YMMV / Kingdom Rush

• Awesome Art: There has been Art Evolution across the series, and it definitely shows in Vengeance. Almost all the mooks from the first game that return as your allies have far more detailed and better-looking art.
• Awesome Music: The dev team picked two great studios for the soundtrack.
  • The boss themes from both games are very well done. Unfortunately, the one from Frontiers is the only one easily found. The other one can be found here.
  • The first Origins preparation theme for the Enchanted Forest levels is a mysterious, enchanting tune that sounds like something straight from a fairy tale.
  • The Anurian battle theme in Vengeance is quick and fast music that gives the feel of a subaquatic, froggy threat, appropriate for a Brutal Bonus Level.
• Badass Decay: The Deep Devils in Frontiers are powerful and brutal units fitting for a Brutal Bonus Level. The Deep Devils in Vengeance that are summoned by the Deep Devil's Reef are far weaker, the Greenfins and Redspines being rather squishy and dealing a lot less damage, and the Bluegale only being able to summon a single stormcloud instead of covering a huge area in them. Justified, since they had suffered a huge loss after Leviathan's demise and are still slowly recovering from their defeat.
• Breather Boss:
  • After 15 brutal waves in the Sunken Citadel, Leviathan comes out like this. His extremely slow movement, lack of useful tricks (his only ability - stopping to disable certain towers next to the coast for a second - makes him stop while doing so) and weak minions (Greenfins, Deviltides, Redspines, the Demonic Spiders only appear if you take too long) make him pale in comparison to his own Elite Mooks.
  • Vasile the Vampire Lord from the Shadowmoon campaign counts, for much of the same reason. He's not even as large as most of the other bosses and has no really useful tricks up his sleeve. Don't get too confident, you WILL be slaughtered when he comes out, just by his entourage of twenty or so Vampiresa.
  • The Dragon King from Vengeance can be turned into one with the Blazing Gem. Despite having a huge amount of health, there's a spot at the bottom left that appears tailor-made for placing a maxed-out Blazing Gem with Gem of Amplification to target him. Since the Dragon King doesn't move until 30 seconds pass, the Blazing Gem will lock onto him and destroy his health in seconds, crippling him before he can move or with prior dps, defeating him before he can move once.
• Demonic Spiders: So many of them in the series, that they warrant their own page!
• Disappointing Last Level: The cave stages in Frontiers. Much of the puzzle-like elements to beat a level are gone. Your towers and powers have leveled up beyond anything the enemy can throw at you and the levels can be swept through sheer firepower because there are no ultra-heavy armored foes and only one caster type, which downplays the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors aspect of the previous stages a lot. The initial funds are much higher, which allows for much less strict and more relaxed planning in the early waves.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Big Bad Vez'nan is quite a popular character, due to being a hammy villain who spouts pop culture references. It got to the point where he became playable in Origins, and is the Villain Protagonist of Vengeance.
• Even Better Sequel: Many reviews have considered Frontiers to be better than the already-awesome original.
• Game-Breaker: See here.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Come ON, who was expecting the Juggernaut?
• Goddamned Bats: Also enough of them to warrant their own page.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Vez'nan. He periodically casts a spell that renders a large number of your towers temporarily unusable (which is very annoying) and kills normal soldiers in one hit, but he doesn't have that much health.
  • Ulguk'Hai also falls into this. He has a shield that absorbs all hits on him. He only puts it down when he's fighting your troops.
  • Baj'Nimen the Hateful from Origins. He regularly spams an AOE skill similar to Rain of Fire on your hero and group of units, but what's worse is that he's one of two bosses in the series that can reliably heal himself for a good amount from time to time, prolonging the fight.
  • Gerald Lightseeker in Vengeance. Not difficult and lacks a strong AoE, but has a good bit of physical armor, and like Baj'Nimen above he can also reliably heal himself from time to time to prolong the fight. You can also spam the bandit mercenaries on him to make things less of a hassle.
