Recent reviews by RTK | toxic cowZ

as someone who has played every kingdom rush since the first one before it even had heroes this is by far the worst one ever and the only one i didn't even bother to finish the heroes are boring and despite there being two of them they have less impact than they ever have and the towers are mostly lazy and boring as well and overall dont feel strong or fun to use, thats not to say this game is too hard or anything like that everything just lacks that UMPH of the previous games and its very disappointing this feels like a game for the gameboy advance.

WARNING!
In my opinion this game is edges on greatness but fails completely in one huge fundamental no way around it kinda way and that is how the game handles evolutions which we all know is a core part of any creature collection game we love to see our dudes evolve and become stronger and cooler than they were before and this mechanic is well established even in card game form looking at the obvious comparisons of and dare i say it's name lest nintendo sue me for copyright but pokemon and digimon. In those card games it all makes sense and flows you have all the creatures from that line in you're deck and you play the bigger ones on the smaller ones so they all have a purpose, however in this game while there are evolutions the evolutions function effectively the exact same as the pre evolutions, while they do have there own card effects what i mean is you don't need the prior evolution to get to the next one and the next one has no relevance to the previous one other than the art. Allow me to explain simply that your deck gets 3 pals, they can be any pals of any evolution and what colors they are make up the colors of your deck, that's it, you don't get to see you're guy evolve and become stronger mid game leaving a big hollow feeling in my chest every match, frankly this makes the game unplayable for me because of how wholly satisfying it is.
My solution would of course require a rebalance of the game but you're deck should be made up of 3 base pals and evolutions should be cards you put in your deck to play on top, it would need testing to feel right but the evos could have a range of mechanics attached to them
-more hp
-on play effects
-a cost you have to pay to play the card
And in general should be a better version of the pre evolution as would make sense rather than completely doing it's own thing with some exceptions.
So in conclusion with this fundamental part of the game being a complete fail in my opinion i can not recommend this game though it does have some really fun concepts
The swapping/trading is a really cool mechanic
It's fun to open boosters
Some of the special battles like the rival could be made to be a little more something something but overall are cool
And the binder is incredibly fun to collect and flip through.
With that baste i have one final gripe that could be overlooked but it's annoying that the ai does not play by the same rules as you do, they play the same number of cards but they don't need energy for there moves that can sometimes lead to you being attacked relentlessly though they still do play energy’s sometimes.

32 hours with my demo play time and I enjoyed it a lot, it was surprisingly good and I kept putting it down saying i should be done playing it then kept wanting to play it!
For veteran moba players you may notice some things that seem annoying like your jungle not helping lanes in the auto phase even when the laner is dead and the enemy is taking the tower right in front of them...actually maybe it is true to real moabs but i digress overall its a really sweet card game and the heroes are mostly balanced.
The auto phase or map phase not being very deep is something i had to get past but then I realized it's really just about the cards and that's fine but not as interesting as it could be. That being said the real biggest weakness of this game that i knew would be an issue from the jump is the AI which even on the hardest difficulty will have every team mostly picking the same selection of heroes and while they do manage to avoid most of the ones i consider not very good most of the time they are rather incapable of forming really cohesive teams and will often blunder cards on the field but it's understandable given the rather complex nature of the game at least there are usually a lot of decisions to make. Overall, a really good game with a good concept would love to see it expanded upon and perhaps even made multiplayer because that would be dope.

its janky and the marketing is scummy but i had fun. when the heroes are doing what they're meant to IE running up walls as Iida or blocking people off with the concrete guy it feels really cool but its clunky and theres lots of stun lock and I frames that just dont feel smooth.

Edit: from yes to no
while the above is still true it has fallen victim to really scummy pay or "grind your entire life away" to win like an actually grind system that has multiple layers and items you need for each character that has powerful buffs at the higher levels, while the player base is small but dedicated a lot of the people still playing have powered up with this system and will straight up be stronger than you and the whole system is a chore in the first place i uninstalled when i saw it and will never go back very sad.

steal for 10 dollars with tons of actually really special units that are diverse with multiple abilitys but not at all overwhelming i have spotted a few bugs over the years but when its working perfect the quality feels top notch,

So far the worst thing about this game is sometimes i get locked out of dialog options when i just wanted them to talk to me more because the content is so good. nothing but my cat is perfect but this is 10/10

