Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD review—Lacking depth where it matters

In Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD, you’re tasked with making your way through the kingdom to stop a new foe. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to pay attention to the story. Though the comics at the beginning of the game are beautiful, where the beauty of this tower defense game lies in the towers and stages.

In this game, the forces of Linirea and the Dark Army come together. Their alliance allows you to choose towers and heroes from both sides. You can create some interesting combinations of towers. Sadly, I found that since air units dominate this game I would only use towers that could hit them.

Map

The map is pretty big but from what I can tell, there aren’t many stages. You can see where I lost interest in making progress, and I explain the reason for this further in the review. Each chunk of the map unlocks more of the story and as you progress the maps do get better and more varied.

The maps in Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance are my favorite part of the game. I like how most of the maps have multiple points of entry, and a lot of the maps have small things you can click on to make creatures attack the map.

I love when tower defense games have interactive maps and multiple points of entry, but most importantly they have multiple strategies for clearing said map. Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance has a massive problem with flying units. They’re everywhere, and while most towers can take them out, having so many detracts from the tower variety you can use.

Heroes

During the game, you can have two heroes on the map at the same time. Each hero is unique. They have different stats, abilities, and weapons. When you click on one you’ll get a little description of who the hero is.

Each hero has a level and some stats that you can see on the bottom left-hand corner. The skills always appear on the bottom right side, and the heroes can upgrade these skills with skill points earned as you play.

During my time with Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance, I found myself being more invested in the heroes than the towers. Finding optimal hero combinations for each map is exceptionally fun. However, micromanaging the heroes quickly became the worst chore in the game. You can move them around, and at first, it’s optional, but as you play, the option goes away and you’re forced to move the heroes. The reason the option goes away is because of the way the waves in this game work. Often, you have to bring the heroes to the same lane to deal with tanker opponents.

Skill Tree

I hate this skill tree and find it to be almost completely useless. I find it frustrating that Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance doesn’t give much importance to the towers. Everything feels like it had to be balanced around towers and heroes and while that makes sense, this skill tree was the tipping point for me.

There are paths to the skill tree. One is for towers, the other is for heroes, and the last serves a more general purpose. The only benefits on this tree that are worth getting involve the extra currency when starting a round early and the tier that changes what happens to enemies when they reach the defense point on the map.

The skill tree feels tacked on and I hope it gets expanded because this is where the towers should’ve been the primary focus. Yes, it’s cool that you can give your heroes and abilities something extra, but in the end, I felt like the whole tree was thought of just to say that the game had one.

Don’t get me wrong, the skill tree isn’t hurting anything, but I find its presence to be extremely confusing. As you dive into the systems in Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance, you can tell that the developers wanted to have more complexity, but for me, they missed the mark in every way.

Towers

The tower variety is alright. I like that each tower can be upgraded to its Elite rank, where you can choose to upgrade various aspects of the tower. Sometimes, it feels like you’ll never reach that point because of how few enemies you battle during each stage. What ends up happening is you don’t always get to stay on a level long enough to see your towers hit their max level. At most, you can upgrade a couple.

Each tower has special skills, and the animations for every tower are super cute. None of them were memorable to me, but that’s because I found myself focusing on the heroes more so than the towers.

What I ended up liking the most about the towers was how they looked. The animations are truly solid, and I love how much personality each of the towers has. You can see it in the image. Each tower stands out in a truly unique way and I appreciate that. It prevents towers from becoming muddy when you place them on the map. Despite having issues with getting towers to their max rank, once you get them there I adore that their visual style changes with each level up.

Final Thoughts

Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance is not a bad game. Certain aspects of the gameplay just miss the mark for me. The skill tree needed to be more fleshed out, and towers needed to be given some more thought so that they had the chance to shine more.

However, I found myself losing interest in Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance because it didn’t have the fleshed-out systems I look for in a tower defense game. The generally solid gameplay compensates for the lack of depth where I would like it, such as in the tower upgrades, but it didn’t prevent me from losing interest in Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance.

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