  • The Winter Queen. She has very low HP for a boss (4000, the lowest in the series), but she freezes your towers at an extremely fast rate, prolonging the fight.
• Good Bad Bugs: Vengeance has one that occurs if both the Specters Mausoleum's Possession and the Wicked Sisters' Froggification hit an enemy at the same time. It'll cause the affected target to permanently switch sides and fight for you until they die or exit the area, instead of wearing off normally. This also happens should a possessed Frozen Heart die, its soul (and subsequently regenerated Frozen Heart) will permanently fight for you.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Eiskalt from Vengeance is widely considered the most overpowered hero in the series to the point where he kills any difficulty the game had. As a dragon, he flies around quickly, and his entire kit is based around high damage, area hitting and stalling, with every attack of his capable of slowing enemies. His basic attack is a True Damage wide-area attack that fires much faster than any artillery, his Ice Peaks deals a huge percent of enemy HP, and his Hero Spell is basically a "turn the tide" button by freezing all enemies for a good amount of time and allowing them to be picked off. He was nerfed by making his basic attack no longer target Airborne Mooks, but he's still one hell of a menace against grounded enemies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A fan-made game idea for the series had an enemy called the Hyporus, an icy monster with arms made of ice that turned troops it killed into icy monsters. The Frozen Nightmare mini-campaign for Vengeance introduces the Ice Reaper, an icy spirit with icy arms that turned troops it killed into icy Apex Shards.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Druid towers in Origins are considered rather useless due to having nothing to circumvent the Artificial Stupidity of the Artillery towers not to mention being unable to hit air units at all^note In the original, Big Bertha has homing missiles while Tesla has the Chain Lightning. In Frontiers, DWAARP has a 360-degree splash damage while Battle mech has the aforementioned homing missiles. In Vengeance, the Goblin Zeppelin can be positioned to affect troops effectively, the Melting Furnace uses a 360-degree splash, the Rotten Forest has a similar 360-degree area of effect In Origins both the level 4 druids uses the same inaccurate rock throw with only clobber as the reliable splash damage with the Arcane Archers' Burst Arrows being considered to be far more reliable splash damage than the Druids. This unfortunately has the side effect of making swarms that much more difficult compared to other games but particularly the spiders who are both fast and easily shrug off the splash damage from the Burst Arrows.
  • In a similar vein, the Goblin Rocket Riders in Vengeance are seen as one of the more useless towers. Like the Druid towers in Origins, they share similar weaknesses but are even less reliable. Nitro Boosters are a nerfed version of the Dragonbreath or Wasp missiles, having a much shorter range and the inability to target air units. Minefield is unreliable due to random placement on the track and can outright miss enemies that don't go close to them. Finally, unlike Origins' Druid towers that at least had abilities to stall or stun (Runed Bears and Clobber), Rocket Riders don't even have a way to do either. The other artillery towers in the Melting Furnace, Rotten Forest, Goblin War Zeppelin and the Ignis Altar are seen to be more useful thanks to having wider, more reliable Area of Effects and stuns, or dealing more damage while being more versatile.
  • The Templars in Frontiers are pretty universally agreed to be outclassed by the Assassins for most situations. Assassins have similar survivability (due to their dodge rate), way better damage, and their upgrades cost a lot less. Additionally, the Assassins go into stealth when not moving or in combat, so they can't be targeted by ranged attacks. The Templars' only real saving grace is using them against enemies with area-of-effect attacks, which the Assassins can't dodge.
  • Bolin Farslayer is often considered one of the worst, if not the worst-performing hero in the entire series. He has one of the worst sets of abilities in the entire series. Despite being the Artillery Hero, his basic attack is merely a rather weak tri-shot gun that doesn't deal area damage and has awful reload time to the point where his ranged DPS is only better than Magnus', Elora's, and Alleria's melee damage. His only AoE damage ability is the landmines, which are so small that they almost never hit enemies, and their explosion's Area of Effect is tiny. Worse still, he will prioritize using the useless mines before actually engaging in combat with the enemy. His only somewhat useful ability is the tar bomb, but even that often slows down enemies during times where you don't want them to.
