Knights Onrush (iPhone) Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

A very well polished siege swipe

If you follow the top paid charts in the games section of the App Store you would probably have seen Stick Wars and iDracula battling it out for the number 1 spot. Why the history lesson, well Knights Onrush is developed by the team behind iDracula and heavily borrows its gameplay from Stick Wars.
If you've played and enjoyed Stick Wars, then get this game without any doubts (especially as Knights Onrush is currently enjoying a huge sale and is only $0.99/£0.59).

The concept in both games is to protect your castle from invading hordes. This being a touch device, the best way to get rid of the enemy is to swipe them away with your finger. The longer you swipe, the higher they fly and the greater the internal injuries and hopefully they don't come back for more. Small, quick swipes will only move them back at short distance and they will soon run towards your castle door. The only down side is that your finger of God can only pick up one enemy at a time and so you are constantly swiping enemy after enemy.

I must be getting old because my thumb joints are starting to feel it and my thumb itself is sore from all the swiping (takes me back to the old PES days on the PS3). The levels never last for more than a couple of minutes and only a mad reviewer would play this constantly for hours and swipe the skin from his thumb. Such is the addictiveness of the game that a little pain is worth it.
The game mechanics are lifted from Stick Wars (with a few tweaks) but the graphics have been bolstered and look very impressive in almost every department. The enemy characters themselves are actually quite charming and there's no awkward animation as seen in iDracula. After each level, you can upgrade your defences and the animation in the guns and fireballs is also very good.

The game has 3 main modes, Campaign, Endless and Madness. Campaign is set across 12 different sieges. Each siege is split into days and these form the distinct levels. After each day, you can trade in your cash for upgrades. You can also offer sacrifices to earn souls and these are used for the more impressive upgrades. The upgrading section can be quite tactical as there isn't enough money to buy everything. A strong door is obviously important and there are a number of different defences that you can buy. It is worth reading the help screen as some of the defence controls may not be instantly apparent. Each defence unit has its own timer while it readies itself. Once ready, there is usually some kind of directional swipe to launch the projectile at your targets. The boulder can be picked up and dropped anywhere around the screen. The column can be swiped in a downward motion to flatten anything nearby and the fireball can be spiralled to charge it before bouncing around. And this is all done while swiping away the enemy. Needless to say the action is frantic but there are a choice of difficulty levels if you find things tough.

Endless and Madness modes are basically more of the same except they come with online high scores and they are linked to the OpenFeint server where you can even have an online chat over a whole bunch of games including iDracula.

The only thing missing is some special effects. The background music is good but some screams or squish effects could have been added for some of the killings.

We'll give this one a silver award A great game for this genre but the constant swiping action wont be to everybody's taste.