This game is solid but desperately needs to go free to play or it is going to die slow and painful its already way down on players to the point theres pretty much no point in playing except prime hours, the main reason for this in my opinion is that this is a very VERY poor game to play solo in fact i think its downright silly to play solo for more than a few hours total unlike something like dark and darker where thousands of people where queing up over and over solo and having a blast guns just completely change the dynamic you always feel like you have a chance in dark and darker if not to straight up win a fight out numbered but to get away or sneak around but in this game you cant clear rooms without shooting and and shooting is loud, solo you'll quickly run into teams of 2 or more armed with powerful guns that can 1 or two tap you from so far you'll never even see them you might be able to do a little sneak but being out gunned is a lot different than being out sworded if that makes sense its just not a fun experience unless your locked and loaded with your boys and its why this game is doomed to fail unless free to play,
notably its also a lot easier to team up with random people in dark and darker and i had fun solo and with randoms for a lot of different reasons but again guns change the dynamic even in a group with friends the limited hud makes it really easy to accidentally friendly fire even when your friends talking on comms i didnt even bother trying but i could only imagine how bad it is in this game and how easy it would be for a "friend" to just blast you in the back of the head and take your loot.
its missing a lot of QoL like others mentioned

Uhhh yeah, this game is straight booty cheeks. I loved punch club one, played it to many times for sure and i will put to many hours in this game as well but i cant recommend it unless you are an absolute fiend for it like me that's the TL:DL but let me be more specific on why this game sucks and is a huge disappointment.

The first game came in hard with really good fundamental systems but a lot of the stuff on the side was well stuff on the side very sub par below flash game level and none of it has been made better here which blows my mind this does not feel at all like a second game that i dreamed it to be rather feels like a big DLC and leaves me constantly disappointed as my mind runs wild with all the stupid simple things that should have been added: a specific example would be house upgrades, the last game allowed you to buy workout equipment for your crib and that was it at certain points in the story you get designated house upgrades usually in the form of a complete overhaul to a new place that has slightly better stuff (fridge, bed, entertainment) in my mind this was an EASY dub all you have to do is give the player some form of agency over these things and its a free slam dunk but its not there. Give the jobs fun simple little mini games EASY dub the bar just filling up automatically was an okay place holder for the first game but is kinda unusable here. You become a trainer and run your own lessons i mean... the potential here is bottomless you could make training your students more personal you train them your moves in your school maybe you can make your own school, watch your students level up and get stronger maybe even fight with them or have them graduate or or or.... yeah theirs nothing like actually nothing the whole thing boils down to just 1 click watching a bar fill up, this ones not as easy of a dub but they could have tried literally anything but it all just comes across as lazy the fights are still good but not noticeably better imo they didn't need to be though that's the strong core of the game its everything else that needed to be elevated around it and that didn't happen soooo... team? what did we do? what did we spend all these hours on? there's a lot of dialog in the game and its marketed as "funny" god there is SO much dialogue gotta be bloody hours of it and maybe im in the minority but i'm here to punch people not read the first game had a lot but it feels like a lot more here feels like i'm having to constantly skip through text at max speed for minutes at a time i read some of it and its fine but i just don't care that much and want to get back to the fighting and training and side content that isn't there.... huge fail guys... huge fail this could have been what borderlands 2 was to borderlands 1 but the opportunity has been missed i really hope they get another try.

Edit 1. first update
sorry for any and all sorry for any tangents i am a little heated about this game.
they seem to really miss the point with the training, they buffed neuron training which i think no one wanted...simple answer is buff regular training there's no reason they cant both be viable options and if anything regular training should be BETTER for you but slower to train that would be a sweet feature its like leveling up in Pokemon with rare candies vs battles you end up in the same place but one is better and takes longer.
for some reason they think grinding is the problem so they shortened some of them and made neuron training cheaper so people don't grind regular training as much but the thing is people LOVE the grind, its why they choose to do only regular training the grind isn't a bad thing its a core part of the game that makes it satisfying but the grind needs to be more interesting and you cant band-aid that its broke at a fundamental level the game has no soul there's nothing to do to "fix" the game you pretty much have to make another game and slap it on top of this one but that's like losing the engine of your old reliable car no point in replacing it because the battery is worth more than the bloody car but i digress barring major changes this will be my last report even if this review is mad old still head its warnings because believe you me if god game developer Hideo Kojima descends from the heavens himself to put life into this game (the only thing that will save it) i will return play it and change my review.

I will forever cry that this game never went free to play. i believe believe a solid player base could have been formed and more money could have come in through cosmetics for the development team but instead it suffered a slow and painful death. dont play this game now but go back a good few years and have an amazing time.

this game is sick, kinda feels like old school halo wars to me.