An anthropomorphic warthog takes an arrow to the heart, collapsing in the middle of the lane. A dozen of his hairy brethren stomp past him. The enemy’s gates, your gates, lie ahead. Through them lies victory, but Helm’s Deep had looser security. Tower defense games are about as simple as they come. The focus here is on quality, polish, and stacking bodies higher than Shadow of the Erdtree. Kingdom Rush has a reputation to uphold, and Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD doesn’t disappoint. It delivers a gameplay loop as sharp as an elven arrowhead. I only wish it pushed the genre more.
Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD Review
Though there are additional modes, the campaign is the core of Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD. It’s a well-paced, 16-stage affair, taking you and your heroes on a tour through colorful cartoon kingdoms. With a solid selection of heroes, towers, and upgrades to choose from (as well as the fiddly business of actual tower positioning), it’s easy to lose hours here. A good tower defense game encourages a kind of tactical mindlessness. Your mind can wander even while it calculates tower positions and the gold-to-murdered-wizard ratio. Alliance excels in that, but it’s too cautious with its other mechanics.
Story: Something Something Dark Side
Although Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance does have a story, it’s very much a background player. Big mean hairy Wildbeasts want to stomp through the pristine countryside and idyllic forests, and the Arboreans and their allies very much want to stop them. From the Sea of Trees to the Ravaged Outskirts and far beyond, the enemy army wants to destroy your towers, and you want to defend them. That’s about as much as you need to know to play and (conveniently) also about as much as the game feels like telling you.
The story unfolds primarily through comic book-style cutscenes. These do a good job of laying out the story, but there isn’t much story to lay out. Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance isn’t a game that cares a great deal about lore. That’s the genre standard, so I’m not faulting Alliance for anything other than playing by the rules and following the lead of its best predecessors (including previous Kingdom Rush games). That said, Alliance‘s cutscenes are a visual treat, full of big-headed cartoon drama, but if you’re like me you’ll forget them almost as soon as your eyes leave the page.
Kingdom Rush 5 does its best storytelling through its characters. It’s a likable cast. When cultists started messing about in the Forsaken Canyon, they irritated the draconic mystic Kosmyr, who promptly struck a deal with Vez’nan and joined the Alliance to get rid of the intruders. Knowing one of the game’s best heroes only got involved because he had a Shrek moment and needed to get some trespassers out of his swamp sells you on the game’s comedy and heart better than any number of cutscenes.
Alliance is happy to throw out some breadcrumbs of lore, but rarely is there any actual loaf to chew on. Take the story of Therien, a Voidmancer helping the Alliance understand the Overseer and other extraplaner threats. While it’s not essential to know more about the arcane experiments that got her shunned by her peers, I’d appreciate that deeper look into the game’s world, and we just don’t get it here. That’s just one example of many, leading to frustration if you’re looking for anything more than superficialities.
Gameplay: The Never-Ending Dopamine Loop
Spend gold. Buy towers. Kill incoming enemies for gold. Repeat. If you want to talk about addictive gameplay, Kingdom Rush: Alliance would like a word. Ironhide Game Studio has an expert eye for pacing, creating a near-perfect feedback loop. I only wish the waves didn’t feel so slow at times. It doesn’t change the difficulty but hampers the excitement when you perform too well. Standing around waiting for the next wave to meet the firing squad is less fun than it sounds. It’s by no means game-killing. It just irked me.
In Alliance, you pick two heroes to bring with you into battle. There are 12 to choose from, each with powers and quirks. Nyru’s speedy nature magic lets you dart across the battlefield to cut down rogue hyenas as they break your back ranks. The lumbering Onagro, meanwhile, stands as a bulwark against the toughest mob. Hero selection is all about synergy, not only between your heroes but with your towers as well. Each of the 15 towers offers unique abilities, with branching upgrade slots. There’s room for creative synergizing but (arguably) less than in older Kingdom Rush games.
I wish the campaign were longer, but there’s a lot to like about the stages. Between lane count variability, new spawn points that appear mid-game, stage-specific mechanics, and bosses, stages can feel quite different. Maybe you chose aggressive tower placements to spawn-kill mobs. When a hidden elevator starts dumping hyena men into undefended territory, you’ll be scrambling to move your heroes. Now’s the time to trigger the druid and rain toxic green gloop upon your enemies.
Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance neatly sidesteps the biggest threats to balance that tower defense games face. Spawn logic, enemy stats, the gold economy, and tower progression all fit a neat difficulty curve. Even on Casual, the easiest of the four difficulty levels, it’s possible to scuff a round by calling waves too early or through thoughtless tower placement. When your paladins die, your heroes collapse, and you start losing hearts, you’ll know why. Hyenas outrunning your slow Tricannon? Too few archers to shoot down enemy birds? Spellcasters flailing against anti-magic mobs? User error.
I love the strategic flexibility you get from adding a second hero, but controlling both feels cumbersome. Without a convenient way to issue snappy directives in two places at once, you’re often forced into fiddly micromanagement. You need Grimson’s Creeping Death to stall the iron-plated rhinos rushing top-lane, but you’re busy using Lumenir to smack a mini-boss with Celestial Judgment. It didn’t ruin the game for me, but it did spoil some otherwise enjoyable maps and moments.
Graphics & Audio: Stomp and Sputter
Trapped between your Dwarvern Flamespitter and Demon Pit, the enemy mobs crackle and burn. Before their bodies even drop to the dusty lane, however, they’re blotted out by a tide of reinforcements. Anthropomorphic animals bleed together as they continue their dauntless march deeper into your defenses. They’re unbothered by your heroes’ shouts and the dying twitch of their brothers in arms. Arrows, bombs, and eldritch lightning scar the lanes, but the tide keeps coming. Even as the army breaks like an emerald wave against your defenses, you see the next wave forming, steel in hand.
Kingdom Rush games have a cartoony, hand-drawn style that you either love or hate. There’s something cheery yet ominous about big-headed animal people thundering toward you like an army of bloodthirsty Funko Pops. I’d prefer larger hero sprites to make them stand out more when battles degenerate into scrums in the final waves, but that’s nitpicking. The art feels bright and cohesive. It’s like stepping into a coloring book that wants you dead, which is exactly how I want Kingdom Rush 5 to feel.
The music is the same sort of rousing fantasy anthem we’ve heard before, but it’s well done. The voice acting is great, giving you a strong sense of each hero’s vibe, if not their whole personality. The SFX are hit or miss. Arrow impacts and sword strikes can end up spammy. That gets annoying when there’s a large battle featuring identical units, which is all the time. Petty annoyances aside, Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance is about as polished as they come.
Conclusion: In the Shadow of Excellence
I experienced few glitches and no crashes during my time with the game. The biggest issue is that little here feels new, and what is new fails to thrill. If you enjoyed Vengeance so much you’d like a second helping, Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD offers that. If you want a simple, sugary distillation of the tower defense genre, Alliance offers that. It’s just too conservative in its design to surpass its predecessors. The bones of this franchise are as strong as a Dracolich, but without some more meat on them, they don’t feel much like a dragon.
Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD (PC reviewed)
Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD upholds the tower defense standard set by Vengeance but fails to innovate.
Pros
- Great tower and hero designs
- Compulsive gameplay loop
- High degree of polish
Cons
- Brief campaign
- Little innovation
- Some annoying SFX
