Games that flaunt high replayability need to have a rewarding progression system to keep players coming back for more, even though there is not enough content to keep them otherwise engaged; unfortunately, Legends of Kingdom Rush punishes players by resetting the most important aspects of progression at the end of each level, ensuring players are forced to repeat the tedious early level grind repeatedly, instead of becoming incrementally more powerful and taking on equally challenging opponents.
Progress Retained:
Progress Lost:
While the developers may have designed the progression system this way to encourage replayability, it makes replaying campaign missions feel pointless, knowing that no matter how good or bad you do, it will have next to no impact on the overall campaign.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
Legends of Kingdom Rush is a very difficult game, even on the easiest difficulty setting, if you are not used to tactical combat.
Racing into an encounter and hoping your heroes will kill the enemy before they die only works at the very earliest stages of the game. Players who want to progress must examine and optimise their party layout and hero abilities to make any real headway.
While this difficulty has resulted in many negative reviews, I feel it is one of the most positive aspects of the game; and takes what would be a very basic mobile-centric strategy game and brings it on par with what we have come to expect from full-fledged “built for PC” titles.
Despite being lacklustre in many other areas, Legends of Kingdom Rush has one of the best combat systems to be found in the genre, with heroes and enemies alike having access to a diverse range of passive and active abilities that can radically shake up any encounter.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
Legends of Kingdom Rush launched onto mobile with only three levels (around 3 hours of content). While an additional level and hero were added post-launch, Legends of Kingdom Rush is decidedly light on content. Early levels take less than 20 minutes to complete for a veteran gamer.
While the developer may intend to add more content, they must be upfront about what we can expect from them in the coming weeks and months. For many people, four levels are nowhere near the level of content expected from a fully released title.
Legends of Kingdom Rush launches with over 100 random events, which help to make the lack of content and unrewarding progression feel a little more bearable, even if they all start to blend after a while.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
Despite playing Legends of Kingdom Rush for several hours, I have little to no idea about what is happening. While the developers have tried to make a cohesive narrative, it feels so generic that investing the time to “follow along” with the narrative and learn more about the world feels like a waste of time.
While Legends of Kingdom Rush may not have the best narrative, and much of it feels like a cheeky parody of better franchises, the comic book style artwork used in cutscenes and the sprite-based artwork used everywhere else are top-notch and shows just how passionate the developers, and especially the art team, were about making the best game possible, even if they made a few missteps along the way.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
With 18 playable heroes, each with unique passive and active abilities, Legends of Kingdom Rush allows players to experiment with various party builds as they explore what little content the game has to offer.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
While I do not care about achievements in games, for those who like to work their way through a predefined list of challenges and tasks, having an in-game achievement list is useful and, like all other aspects of the Legends of Kingdom Rush’s visual design, it is very pleasing to the eye.
Image credit Legends of Kingdom Rush - Published and developed by Ironhide Game Studio.
Legends of Kingdom Rush is a strategy video game developed and published by Ironhide Game Studio, it was released on 11 June 2021 and retails for $14.99 .
Legends of Kingdom Rush is available on the following platforms: IOS, and PC.
On average Legends of Kingdom Rush takes between 9 and 30 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Legends of Kingdom Rush is unrated and contains the following:
Legends of Kingdom Rush is a good game; that could have been a great game if it only had a more rewarding progression system.
