A RUSH OF BLOOD TO THE STRATEGY
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Before playing Kingdom Rush - a smash hit from the Uruguayan
developer Ironhide S.A. - the closest I'd ever come to a
tower defense-game were real-time strategy (RTS) games like
Starcraft and Command & Conquer. It was a
guilt-by-association situation; I avoided tower defense games because I
never particularly enjoyed RTS:s. They stole a lot of time without giving much
of value in return. As far as I remember, the only one I finished was
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
After finishing the Kingdom Rush-campaign, I find the two strategy subgenres
have a lot in common, but that tower defense is much more direct. This game
skips a lot of middlemen to deliver the same juicy goods. You don't have to
micromanage your resource gathering and military units for hours to win. Each
level passes so much quicker, and if you screw something up and find yourself
on the road to failure, the game lets you know almost immediately. Simply put,
Kingdom Rush respects your time a lot more than any RTS I ever tried.
One map of Kingdom Rush takes place on a single screen, giving you a great,
uncluttered overview of the situation. A road leads from one edge of the
screen to another, sometimes branching off into a few different directions.
You must defend that road and keep the waves of enemies that approach from one
edge from reaching the other. In order to do so you must raise a few
towers of different kinds at fixed locations along the map. If you survive all
the waves, you proceed to the next level.
Different towers house different military units, each with their own strengths and
weaknessess. Most of them are ranged, but one of them actually places units on
the road, functioning as barriers of meat and steel. As soon as the enemy
reaches a tower's range, the associated unit starts attacking automatically.
For every fallen enemy, you gain gold, allowing you to erect new towers or
upgrade old ones. Later levels even allow each tower to go down one of two
different upgrade trees.
Your task is to monitor the situation, funneling your income into
strengthening your defenses, in real-time, where they matter the most. All
changes happen instantly and often to great effect. Is it best to pool all
your resources into a single choke point? Or do you prefer spreading your
troops out to slowly whittle down the enemy's health? Are more towers better
than fewer but stronger ones? It all depends on the structure of the level,
and what type of units the enemy sends marching down the road.
I particularly enjoy the tweaking mechanics on the world map ahead of a level,
which can greatly affect your efficiency. For every level won, you're awarded
a star rating from one to three. These stars you may spend on upgrading each
particular unit's damage, range, attack speed, etc. If you find, for instance,
melee fighters useless on a level, you can undo all their upgrades and spend them on the archer's, mage's or cannoneer's towers instead.
In true Warcraft III-fashion, you also have full control of a powerful
hero. They can relocate to anywhere on the battlefield, lending their support
where it's needed the most. As you progress through the game, you unlock more
heroes with different statistics, opening up a myriad of different
possibilities. Some of them are nimble but weaker, some of them have unique
situational powers, and some are like juggernauts, but slow to move around.
Kingdom Rush uses relatively passive gameplay to make the player become
overwhelmingly engaged as an overseer. You upgrade towers and move your hero
around in response to the situation, and have two timed powers - sending weak militia reinforcements and a powerful meteor crash - to unleash at different
intervals. As the game progresses, the levels also get progressively longer.
It is mentally taxing, and I could rarely bring myself to play for long
sessions.
The game is relatively short, offering only 16 levels to the main campaign,
not counting the tutorial level. They are divided into three different regions
- forest, winter and volcanic - each with its own extended bossfight at the
end. It was frustrating to see defeat close to the end of a particularly
long-lasting level, due to a sudden spike in enemy activity. With no
checkpoints, you had to spend all those minutes building up to the same
fateful moment - sometimes only to fail again. That was when the game
frustrated me the most.
The final stage of the game was so hard (on normal difficulty), I abandoned
the game for months, before it dawned on me that I could respec all my upgrade
points from ground up. After trying that, it only took me two attempts to beat
the level. That's how important the right preparations are; choosing the right
hero for the right level, min-maxing your towers and powers, reading the
layout of the land and taking note on what troops the enemy sends. I doubt I could have beaten the final level with the same, solid setup that had gotten
me that far. Solid wasn't good enough - I had to make sacrifices and specialize to see the
credits roll.
Kingdom Rush is pure strategy and conflict, scaled down to all its most
immediate parts. It has some story in the same sense that Warcraft II had one;
it's mainly flavor text to establish some sort of context, tension and
progression between the stages. The presentation also echoes of Warcraft, with
a similar, cartoonish artstyle full of vibrant colors and humorous feedback
from your troops. It gives you a great overview of the battlefield, and the audio cues are very helpful, once you learn to distinguish them from one another.
Seeing your plans come to fruition feels greatly satisfying, and seeing them collapse feels like a tragedy. The level of commitment I muster towards my troops reminds me of my old days of playing Championship Manager, a clear indication of how good this game is.
It was surprisingly fun discovering a brand new (for me) subgenre for the first time in a
long time. I had to explore new avenues of my mind's landscape - and
dust off some old ones at that - to tackle the hordes marching my way. I had to pool my
resources into the right places to make bottlenecks on the battlefield, and
build ranged units that could bombard the enemy from afar as they tried to
smash their way through. And best of all - I didn't have to watch miners mine 'n' whine for hours to make the land mine.
But can someone explain this: If I'm the one defending my homeland, why am I the one advancing across the map towards the Mordor in the east?
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