Test Kingdom Guard : at the crossroads of merge and tower defense

In this test of Kingdom Guard on mobile, you may be surprised to discover a nice, scalable handheld game underneath its merge and tower-defense cartoon looks. But, rather than revealing everything in the introduction, I'll let you read my full review of Kingdom Guard, its gameplay, graphics and business model.

Test Kingdom Guard's gameplay, between merge, gacha and strategy

My test of Kingdom Guard took me through many locations and gameplay loops, so it's hard to know where to start. Firstly, your adventure begins in peaceful lands where a few monsters are trying to attack a dragon egg that must not suffer any attack. Wave after wave, you collect gold, which allows you to acquire units to defend the path to your egg. Thus begins your journey.

An addictive merge system

The Kingdom Guard tutorial teaches you how to merge two units of the same level to make them level up. Moreover, each time a new creature tries to survive under your fire, you'll get a message explaining the strengths and weaknesses of this monster, to better choose which units will defend your egg during the next waves.

The levels follow each other automatically, which makes the gameplay more fluid. Thus, you will pass successively blue and red levels. The blue levels are "normal" levels while the red ones with a skull indicate the presence of a boss. This boss will be more difficult to kill and may even freeze one of your towers for several seconds. As long as your tower is frozen, your units will attack it to free it and let the boss progress, so be quick!

As you level up, you'll unlock four types of units: archers, fire mages, ice mages and poison-shooting goblins. Incidentally, the auto-merge, rather than spoiling the game, is quite satisfying. But your units are not alone in battle, as after a few levels they are joined by your first heroes. Thus begins the gacha part of my test Kingdom Guard.

Choice of characters

The gacha in Kingdom Guard works in a fairly standard way: you get chests or cards, which give you access to heroes of different rarity. The higher the rarity, the more powerful the hero is naturally. And low rarity heroes are immediately used to level up the rarer heroes. This is the food chain of any gacha.

Each hero has an element that indicates its damage type and the elements respond to a shi-fu-mi system.

By default, you will be able to place two heroes on the field at first, and then more heroes in support later on. Remember to match the heroes you use to the type of enemy you are facing. Simply drag the heroes across the field to place them where you want them.

The evolution of the experience through the levels

At first you unlock units, then heroes, and then your egg will turn into a young dragon! You'll have to keep evolving it, and it'll just attack enemy creatures wherever they are in the way. A handy unit that can now defend itself and contribute to your damage. In my opinion, it's a great move by the developers of Kingdom Guard to not leave you with a passive element to protect.

In addition, the environments vary every 100 levels and offer very nice scenery, which, in addition to the beautiful animations, allows the title to enjoy quality graphics that are well suited to this type of handheld game.

However, the evolution of the game experience does not stop there. Soon, the merge of this test Kingdom Guard leaves room for more things to do. Going on a monster hunt or collecting gold in the mines for example! Like titles like Infinity KingdomKingdom Guard offered me in this review the possibility to play on a larger map than the levels. A map full of other castles, which you can attack or ally with.

The map is full of monsters of various levels that drop clear rewards . This makes it extremely affordable for all players to plan their PvE attacks. As with other mobile strategy titles, PvP and guilds are also part of the game, as well as bosses and objectives to take in order to collect rewards. The game's community, from what I've seen, is very welcoming and friendly to beginners. You can take advantage of map events to meet people, get help and progress at the same time.

However, in my opinion, Kingdom Guard's strength remains in its pocket tower defence which works really well. There are other ways to upgrade your units on the defence towers. In addition to the rest, you can also spend your gold on unit upgrades. As I found out in this test Kingdom Guard, the units evolve in tiers and get more and more badass with each tier.

It's a real pleasure to progress your account, as I've rarely felt on games of this type where you usually feel stuck by the business model rather quickly. Fortunately, I'll explain in the next section how the game works on that side and offers a very pleasant free-to-play environment.

Test Kingdom Guard and its balanced business model

I thought the Kingdom Guard business model was a bit harsh before I realised a few things. First of all, 10k or 50k Gold bonuses had accumulated in my inventory without me knowing where to find them, as the menus are not always obvious. But, for once, my opinion of Kingdom Guard and its business model on mobile is quite positive.

I was not interrupted by any ads during my sessions. The only ads you have to watch are the ones you choose to watch to triple the gold in your stash or activate auto-merge for example. And it is very profitable! Even the duration of the auto-merge is long enough not to have the impression of an unfair system where you spend your time watching ads (as if you were injecting money into a free game all the time). The only redundant pop-up is the one for the pack to buy, as in many if not all gacha.

You can also collect gold on the map, by harvesting or killing units, and here again the game is rather generous. After about ten hours of play, I didn't find anything to complain about in the title's business model, which seems to me to be well established and very permissive for F2P players.

To conclude my review of Kingdom Guard

To conclude this test of Kingdom Guard, the title offers a rather varied, arcade, addictive merge and gacha based gameplay, which makes it a perfect pocket game. I recommend this game to any player who would like to spend time, growing their account to slaughter more and more waves of monsters. For me, as a tower defense fan, the strategic aspect is not the most present, but the rest of the content makes up for it with a good dose of medieval fantasy and a rather quiet community, so far from the strategy games where you have to be connected 24 hours a day like Rise of Kingdoms or State of Survival.

This test has been made possible with the support of Huawei whose AppGallery and Game Center are designed to bring additional rewards to players on their favourite games, and even cashback.

Positive points

• F2P-friendly business model
• Addictive pocket game
• Simple and efficient

Negative points

• Some menus to reorganize