• Memetic Mutation: Necromancers^ExplanationYoutubers Voduke and The Real Morgan regularly made Kingdom Rush polls comparing towers, where the fanbase constantly voted for Necromancers to the point where it became a meme. It got to the point where Necromancers became an option in polls where it was otherwise irrelevant, which people kept voting for regardless, and even in polls without Necromancers there would be someone making a comment about voting for them. Likely became Meme Acknowledgement when the Necromancers became a returning tower in Alliance.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The victory sound when you beat a level.
  • The sound that plays when your instant-kill tower triggers their instant kill. Even more so if it hits a Giant Mook.
  • The low-pitched "OORGH" that most Giant Mooks make on death unless they were instakilled by something that completely vaporized them.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Enemies with ranged attacks = Annoying micromanagement with moving rally points, or the soldiers sit there and do nothing. Twilight Harassers actually take advantage of this by teleporting backward out of your troops' range and firing a painful ranged burst damage attack.
    • Perhaps the most severe example of this would be the Saurian Deathcoils, whose attack is a powerful, armor-piercing crossbow bolt that has a range of nearly half the screen. As such, they can easily pick off your barracks, skeletons, and heroes before you even have a chance to move them. For this, they're considered to be one of the most annoying and hated enemies in the entire series, though they thankfully only appear in one level.
  • Artilleries don't fire where the enemy is located (or into the biggest density of units), they fire at where the enemy will be. This means that should the enemy stop or be intercepted by your units or perform a burst of speed, you will miss that shot and waste the splash damage. A big part of why Druid towers in Origins are rather useless is that none of the level 4 upgrades have any gimmicks to work around this.
  • The Bloodsydian Crystals in the Hulking Rage campaign. When they activate, they can either: 1. Upgrade gnoll burners and reavers around them into Blood Gnolls. 2. Kill all gnoll burners and reavers around them. 3. Heal a group of enemies. 4. Teleport a huge group of enemies back. 5. Teleport a huge group of enemies forwards. The first effect can overwhelm you with a bunch of Blood Gnolls, while the last effect is especially nasty in a Heroic or Iron challenge and it teleports a group of Hyenas, which will then charge past your troops at the back and cause a defeat.
  • The second half of Vengeance's final level has King Denas' mortar troops dropping flaming Tar and Feathers on your towers to disable them. In order to free your tower, you either need to wait 40 seconds or pay 125 gold. Unlike Umbra's and the Spider Goddess's tower-destroying, this happens far more frequently. Better hope they didn't hit one of key importance, and if they did, better hope you didn't spend too much of it upgrading your stuff! Even worse, it lasts indefinitely until cleared in the Heroic and Iron Challenges, but it's thankfully reduced to 30 gold in the Iron Challenge.
  • Snow Golems in the Frozen Nightmare expansion initially appear on several spots on the map including areas near your exit. They're dormant until a certain wave passes, after which they get up as a slow but powerful enemy with very high HP that drops a paltry 25 gold on defeat. To get rid of them prematurely you can pay a huge 200 gold to drop a bomb on their dormant bodies, which gives you a Sadistic Choice: Spend a huge amount of gold or fight an annoyingly tough enemy that drops chump change which can be spawned near your exit. Thankfully, the cost needed to bomb them is reduced to 100 gold in Heroic challenges, and they do not appear in Iron Challenges at all.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Compared to the original, Frontiers and Origins, Vengeance has enemies that generally aren't as tough (Giant Mooks have less HP overall although they sport armor) and allows you to use specialized towers from the get-go instead of having to level a tower to its maximum level to get its specialization.
• Tainted by the Preview: the trailer to Legends of Kingdom Rush announced the game to be iOS exclusive, and therefore, not available on Android or Steam, unlike the previous games. The fans weren't pleased.
