Kingdom Rush: Unga-bunga Edition

Jokes aside, I think this game is different enough to deserve it's own place, Battlecruiser Games did a really good job here.

You can read in other comments that "ui is bad" but I don't agree. Yes, it's almost "text free", full of unga-bunga pictograms but I think one can wrap their head around it pretty quickly and it makes it more immersive since this is a cave-men themed TD.

This is a tower-only game so you don't have heroes, on the other hand you have tons of upgrades you can buy with skill points after each level more or less customizing your playstyle to your own taste. You like blocking roads and focusing damage? You can upgrade your road blocking spikes.

You want to focus attack speed? There are tons of upgrades for those too, just like damage, unlockable levels for different types of towers, even ultimate abilities.

The enemies, towers and levels fit together nicely but instead of writing a short story here, let's see a pro / cons:

PRO:
- Great thematical and humourous art.
- Cutscenes drawn in style for the game.
- Just enough variety of towers so you have to think how to place them yet it doesn't get too hard.
- Lots of different types of enemies
- Lots of upgrades
- Enough level to keep you occupied for about 9-10 hours even if you do only 1 playthrough.
- You can place towers anywhere where it doesn't collide with obstacles, roads...
- It's more or less a balanced experience on normal difficulty - assuming the "second difficulty" is considered the normal one
- Great music

CONS:
- ...but sometimes it's really hard to tell how much space left, can you place another one?
- Map readability is ofthen not that great. Exactly what paths enemies will follow? Sometimes it seems ambigious until you start the level and see it in action.
- The skill points are a bit sparse, at least on the first playthrough and you cannot reset skill upgrades one-by-one, if you reset, you have to pick all of them again. It would have been great if you could right-click bought upgrades to reverse them.
- Difficulty spikes. In most cases it's pretty smooth but each level is LONG. This can be good or bad...but I think some levels could have been shorter and this way more levels could have been included with lower wave counts.

BOTH:
- You cannot destroy / replace towers. This makes you think more about tower placement but at the same time there are cases where I think you can make the end of the level MUCH HARDER by not placing the towers at the best place and I had those "I wish I could replace some of these" moments.
- Felt like there are too much "tower blocking / stunning" effects at the last levels. This made it more challenging but also it was annoying, especially the part where you had to click like crazy - this specific thing only applies to one level.

BUGS:
- Main menu felt like it's lagging when going to the level selection screen
- Sometimes when I got enough food to buy another keeper tower, the UI slot for that tower stuck in a ui animation loop for a short while
- On the level where you have to quickly click near the towers sometimes the clickable part was active but the graphics remained as it is not
- One time the SFX muted itself. I played with a different pair of earbuds. Later I checked the menu and it was set like I muted it manually. Strange... I just set the volume back to normal and it solved it, didn't occur after that - tho I didn't played with those earbuds again.

A bit overlooked - at least I feel like it - but really great, polished and very cinematic tower defense experience.

In a nutshell:
You play as the aliens invading earth to syphon out the energy of this planet. Of course humans don't like that so they attack you with armies of tanks, troops, aircrafts...etc.
And this is where you have to build towers, path blocking (in most cases) laser fences and fly into the battle yourself to protect the core at each level.

Now how this translate to the gameplay? Perfectly.

Most of the levels are cities and you can destroy buildings to make them block the road. You can blow up bridges, clear out trees and basically cause absolute mayhem while spanning your high tech laser / flame / rocket / plasma towers all over the map, not even speaking of the laser fences, all of which looks really great thanks to the nice artstyle and visuals.

The experience is really smooth and combines tower defense and bullet-hell in a great way. You have to navigate your little vessel / aircraft and attack the enemies yourself - if you want - while placing and upgrading the towers.

With all the visuals, destruction and good SFX design the experience is greatly cinematic and doesn't feel blocky in spite of the grid based tower placement.

You have upgrades for your towers, your aircraft and your core, both defensive and offensive and support abilites. Just the right amount to keep you upgrading tho I could have used 1-2 extra upgrades for the DLCs.

But what about everything else?

The game takes about 20 hours to beat with all the DLCs assuming you play on normal difficulty and you wanna beat the game once.

Throughout the levels you have your commander speaking, sometimes narrating the events with a nice, alien, robotic voice. Sometimes there are even some fun lines / dialogues.

You can also hear the communication between the humans since you are evesdropping their commander - they don't know that tho. I think the voice acting is great.

Cutscenes involved simpler sceenes, don't expect Blizzard level 3D rendered "movies" between levels, more like flip-flop animations with a good artstyle fitting the game. The game doesn't have interactive dialogues so you'll only listen to the events.

The DLCs are good but felt a bit like "work" after playing through the base game. I think additional upgrades or at least one new type of tower per DLC would have been great. They say in the comments that the new boss fights and enemy types are bad but I disagree, I think they only add to the experience and makes you think more about your tactics.

Bear in mind that I only played at normal difficulty so I don't know about the balance when you change it to something else..

I think I only encountered one type of bug where you clicked the tower to form a laser fence with another...and nothing happened. This usually occured when I was already through a failed attempt - because it would have blocked all paths for enemies. In this case you have to remove the tower and place it again.

The game doesn't rushes you between waves. You can take your time to think and place your towers however you cannot start the next waves earlier - I think this is due to the fact that there are narrations and events between waves and rushing them would break the storytelling / order of events / story logic.

All in all I would say this game is at least a 8/10, maybe even 9/10 but due to the burnout phase you can experience while playing the DLCs it can get a bit hard to finish and not feel like "I should go next game already".