Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance (2024)

There are very few types of games that will entrance me for hours at a time. The minutes just melt away, I love Tower Defense as a genre and this may be the best Tower Rush game ever made. I was a huge fan of other Kingdom Rush games and this is the best one yet - everything feels so refined and polished, the two hero system is a really cool way to add strategy to your loadout and micro mid-match. The tower upgrades are fantastic, I had a really tough time figuring out which towers to take into battle. The maps are interesting and the enemy variety is very impressive. The last area adds a huge challenge in the Glare and it completely upturned my typical building strategy, adding even more variety. I'll keep going for additional difficulties, achievements and more down the line. Ironhide did an amazing job here.