Esour

What a mess ****. This is a paid app, that includes only a handful of maps in the base game. Each additional campaign costs an extra premium. But even that isn't enough, since you can also buy diamonds to "support" your endeavours (and the developers pockets). Worst of all: This is heavily endorsed by the level and enemy design. As soon as you reach world 2, you run into a massive brick wall. The waves are heavily overturned, even minmaxing towers and talents. Enemies are tedious and annoying. Enemies spwaning additional small enemies behind your defenders on death, unlimited air unit spam, a huge active AoE effect providing a massive heal boost for enemies, and allowing them to get special abilities like ignoring defenders, meaning your effective choke-point area is very limited. Oh, and you thought you got a solid defense? Well, the game just decided to open up a new path out of the blue, and now enemies can circumvent your towers via a path that didn't show up before wave 12. Too bad you didn't see it coming. See you in 15 minutes. Each aspect of this can be alleviated by the usage of diamonds. You get a limited amount from completing levels. Levels are long and tedious. 15 waves default, each of them takes 1-2 minutes. There's no speed-up, so you sit there for a while. Grinding diamonds is as tedious as the rest of the game. Fortunately they can be bought for real money, which seems to be the primary reason of existence for this game. It's just not a good game. It isn't fun, it's annoying, tedious and heavily designed around extracting as much money from its players as possible. This "game" is a disgrace for the Kingdom Rush franchise. Shame on these developers for selling their souls.

The gameplay itself is fine and solid, as it's predecessors. However, from all Kingdom Rush games I played so far, this is by far the weakest one. First of all and what ruins this version for me is the amount of clutter and visual noise they added. Every other map has some kind of visual gimmick. This ranges from a gryphon attack, to a Simon Says minigame. The issue is that these gimmicks play animations on repeat. The gryphon constantly reminds you, that it can be used now. The Simon Says minigame also plays an attention grabbing emote, incentivising you to interact with it. This might look fine and even helpful in theory, the fact that this plays constantly throughout the entire level makes the visual noise annoying rather quickly. At the very least add an option to tune these animations down or (preferably) disable them entirely. Additionally, most levels are designed in a rather annoying way. They open up new paths and shortcuts, sometimes circumventing your entire defenses on the fly. Since you never really know when, where and in what numbers or type enemies attack you from, you are often forced to replay levels until you have memorised the attack patterns. This is just a very lame and cheap way of adding challenge. This is made worse by the fact that the gameplay is rather slow and there is no speed-up. The number of waves is also high from the beginning (15 waves seems default), which makes the levels take a significant amount of time. Even more if you have to replay the level several times due to its trial and error level design. I highly recommend checking out the previous entries of the game (Kingdom Rush, Kingdom Rush Frontiers) rather than Origins, as they provide a more balanced and smooth experience. Origins seems to be designed primarily with the TikTok crowd in mind.

The game just throws you into a combat scene, without explaining any of the mechanics. Thankfully you die within three seconds and even better is the fact that the game doesn't save before your death, forcing you to go through the same intro sequence over and over again. It's called a "standalone expansion", but it is clearly not. Explaining the basic mechanics and giving the player the possibility to test them in a safe environment is game design 101. If your game is intended for experienced players, then don't market it as "standalone".

Doesn't have a setting to adjust brightness, making it basically unplayable in brighter environments. I don't understand how someone can mess up such a basic setting, that virtually EVERY other game pushes into your face at the first start.