Kingdom Rush Battles- week three review

Kingdom Rush Battles (KRB) is a free-to-play tower defense player-versus-player (PVP) mobile game developed by Ironhide Game Studios that globally launched Oct. 9th. The gameplay follows that of traditional Kingdom Rush titles, but has a unique spin that enables PVP. There are also “pay-to-progress” elements and systems extremely similar to other titles such as Clash Royale. 

This game has given me what I’ve wanted from this series for years, which is an infinitely replayable Kingdom Rush title. I’m extremely excited to see where Ironhide takes the game next.

In KRB players build decks of eight cards they bring into a match against their opponents. Players are allowed one “hero” unit that they can directly control,  three spells and four towers. From there, they load into a map against an opponent of similar skill. 

This map is typically a variation of two winding paths, which converge upon a pair of flags the player must defend. If a “creep” enemy manages to pass between the flags, players will lose one of their three lives.

The goal of the game is to survive longer than your opponent against the “creep” enemies spawning in from portals. Throughout the course of a match, players build and upgrade their towers to hold off waves of enemies and try and outlast one another.

If both players survive until wave five or six, there is a boss battle at the end of the match. Whoever defeats the boss first is the winner. If the boss is too strong to kill, whoever can keep it from crossing their flags first is the wins by default. 

Something that’s made Kingdom Rush unique from other tower defense genre games is the inclusion of barracks structures. These towers allow players to spawn soldiers directly onto the map, which can act as road blocks to enemy creeps. It’s lot more interactive and gives the player more control over the map.

In KRB players can upgrade their towers to unlock abilities which influence their opponent’s map. They can shoot barrack soldiers, summon enemy creeps, or protect creeps from magical attacks. There are some really fun things you can do to mess with your opponents, trying to find the perfect balance between offensive and defensive upgrades is part of this game’s magic.

There are also “booster” cards where players can choose an enemy type or obstacle to spawn on their opponent’s map. Players can also choose from buffs to their economy, towers and spells. 

The gameplay of KRB is easy to learn, but hard to master.

Without anymore being said, I recommend anyone who’s interested in the game just download and try it out. It’s free, and it takes two seconds to delete if you don’t like it. If you’re already a Kingdom Rush fan, you need to try this game. Ironhide has done an amazing job importing characters and towers from other games, and I can’t wait to see where they take the game next.

The game’s balance from release has been okay. I didn’t play any beta test versions of the game, so I can’t speak for how it might have been before release. In lower arenas and ranks, you can pretty much play whatever heroes and towers you like. The devs themselves have recommended this.

I am a bit nervous over KRB’s balance and gameplay in the long term. In several mainline Kingdom Rush games, once Ironhide is done working on the game, towers have been left in states ranging from trash to blatantly over powered. 

However, there is a separate team at Ironhide working on KRB. I believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt, and time to learn how to properly balance the game. I think they’ve given themselves a lot of tools to work with. I just hope they don’t listen to every single suggestion or cave to popular opinions in the community Discord server. In my personal opinion, a lot of people in there have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about but very “loud” voices.

In high ranked stadium arena, it feels like you’re stuck running one or two towers of the same archetype if you want to have any chance of winning. At stadium, there might as well only be eight towers and three heroes in the game. The polymorph spell is also just flat out way too powerful, you’re griefing the entire game if you don’t run it.

Polymorph’s relevance comes from certain enemies having extremely high resistances. They take little damage from either magic, or physical damage towers. There’s been some debate in the Discord community over whether the resistance should be nerfed, or towers given some kind of targeting priority, but the devs haven’t replied to anything yet.

Whenever I recommend games like Clash Royale or Kingdom Rush, I feel obliged to talk about the “pay-to-win” elements attached to these titles. The game contains leveling, progression, and arenas most similar to Clash Royale.

With card leveling, as you level up your cards, they deal more damage during your actual matches. Heroes and barrack units also gain more health. As your cards level up, you gain “player xp,” and upgraded booster cards. You level up with your card collection. You can pay real world money to buy in-game currency and use it to level up your cards. 

This doesn’t have too much of a direct impact on your opponent. It’s a lot less noticeable than in a game like Clash Royale–where cards directly interact and hit each other–but there are times where it matters. More often than not, I can still clear creeps as fast as my opponent with lower-level cards. But a bit more on this later.