• That One Achievement: In Frontiers, there are a few achievements that stand out among the players as the hardest to get due to them requiring a lot of luck and/or time:
  • "Ali Baba" requires your Assassins to pickpocket up to a whooping 10000 gold in total. At max upgrade, the upgrade only has a 40% chance to trigger while yielding only 1-3 gold per success. You can accelerate the process by building Assassin Guilds on nearly every available spot, but it is a very risky move as doing so will cripple your defenses and possibly end your run early if not careful.
  • "Let it bleed!" needs you to kill 100 enemies with bleed damage. Emphasis on the word kill, meaning that you risk having your other towers land the killing blow if in range or even by normal attacks. This is only possible with Templars having the Arterial Strike upgrade and the hero Cronan who has a whip attack. You can do the same as stated above but you have to take note of the risks of doing such an action.
  • "Highlander" requires one of your Templars to resurrect 5 times in a row with the Holy Grail upgrade. However, it only has a 40% chance of triggering upon death. Pray that luck is on your side.
  • "Grim Reaper" requires your Death Knights to accumulate 99 kills. Same issue as with "Let it bleed!" above. Not to mention, this is an upgrade for the Necromancer towers, which are Mage towers that can steal kills.
• That One Attack:
  • Frontiers has Umbra's Eye Beam attack, which instantly destroys a random tower outright with no gold refunds given, reducing your damage output by a significant amount unless you saved enough gold to replace it. Umbra's other attacks involve spawning groups of relatively tough minions and shooting your troops/hero for a good bit of damage, neither of which are as threatening as their tower-destroying one. The Spider Goddess in Origins sports a similar attack but is far more manageable than Umbra's as she only uses it thrice, each time after losing 25% of her health.
  • In Vengeance, we have the Anurian Chasers' leap attack. When they get within a rather generous distance to your troops, they perform a leap that not only clears a good bit of the lane, but the landing also deals a moderately damaging area Shockwave Stomp. The main reason why it's an attack you don't want to see is that they appear in huge numbers, and all of them using this can and will whittle down Barracks troops while easily sending the group of frogs forwards past a third to half of your towers. Worst of all, this attack has little to no cooldown and they can immediately hop to your next set of troops to bypass more area and plow through them.
  • Sand Mystics in Vengeance's Hammerhold Campaign sport a weak melee attack, a rather irritating heal that grants a fair amount of health to themselves or an ally... and a ranged attack that deals a stupidly painful 220-260 area magic damage which bypasses armor. This will very easily one-shot or two-shot any troops and most heroes can't survive a few blasts.
  • Malik Hammerfury's lightning attack via the Hammer of Ages. Like Umbra and the Spider Goddess before him, this destroys a tower... unlike those two, where you can rebuild the tower, any tower destroyed by Malik gets its building spot permanently disabled. He only does this to towers he passes by, but it's still a very unwelcome surprise especially when mooks start streaming past your permanently-disabled tower spots.
• That One Boss:
  • Lord Blackburn from the original is up there as one of the toughest bosses in the series. He has a very dangerous ability to temporarily stun your units and up to EIGHT towers within a massive range, deals heavy area damage making him hard to block even with Paladins, gets a rather short distance to your exit, has 90% physical resistance (due to being a Tin Tyrant) which makes magic towers a must, and several of his flunkies are highly resistant to magic. Speaking of which, a number of his flunkies are annoying (Black Hags) or outright dangerous (Lycans, Fallen Knights), compounding things further. Mercifully, he's the only boss in the first game who has all his minions die and the waves of enemies stop appearing once he goes down.
