In Kingdom Rush: Vengeance, should you buy towers or heroes?

Like Kingdom Rush games before it, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance offers additional heroes for sale on top of the few you unlock during the campaign. However, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance’s new tower loadout system has provided the team at Ironhide Game Studios a chance to add additional towers to the roster. At launch, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance will give players 11 towers over the course of the game, and locks five more behind a paywall.

We got to play with these locked towers and heroes during our review of Kingdom Rush: Vengeance. So the question is, are they worth your extra money?

Locked towers

Kingdom Rush: Vengeance locks the Grim Cemetery, the Rotten Forest, the Blazing Gem, the Wicked Sisters and the Goblin War Zeppelin towers behind microtransactions — ranging from $2.99 to $6.99. All of these towers are viable in certain situations, but not all of them are worth the price of individual purchase.

Grim Cemetery

The Grim Cemetery is a troop-based tower. But unlike most troop towers that require a specific rally point, the Grim Cemetery spawns weak minions all around its area. As you level it up, you can buff these zombies and even make them explode once you unlock abilities.

While playing, we found this tower to be very useful in choke points with multiple tower spots. Placing two or even three of these next to each other essentially creates an impassable wall of zombies. With the right turret makeup surrounding the cemetery, nothing will make it past your roadblock of undead ghouls.

Of the purchasable towers, this is easily one of our favorites.

Ironhide Game Studios

Rotten Forest

The Rotten Forest acts similarly to the boiler. In a small, 360-degree area around the tower, damaging roots will rise up from the ground. Enemies constantly take damage as they wander over these — although the damage numbers themselves are pretty pitiful.

The best use for the Rotten Forest is to be a single area tower in an choke point filled with allied troops that can keep the enemies in the Rotten Forest’s range. The abilities also benefit troops, and can create roots to stun opponents as well as additional tree allies to occupy opposing enemies.

This tower is very situational, and can be pretty easily replaced with the more powerful boiler. However, when fully upgraded, the frequency of the stuns and ability to lock enemies in a small area for a long time is pretty impressive.

Blazing Gem

The Blazing Gem is a pretty familiar tower for Kingdom Rush veterans. Instead of lobbing slow, powerful magic blasts, Blazing Gem fires a single, powerful beam at an enemy as they walk by. As the tower is upgraded, the beam grows more powerful the longer it attacks a single target.

The Blazing Gem is the perfect kind of tower for big, slow enemies that are hard to kill. Once it attaches its beam, the tower will make short work of anything. There are a few places, especially in the end game, where this tower was invaluable.

Blazing Gem is a little boring, but extremely powerful in the right circumstances. If you’re only going to buy one or two towers, make sure to choose this one.

Wicked Sisters

The Wicked Sisters tower is actually really interesting. It’s essentially a mobile witch on a broom who is tethered to a nearby tower. She lobs either stun or poison bolts at enemies — which can be swapped on the fly — and deals significant damage.

While the tower is great and pretty powerful, it’s not so much better than the other mage options available for free. The abilities also don’t improve the tower that much, and only provide some utility — potent as it may be.

While the Wicked Sisters isn’t a definite buy, it’s a tower that we’ve used quite a bit and have gotten plenty of results with.

Ironhide Game Studios

Goblin War Zeppelin

The Goblin War Zeppelin is like the artillery version of the Wicked Sisters. A giant air balloon tethered to a nearby tower can float over a lane and quickly drops bombs on it from above. This tower is pretty cool, and really lets you direct the havoc when it comes to artillery — a pretty unique trait.

However, even with the ability to target, it just doesn’t win out compared to the other artillery options — at least not in our loadout. The Goblin War Zeppelin is a perfectly powerful tower, but it isn’t worth spending money on unless it’s the exact kind of thing you want to use every match.

Given the chance to throw some cash at the developers for all five towers, I would probably do it. However, if no bundles are currently available for you, I’d buy the Blazing Gem, the Grim Cemetery and maybe the Rotten Forest.

Of course, these towers may not necessarily fit with your playstyle the way they fit with ours. You’ll do just fine in Kingdom Rush: Vengeance without any of these towers, but all five are fun to play with in different situations.

Locked Heroes

Unlike the towers, the heroes are a bit more subjective. You’ll get along just fine with the three heroes given to you over the course of the campaign. That being said, we did find one purchasable hero that we enjoyed our time with quite a bit.

Tramin

Tramin is a little goblin with red hair. He carries around a giant rocket and spends all his time throwing explosives at enemies. Of all the purchasable heroes, Tramin was our favorite.

This hero excels in area damage, and can take down groups of enemies pretty quickly. His hero ability drops a box of walking mines on the trail, which will advance up a lane until it finds enemies to kill. It’s a powerful tool with a very short cooldown.

Perhaps Tramin’s strongest feature is his ability to move fast. When moving across the map, Tramin can rocket jump to wherever you want, which makes him a very powerful hero for making clutch saves or simply repositioning in a tough battle.