Part of KRB’s pay-to-progress is their gacha system where players can spend in-game “scrolls” currency to “pull from a banner” for premium content Ironhide has recently released. Every time a player redeems a scroll on a banner, they obtain one pity point amd have a 1% chance to get the featured item. If the players don’t get that item, there are several other rewards they can get from redeeming scrolls.

Once players have redeemed 60 pity points, the banner item is guaranteed. Pity points are reset between banners and I honestly can’t think of a good reason why this is the case. Gacha systems always come with this hidden asterisk of “spend your pull currency wisely,” but it would be really nice if we could build pity and carry it over. Especially since all of our accounts are new, and the lower tier cards we get from pulling are extremely valuable.

Scrolls are obtained through winning event game modes available in the game’s client. These events cost “event tickets” currency to play. Players can also purchase scrolls directly using real world money, or the game’s “gem” currency. 

To purchase 60 scrolls and get a character guaranteed, it’s $15. I don’t think players ever have to do this, but I do want to note that it’s the same price as some mainline Kingdom Rush games. A mainline game is a lot more content for the exact same price.

Gacha systems can get very anti-player very quickly if mismanaged. I think preying on fear of missing out is kind of a crummy business practice, and I dislike that it’s become so standardized in the gaming industry.

However compared to a title like Genshin Impact, I genuinely believe that KRB’s gacha gives you a reasonable amount of time to build up scrolls, gems, event tickets. There’s more than enough currency to spend on these banners. It is also really nice that you can get more cards to level up and progress your account while pulling.

And to Ironhide’s credit, they do plan on adding the otherwise unobtainable banner cards Beresad and Necromancer to a future arena. It’s just not been implemented yet.

I’m honestly fine with gacha as a “first look” or “first to play” sort of system so long as the cards aren’t released to screw over and break the entire game’s balance. It sucks feeling like you have to pull something and spend your hard earned currency. My biggest fear with the gacha is that meta towers and characters are going to be locked away for months at a time, putting several players at competitive disadvantage.

With all that being said, if you get the right deals in your shop, it can also be reasonably cheap to unlock the new content and skip the gameplay grind, it doesn’t always cost the full $15.

The gacha system is completely independent of the main gameplay loop and I almost feel bad dedicating so much time to talking about it. But if I’m going to recommend a game, it is my responsibility to discuss the good and (potentially) bad in honest detail.

I mentioned before that KRB is “pay-to-progress,” and I said that over pay-to-win (P2W) intentionally. But Ironhide is walking an extremely fine line with their gacha systems. When I first started writing this article, Necromancer was a premium card you could only get by spending real world money. Ironhide has since made the Necromancer the second banner so it is obtainable for free-to-play players, which is really cool. 

Still, I’d caution Ironhide to be careful, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the game became P2W eventually.

Again, if this any of these systems are something off-putting to you, maybe wait a few months before downloading to see which direction Ironhide has taken the game.

I think players and consumers would be thrilled to support Ironhide instead if they establish a good track record, and show themselves to be against what that Supercell has done to Clash Royale.

Supercell’s Clash Royale has been the king of mobile games for a long time now, but I think KRB genuinely has a chance to dethrone them. Or at the very least, appeal to a very large portion of their playerbase. Supercell has done some genuinely awful rugpulls and pushed out some extremely anti-player updates over the years. 

Some of the lowlights have been the card level fourteen update, the card level fifteen update, card evolutions being locked behind an expensive paywall off release, and their removing of the “season shop” feature. They have a reputation now for being greedy. Their battlepasses are overpriced, and as a player and consumer, it feels like they’re constantly trying to take advantage of me.

At the present, I’d be thrilled to spend money on a battlepass from Ironhide rather than one from Supercell. It’s kind of hard to make a fair comparison between the games, however, given that Clash Royale has been out for almost a decade and KRB just barely came out.

At the time of writing this article, KRB has 3.4k ratings on the Apple Appstore, and a 4.7 star rating. The KRB community is extremely active in Ironhide’s Discord server, there is always someone in the dedicated KRB chat talking about the game.

Ironhide’s only patches since release have been fixing game performance and balance I’m optimistic about what this game already is and could become, and extremely excited to be following it.