3:18pm Wednesday 1st July 2009
By Simon Bull
Sometimes it feels as though certain games have been designed purely to annoy anyone unfortunate enough to play them. It’s as if developers don’t want you to enjoy their products so they make them as frustrating to play as possible, either through dodgy controls, terrible user interfaces or just plain rubbish gameplay.
Knights Onrush, on the other hand, is nothing like this. It is the opposite of a frustrating game. In fact, playing it is the perfect way to relieve stress and pent-up aggression.
Flinging attackers into the air, feeding them to a dragon, crushing them with boulders, blasting them with fire – Knights Onrush for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers a great antidote to a hard day in the office or the frustration of suffering through a sub-standard game.
Castle defence is still a sparsely populated genre in the App Store but has already enjoyed considerable success with titles such as Stick Wars and now Knights Onrush being well suited to the pick-up-and-play nature of gaming, as well as touch controls, on the iPhone and iPod devices.
Though the premise of Knights Onrush might seem slightly evil, the game is actually a delightfully light-hearted and chaotic medieval-themed game in which you must defend your castle from waves of marauding enemies.
There are 11 types of enemy including knights (obviously), bombers, assassins, catapults and wizards. The more basic types will try to charge your castle door while others will attack from afar such as by hurling barrels of explosives over your castle walls.
The attacks rapidly intensify in speed and strength, so defending your castle soon becomes a desperate battle of survival. Your castle sustains damage for each hit. Too much damage spells defeat and it’s game over.
Luckily you have one mighty weapon to repel these hordes of creeps – your finger.
The most basic way to kill an enemy is to touch it, swish your finger upwards to flick it into the air and then watch as it lands with a satisfying, bloody squelch on the ground.
Gold is earned for each enemy killed, and this can be used to buy upgrades for your castle which allow even more sadistic ways to kill attackers.
As well as the dragon, boulder and fire options mentioned above, you can also throw them into a burning pit, shoot them with a cannon or drop a great big stone column on them.
The campaign mode sets 12 challenges to complete. In each campaign you must survive a certain number of days, each day lasting a couple of minutes or so and varying in difficulty. At the end of each day there is the chance to upgrade your castle. There are differences between each mission, such as the types of enemies you must defeat.
Two other modes vary the play even more – endless, in which you survive for as many days as you can, and madness, in which a crazy number of enemies attack you at once.
Knights Onrush, developed by MoreGames and published by Chillingo, looks and sounds great. It boasts colourful, vivid, cartoony graphics, along with a dramatic soundtrack.
Good controls are the cornerstone of any game, especially on the iPhone and iPod. A game like Knights Onrush would collapse without responsive touch controls as timing and direction are crucial when flicking enemies away from your castle gate. Luckily, this game’s controls work flawlessly – I’ve not noticed any slowdowns or glitches which affect play.
The overall presentation of Knights Onrush is really polished. There are lots of nice touches which put this title at the upper end of the quality scale, such as online chat and leaderboards.
My only slight concern with Knights Onrush is over its longevity. The campaign mode with its 12 missions obviously has a limited lifetime so the game’s long-term appeal will depend on how much determination you have to set the highest score in endless and madness modes. The game definitely has the fun factor but it’s hard to say whether it also has that special addiction factor that will make people want to keep coming back for more.
On the whole, there is a lot to like about this game. If you’re looking for the best example of a castle defence game currently available then look no further because Knights Onrush is it.
Verdict: 8 out of 10
The good:
- Beautifully designed graphics, great soundtrack
- Wide range of enemies and castle upgrades
- Responsive and smooth controls, great fun to play
The bad:
- Might wear your finger out after extensive flicking action!
- Question mark over game’s longevity but should provide hours of fun
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