Kingdom Guard Review

Fantastically Boring

Clash of Clans this is not. Coming from a long line of strategy games by tap4fun, you’d think Kingdom Guard would live up to its lineage. Unfortunately, though cute, this game bores even casual fantasy fans. The developers had a good idea but ultimately failed the execution. Between only taking place in one area and awkward touch controls, it’s a wonder the game was ever released.

A Strong Start

The premise of Kingdom Guard is to defend an egg from invading hordes of enemies through multiple levels. The warriors with which you attack are an elven archer, fire wizard, ice witch, and a goblin with a poison cannon. Place them on different platforms along a trail and watch them fight. Switch their positions at any time. You need one of each warrior, as different horde members move at different speeds. For example, an ice witch is most helpful at slowing running enemies. Horde members consist of gnomes, rogues, and orcs, along with a cyclops, who you fight at the end of each level. The cyclops is the hardest enemy to defeat and you need to level up your warriors to properly fight him.

When enemies are defeated, you earn coins, and then use those coins to buy warriors. In an interesting twist, you don’t spend coins to make your forces stronger; you merge them. For example, a level one archer merged with another level one archer becomes a level two archer. If you fail a level, you can farm the previous one as long as you need to strengthen your forces. And as you, the player, level up, your warriors level up with you. So, you’re not always merging them at level one. If you have too many warriors in the spawning area, just feed them to the sharks for extra coins. There’s three of them circling near the spawning area. Additionally, after watching an ad, you can auto merge for ten minutes if you’re tired of doing so manually.

Random Nonsense

As previously stated, Kingdom Guard only has one area. It’s the same long winding road level after level. The game would be less repetitive if there was a different road with a new environment every level. At least horde attacks are random. Another downside is that you don’t get to choose what warriors to buy; they just show up indiscriminately. This means you spend coins more often than you want in hopes of getting one specific character. The more you level up, the more money is spent and the more quickly you run out. It’s almost a requirement to play a level over and over just to earn enough coins. If warriors could be chosen, coins wouldn’t disappear so quickly, and you wouldn’t waste them. Plus, manually dragging warriors is frustrating. They must be directly over where you want them to go, otherwise they’ll pop back to where they were.

Close, But No Magic Cigar

Kingdom Guard tries to be a fun strategy game but is ultimately boring. The scenery never changes, the controls are finicky, and coins are wasted more than anything. Not even cute characters and graphics can save this one. I hope other games by tap4fun have more to do.