Fantasy Kingdom Defense HD – epic sword & sorcery fantasy Tower Defense game
by Toni McQuilken
Sep 26, 2012 2:04 PM –
Install
Fantasy Kingdom Defense HD is an epic, free sword-and-sorcery fantasy tower defense game. Your kingdom is under attack. The Evil Lord is throwing his army of demons at the gates of your castle, and only you can stop him! Take command of an elite unit of elf archers, sword-wielding knights, powerful mages and fire-breathing dragons in this epic new swords-and-sorcery tower defense game.
Price: Free, In-app purchases
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Several different types of defenders to choose from, for a wide range of strategies!
- You can upgrade defenders in the middle of a game!
- There are premium defender types to buy!
Cons
- Poor gaming “threshold”, meaning money is somewhat hard to manage. Every defender you place in a round costs coins, and you don’t get to keep the defenders you’ve purchased.
- Coins don’t accumulate at the same rate you use them.
- Premium upgrades cost a different currency and while you can earn it in-game, you only get a few at a time and need a LOT to buy anything.
Features:
Fantasy Kingdom Defense HD is a tower defense game where you have a variety of types of troops to command, including a ranged attacker, a soldier and a mage. Enemies come from portals, and while you start off with them only coming from one or two, as you go further in the game, enemies get harder and more frequent, as well as come from more places.
At its heart, this is a tower strategy game, and I usually love this style. In this case, I liked the game, but there are a few things that really detracted from it for me. First of all, you don’t start off with many coins. Each enemy you kill you earn a few coins, but it takes killing a lot of monsters to earn enough to even get one defender. You don’t get any credit for defenders you bought in previous rounds, nor do you get to re-use those defenders, meaning that by round two, I was broke and dying because I didn’t realize nothing would carry over. I had two defenders in round 2, and that just wasn’t enough, so I had to uninstall and restart the game, being more strategic the second time around, even still I found that I died more often than not simply because I didn’t have the coins to buy enough defenders, especially as the enemies got both harder and numerous at the same time. Your defenders don’t scale – you have to pay, each round, to upgrade each defender, on top of having to pay for the defenders themselves.
There are premium defenders that are more powerful, those you purchase with gems instead of coins. You can earn gems at the end of each round for completing it, but you’re getting around 5 at a time – to upgrade costs anywhere from 20 gems for some of the castle upgrades to 180+ gems for some of the dragon defenders. Considering you earn so few gems and coins in a round, the system is designed to more or less force you to buy them in the store to really be able to play (this is what we mean when we refer to gaming “threshold” for freemium titles). Personally, I would much rather pay a small fee up front and then be able to play the game, rather than have a system where the game is “free” but nearly impossible to enjoy without investing money.
As far as the game itself, as you play, your goal is the prevent the enemies from reaching your castle and breaking through your defense. Enemies won’t attack your defenders, but they will attack your castle, which doesn’t have many hit points unless you’ve upgraded it. I found that for some reason only the soldier on one side of the gate would actually attack enemies standing at the gate, so if any of them made it that far, I was dead pretty fast. It’s all about putting your defenders in place to keep them from getting that far. In some cases, I wished I could move the defenders. Instead, you have to sell the defender for less coins that the purchase price, then re-buy it to place elsewhere, I wish the system was a bit more flexible to let you move them around based on strategy or discovering that where you’ve placed them they can’t actually reach any enemies (which I did several times.)
Watch on Mobile
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Fantasy Kindgon Main
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Fantasy Kingom Menu
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Fantasy Kingdom Win
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Fantasy Kingdom Lose
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Fantasy Kingdom Victory
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Fantasy Kingdom Gameplay
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Fantasy Kingdom Daily Coins
Fun Factor:
If you like tower defense strategy games, you’ll find this one fun. The most frustrating part is the lack of currency to really sit and play for a long while – you can play for a short while, but then you don’t have enough coins and you have to wait until the next day to get the daily coins to have enough to actually buy any defenders. For me, having to manage currency just to play the basic game, and almost requiring upgrades and in-app purchases just to play, took away from my enjoyment. If it was introduced in the later levels, I could see really needing to upgrade, but I was having issues with the second round, dying because I had no coins to buy defenders.
Addictive:
I hate to harp on it, but the currency management aspect really kind of killed my desire to go back and play. It could be addictive if you could sit and play for a while, but because you can only really get in one, maybe two if you’re really efficient with your defenders, rounds before you’re out of money.
Graphics:
The cartoony graphics work well here, and that part of it I thought was cute. The animations for my defenders could be a bit better – I had a hard time telling the difference between some of them at rest and fighting, so defenders I thought were fighting enemies were really just standing there wasting coins and space. Better differentiation between animations would solve this, as would the ability to move your defenders around on the field.
Accelerometer, Vibration & Sound:
The soundtrack is pretty standard for this type and style of game. It’s not horrible, but it’s not standout either.