Crazy Kings

Crazy Kings is about as generic as tower defence games get, save for one slight addition. Here you've got defences to build, a hero to send out, and an art style that nods to, winks at, and then uncomfortably propositions Kingdom Rush.

The little twist comes in the form of a card-collecting element that lets you power-up your towers by mashing versions of them together. But it doesn't really make that much difference to the overall sense of ennui.

Tower

The game takes place over a series of maps. Thee are spaces to pop your towers, and specific entrances where the waves of bad guys are going to stomp in from.

You collect towers as you fight. They cost mana to purchase, and you can upgrade them with a variety of different boosts as you fight.

You've also got a hero, who you can drag around the level to fight enemies head-on, and other troops you can drop into the battlefield. There are traps as well, and your arsenal gets more powerful as you get deeper into proceedings.

There's the usual balance of strengths of weaknesses, and you need to create a series of towers that can deal with your opponents as effectively as possible.

The levels are alive with little details, from scampering rabbits to terrified villagers, and everything is polished to within an inch of its shiny life.

If you get multiple versions of the same tower, you can smoosh them together to make more powerful ones. And there's loot you can equip your hero with too.

Defence

But in the end we've seen it all before, multiple times. There's even an energy system here as well that means you'll be stalling or coughing up from time to time.

Crazy Kings is symptomatic of the iteration culture on the App Store. It's a little step forward, and if you like tower defence games you'll probably lap it up. If you don't, it's just more of the same.