Android App Review: Fantasy Kingdom Defense HD

Fantasy Kingdom Defense is, for the most part, a well executed strategy game. It's also good to use as an example if someone asks you want generic 'fantasy' looks like.

The game explains step by step how you play, which is nice, but when I started playing I immediately failed because the game hadn't really explained what I had to do. After a couple of similarly swift (and embarrassing) defeats I think I sort of have the hang of it: monsters are walking down a path to attack your castle. You can put soldiers along the side of the path who will attack the monsters. If the monsters get to your castle you lose. If all the monsters are killed by your soldiers before that can happen, you win.

The graphics are bright and cartoony with bobble-headed characters and bouncy walk animations. Being HD is a nice selling point on a larger tablet screen but even on a smaller smart phone it looks good. There are a few control issues – sometimes it's fiddly trying to tap the exact right spot to bring up a menu – but I'm willing to believe this may be dependent on screen size.

The story or setting or whatever you'd call it is pretty generic 'fantasy', but given that that's the first word of the title I guess it's fine. Your characters are knights, archers and mages (which is a slightly cooler word for wizard, if only for a very specific definition of 'cooler'), and you fight demons, trolls, and some other creatures which will almost certainly turn out to be orcs because you can't make something like this and not have orcs in it. Perhaps this is being overly critical, but unless you live underground and never engage with any sort of media and actually are an orc, then you've definitely seen all of this before. Don't worry about reading the text boxes that tell you the plot because you already know it.Oh, and I forgot to mention there are dragons occasionally. Because of course there are.

Seriously though if you like fantasy, then this game is right up your alley. You'll probably enjoy it because it ticks all the boxes and it's a decent little strategy game as far as I can tell. But don't expect too many surprises from it.