Pros: Nice graphics, research trees for personal customization, fun combat
Cons: Laggy gameplay, progression is restricted way too much, horrible monetization
Gameplay: 6
Performance: 7
Graphics: 8
Overall: 7
Recently we checked out R2 Games’ newest tower defense game Kingdom Invasion: Tower Tactics, a free to play web based title where players have to fight off hordes of orcs and company to save their land from destruction. On its surface KITT is a fairly standard tower defense game using a lot of traditional gameplay mechanics, but at the back end there’s a lot more scope and extra features that round the game off as an a more full MMO… of a fashion.
Graphically Kingdom Invasion: Tower Tactics is a pleasant looking game, the cartoony style works well and the animations are detailed and slick, as well as the overall user interface looking very well polished. The sound is a bit of a different matter, whilst not lacking in quality there is no volume button and so we had to either play in silence, the music blaring at an unnecessarily high volume, or fiddle with our individual browser volume on our computer; not an overly user friendly system.
The premise is the same as every other tower defense, each map players will have to stop wave after wave of enemies from traveling down a set path and ensure they don’t reach the other end; in doing so you lose health points and lose enough and you are defeated. To stop the enemy we get the chance to place down different tower defenses in specific tower plot locations that will fire at the enemy minions, or hinder them in various ways, spending Goods resources that are earned throughout the duration of the battle. It is a strategic juggle trying to pick the right towers to defend against the right enemies; upgrading them for various improvements, or selling them and replacing them when different types of enemy appear in later waves.
The actual battles are fairly standard for the most part, a good solid base for the game with added extras attached to try and make the title stand out from the crowd. Whilst players are able to upgrade towers into different versions this can only be done by first spending gold in your city to upgrade each towers individual tech tree, determining what variety of towers you can access in a battle. There are four basic towers including an Archer tower for long ranged attacks, a Cannoner tower for area damage attacks, an Arcane tower that fires off various spells, and a Barracks to summon knights onto the path that stop enemies from passing by. With the tech tree you improve the towers to make them attack further, or penetrate armor, or fire different types of spells and more.
In a similar vein where we had access to upgradable towers so too did we have three different upgradeable spells at hand; one to summon two militia guard who would fight enemies, a single target lightning strike, and a huge AOE blizzard attack (particularly useful when your milita or knights hold back the wave and make a bottleneck). The spells have cooldowns between uses and were most effective in conjunction with the towers, the cooldowns being so long that simply relying on the spells alone would never be enough. Finally, in our arsenal we had the Heroes; single characters that can be controlled and moved around the battlefield to fight enemies and can be upgraded like everything else, but also equipped with new items to improve their strength and even levelled up to learn new skills.
There are obviously a variety of options for how to go up against each battle, the problem is that the progression system to customize these different elements is extremely restricted/ linear (at least for the first few hours of gameplay as far as we can tell). To advance certain tower tech trees you generally need an abundance of specific materials, these materials can only be accessed in other features, which unfortunately are level locked; the alternative is spending real cash to buy the materials. The game is most definitely structured in a way to hinder or limit advancement, even getting to the eighth stage in the first region we were in a fairly unwinnable battle that we can only presume we weren’t meant to be able to win, not until we had gone back over the same content over and over to grind up levels, gold and materials… or pay cash.
Our biggest issues, and the one that for us makes the game simply unplayable, was the Energy system; each time you perform an action such as picking up gold earned from your defeated levels (each time you win a stage you can then earn gold from it every 5 minutes) or simply fighting a battle, you use up Energy. With an hour of casual play you can use up all your Energy with ease, leaving you with no Energy to do anything, particularly not actually fight in any matches and so the game forces you to stop playing. Energy replenishes at an abysmal 1 point per 3 mins 30 seconds and it costs 3 Energy to play just one sub-five minute battle; you can of course buy food that will replenish 1 point of Energy, but that costs diamonds premium currency, 4 diamonds in fact, and at level 10 there’s no systems in place to actively acquire them. You do have the option of spending real cash to buy diamonds and for $2 get a pitiful 20 of them, this equates to five pieces of food, or 5 stamina… essentially it costs just under $2 to play each battle or wait around for just under 15 minutes. That’s ridiculous.
Finally, and quite honestly, the game doesn’t need to be an MMO because there is a staggeringly limited amount of player to player interaction. Through the arena you can PVP against other players, this consists of entering an instanced battle ground where troops automatically run out of your four towers (Archer, Cannoner, Arcana, Barracks) and fight each other for a few seconds; the power of your troops is based off how high you have upgraded each tower in your city, but other than that there is absolutely no player involvement at all. It’s a rubbish system.
The problem with the game is that it wasn’t left to just be a cool tower defense game with some extra customization; it feels like the core of the game was made to be great and then had the life monetized out of it and as many restrictions and hindrances put in place to try and drag a couple of dollars here and there out of players. The paywalls are too demanding, the prices are crazy high, and ultimately this makes the game unplayable for any sustainable length of time; a good game but horrible monetization.
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