Arknights = A F2P hero-collector “gacha” Tower Defense game? The conceit is that the individual heroes are towers that you level up with persistent progression. Comes with a story campaign that’s both pretty generic (you have amnesia!) but also really disturbing with wars and mercenaries and oppressed minorities and fighting…and you’re a drug company/army??? Possible warning some/all the people are part-animal, with regular anime art portraits and mini-me “chibi” style art in the map/combat. Cut-scenes are pretty static pictures/portraits/text with some sound effects and screen shaking. Tiny bit of “Fallout shelter”-style base building.
The randomization means you won’t have access to all the units without spending tons of Real World Monies, and the persistent progression means there’s grinding to level up your units using a combination of currencies - but persistent progression also means you can pretty much also grind and out-level a map that you have trouble with. The geometry and unique unit powers also means that all the units are pretty useful, although the higher rarity units tend to be more efficient/have higher level caps.
Anyways, I haven’t spent any real world money and I just finished chapter 3 (of the 4 current chapters, although another chapter is dropping today) and it’s definitely so good that it’s kept me away from my backlog of games I’ve paid for with trying to figure out how to pass “one more map”.
Bloons TD6 is proving itself a competent TD game. I believe number 5 was mentioned at the start of the thread.
The variety in the game is mainly in the towers themselves, various types of monkey. Each monkey has multiple upgrade paths and different outfits for each and you can mix it up with many combos. The enemies are balloons, a few types but its the colours that matter, different colours require more hits and different attack types needed. They whizz past in huge trains but my one criticism is they arent very exciting, more of a game mechanism than anything else. There’s also many game types, weekly games and challenges for if you complete all the game type and difficulties. There seems to be some kind of p2p and shop but AFAIK its not required or needed.
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance progress report. After finishing the main bad guy, as is usual in these games, it unlocks several levels that are the extra hard “post game” levels almost, kind of like in Mario games where you unlock bonus levels that are much harder than just finishing off the story.
Anyway, I’ve gotten much better at the game after banging my head against the final level so many times. I have a much better idea of what works. So I’ve actually gotten done with two of these post-final boss chains. So I finished three missions in the north, three missions in the center and one mission in the south. The missions in the south are sooooo hard. There’s ghosts, which can’t be stopped by any melee troops, they just fly through everyone. But they can be hurt by magic, and only magic. And then there’s these troops of magic zombies. When one dies, all the other zombies near it receive a health boost. So when they’re in a cluster, it’s almost impossible to kill them because the death of one causes all the others to regenerate health. For the first time in a game like this, it’s actually better to kill something by separating it instead of clustering it. Only, there really is no good way of un-clustering in this game, so it’s just really hard. But these are some imaginative enemies with unique characteristics. There’s quite a few others.
So yeah, this is pretty much the pinnacle of the Kingdom Rush games, I’d say. Definitely the best ones. I wish I’d bought the towers pack when I first started playing. I haven’t been able to resist buying these towers one at a time. I would have saved money by buying them all for $15.
I notice Kingdom Rush: Vengeance is $5 on Google Play. Does it come with everything you need to beat the game without a punishing grind or is that only an option if you spend more money?
I beat it with all the base towers that come with the game. At least for the story beats.
The part I mentioned above, the levels that unlock only after you beat the main story, those are much harder. What’s funny about them is that I’m actually going back to the towers that came with the base game because in some of these harder levels, those are more appropriate than the towers that I bought separately.
The towers, as I mentioned upthread, are quite different. Even if you don’t buy any more towers, you still unlock more during the course of play. So you can choose to go into a map with any 5 towers. In the other kingdom rush games, you just had your four towers each time. Here you have to pick which one you’ll enter battle with, and then there’s more choice within the battle too. And there’s more enemy variety too.
I have the first Kingdom Rush and liked it quite a bit. Steam has Origins and Frontiers, but no Vengeance. Is there a strong recommendation for one over the others? I prefer PC so that is a plus for Origins and Frontiers.
They’re all good. Play them all. They’re all different enough from each other, so it doesn’t feel like repeating the same content. The towers and meteor/lightning and the troop reinforcement upgrades are all quite different between each game, as are the enemies you fight.
I bought the two Kingdom Rush games I didn’t have on Steam and decided to fire up the first one since i haven’t played it since 2014. From a balance perspective, is it better to immediately try and beat the scenarios on the heroic and iron levels, or move on to the next scenario?
I’ve done it both ways. I’d say it’s better to do it right away. For Origins, it’s not as big a problem because that one is a tad easier. For Frontiers especially, I had to eventually go back to the early levels and do those modes for the extra upgrade points I needed. So if you do them from the beginning, I think it’s easier to keep track of what abilities you have and what isn’t unlocked yet. When you go back from near the end of the game, you’re constantly trying to remember oh yeah, level 2 abilities are unlocked which means I don’t have this yet. And oh yeah, I can’t build this type of tower yet on this level. If you just do them all right after you finish the level, it’s very easy to keep track of everything.
Both Sanctums, both Orcs Must Die games, and Mindustry are all fantastic and highly recommended. Some of my all-time favorite games, in fact. That’s a hell of a good sale.
I mean, you set up defenses to break the other guy’s boulder. I kind of see it but it’s definitely a stretch. Rock of Ages is great fun, though, even if the tag is a little… off.
