I can appreciate is how the developers have approached different screen sizes, from iPad to iPhone. On the iPad, you’ll be able to see all of the map at once, on the iPhone it’ll zoom in to make it easier to control. Another thing that caught my eye was the fluid movement of the characters.

Controls

Controls are pretty simple, simply tap on the pre-determined squares to bring up a menu that lets you choose what tower you want to build there. Once you’ve decided, tap it again, and it’ll build the tower. If you’re playing on the iPhone, you’ll be slightly zoomed in on the top, so you’ll be able to drag your finger to move across the map.

 Gameplay

As you probably already noticed, Kingdom Rush follows the route of a tower defense game. There are pre-determined spots to place you towers, and later on upgrade them. You’ll have four different towers types, which will later evolve depending on what you want.

If there’s ome thing we should get out of the way right now, it’s this: Kingdom Rush is not the game for you if you just want a quick fix. Each level takes time, up to twenty minutes or more per level as you reach the later levels. Mixed in with the tower defense gameplay, there are also some RPG and RTS elements there.

For example, you can cast spells and summon backup units, such as a meteor strike. One thing that stuck out to me when I first started playing was the lack of a fast forward button, which is usually available in tower defense games (like Fieldrunners, just to use something as an example). However as I kept playing, I could see why: thins become too hectic. For certain things, you need precision, and you can’t do this with the game going at a faster pace.

Conclusion

Although it wasn’t the one for me, I can appreciate how well done and polished Kingdom Rush is, it really is a beautiful game. One thing that I really liked about it is that it provided more of a challenge than I am used to from these type of games, but it also takes a longer time to play. With all that in mind, I’d say it depends on your taste, whether to get this one or pass. 7/10.