Legends of Kingdom Rush Review

Legends of Kingdom Rush is Ironhide Game Studio’s latest restructuring of its fantasy tower defense franchise into a tabletop one shot pocket RPG. For those of you who have never dungeoned or dragoned, it’s a mini tactical turn-based grid RPG with roguelike elements, what a mouthful.

I adventured as one of six Kingdom Rush legends, aided by two of twelve companions. Each character had its own role based traits and accompanying actions to choose from. Agile characters maneuvered the battlefield better, tanks were slower durable frontliners, mages were glass cannons with armor piercing properties, crafters specialized in area of effect damage and summoning entities. General combat was amusing, but lacked depth beyond combining different character combos, some of the more advanced moves relied on my past DND experience, which felt like a treat at first, but it did little for the gameplay. The depth it did have was stunted by overall balance feeling centered around the tutorial. As fun as the beginning characters were, I had my fill by the end of the first adventure. We traveled on routes that branched off from one another with no backtracking. Encounters were 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. There were different ways to deal with non combat encounters, but options were taken away if I didn’t have the right characters which was a shame because the writing and presentation excelled in capturing the old school RPG storytelling feel.

All entities took turns fighting on a hex grid based on initiative order. Most of the environment was repetitively, irrelevant to the combat. The thrill of maneuvering hazards, learning patterns, and proper positioning was limited to the boss encounters, which in itself was a gimmicky short live reprieve from a tiring track even on the intended difficulty. The bulk of the challenge came from the game conveniently leaving out boss information at times. Regardless of victory or defeat, progress was always reset after a run. The procedural content, however, started to feel incredibly similar after about three runs with reskinned enemies, similarly constructed open arenas and reused encounter outcomes. It lacked the dynamism and replayability that a good roguelike requires.

The game also has annoying design choices, for example, gauging distance was quite a hassle for a game that hinges on positioning as a core gameplay mechanic. The late game suffers from visual overload, sometimes the screen was so cluttered that I couldn’t properly make out if I was standing in a safe spot or sitting in the lap of an enemy. Overall, it’s a small game making big boy decisions without doing its big boy due diligence. Although not a bad game per say, there’s definitely room for improvement. If you thought about picking this one up, I’d recommend getting on a steep sale.

Purchase Legends of Kingdom Rush on Steam!