  • Umbra, the Final Boss of Frontiers is a brutal fight even by final boss standards. It seems like a standard Flunky Boss at first, but it get far worse after its first kill and reform. Umbra starts using Eye Beams that outright destroy your towers with no gold refunds given, hurting your DPS and funds to build a new tower while making it harder to kill it and its already-strong Mooks^note Umbra, the Spider Goddess, and Malik Hammerfury are the only enemies in the entire series with a tower-destroying move, but Umbra can use it an unlimited number of times and targets random towers, while the Spider Goddess only performs hers thrice in the entire fight, and Malik destroys towers he's nearest to. As such, Umbra turns into a race against the clock and funds as the player needs to quickly destroy it before its eye beams destroy the player's defenses and the hordes of rather strong minions get through.
  • Cerberus from the original game is a noteworthy Mini-Boss example. Three-headed hounds from Hell are the strongest units running at the speed of the ordinary Wulf, while having 60% physical armor to boot! They're only encountered during the Pit of Fire and Pandaemonium levels, but the things can go awry really fast if you aren't prepared. Extreme amounts of health plus sufficient resistance to physical attacks equals the necessity to bring out Rock Elementals to stall them, as well as combined one-hit kills from different types of towers to keep even a single Cerberus at bay. Pandaemonium is especially bad when one gets spawned on the start of Wave 10 on the left side... and another at the end of Wave 10 on the right side, potentially leading to a Dual Boss situation.
  • War Elephants and Drum Elephants are more Mini-Boss examples, this time coming from the Hammerhold expansion of Vengeance. Let's run them down: both are the strongest types of enemies the Hammerhold campaign has to offer, mostly thanks to large amounts of health. Both have incredibly high resistance to physical attacks, so magic-based towers (or Asra's armor-removal shots) are a must to counter them. While they don't have as much health as Cerberus and are far slower, they make up for it by being literally unstoppable — any opposition, hero or troop, is Trampled Underfoot instead of blocking them, while abilities that trap, freeze, slow or stun are no-sold. War Elephants have two archers on their backs providing support, thus even Beresad, Eiskalt, Murglun and Dianyun have to be effectively micromanaged to stay out of trouble. Drum Elephants provide significant boosts to units in their vicinity. If you had a rough time against such enemies during the casual play, then good luck tackling the Iron Challenge of Hammerhold Streets level. Both types of Elephants come in large groups, and you have only Twilight Harassers and Swamp Things available to counter them. Hope that you can mount effective defense before they inevitably march straight to the exit.
• That One Level:
  • Pandaemonium from the original game is seen as the hardest level in the series and for good reason. The map itself isn't doing any favors with 3 separate entrances to keep track of and lava fissures placed specifically at the chokepoints to roast your barracks units at the worst possible moments, but the wave design is what makes this level pure hell. Each wave is made up of sadistic combinations of demons, such as first 2 waves sending in Hell Hounds to encourage you to build barracks to at least slow them down (Since they are more like speedbumps because the hounds will easily blow your troops to pieces when they die). The next wave then decides to send a large amount of Demon Spawn along with Lords, which will most certainly plow through your barracks, and to seal the deal, Imps, Flareons, And Demon Legions show up within the next 6 waves. Even foreknowledge of the anti-barracks nature of the level won't be enough, since the demons show up in such numbers (The final wave has 48 Demon Legions, you know, the infinitely duplicating and sturdy enemies? Also you are required to kill all of them in the Steam version) that you also need to know exactly when to use Rain of Fire to thin their numbers - or else you will be overrun every single wave even with the right towers. And if all that wasn't bad enough for you, Moloch himself can reach the exit at an alarmingly steady pace if you don't bother slowing him down with troopers or the Hero character.
  • Maginicia Shores from Vengeance is often seen as a ridiculous jump in difficulty from the main game, even by Elite Stage standards. You are just simply bum-rushed by a horde of heavily armored enemies, but they each have their own tricks so you can't just pound them with magic (Chasers leap onto your troops to bypass your towers and Wardens have their shields replaced by Infusers). The waves involving Wardens and Infusers can get especially hairy, as the game chucks so many of them at once despite having very good armor.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Blacksurges from Frontiers have a brown-colored spiral shell◊ that resembles a pile of poop, especially noticeable when they're retracted into their shells.