Kingdom Rush 6: Genesis Is Out on iOS, Android and Steam at $6.99

Fifteen years after the first Kingdom Rush turned tower defense into a comfort genre, Ironhide Game Studio is going back to where it all started. Kingdom Rush 6: Genesis launches today, September 24, on iOS, Android and Steam. It is a prequel: you travel back to the early days of Linirea, recruit the heroes who built the kingdom, and try to stop a young Vez'nan before he becomes the villain the whole series has revolved around.

The App Store listing prices it at $6.99, the Google Play listing shows the same price with optional in-app purchases, and the Steam version covers Windows and macOS. If you would rather try before you pay, Ironhide has kept a free demo on Steam since the release date was announced in June. The Steam release unlocks during the day, so if the store still shows it as coming soon when you read this, give it a few hours.

Video: Ironhide Game Studio on YouTube

What you are actually getting

The numbers, straight from Ironhide's own store pages, are the biggest the series has shipped at launch. There are 15 towers, each with its own special skills, and the studio is leaning hard on synergies between them rather than on any single overpowered build. There are 12 heroes, and for the first time you bring two of them into every stage, which is the headline mechanical change. Ironhide's pitch is that you pair a hero built for aggression with one built for holding a lane, and upgrade both to unlock their abilities. Nine spells round out the loadout, from meteor showers to reinforcements to what the store describes as battlefield-wide control effects.

The campaign is 18 handcrafted stages across three landscapes of early Linirea. The App Store description names the Citadel, the Stormcloud Depths and the far away lands of Arcania, so expect familiar ground for anyone who played the first game. Across those stages you face more than 40 enemy types from 5 races and 6 boss fights, and there are extra game modes past the campaign, over 50 achievements, and the usual pile of easter eggs. The final pre-launch devlog, posted a week ago, completed the hero roster with three newcomers, Rhodes, Gemina and Illiana, alongside returning faces the studio had already shown in its hero spotlight videos, including Gerald Lightseeker, the knight from the first game.

The Steam page also lists a Classic Rush Mode with its own trailer, aimed at players who want a stricter, old school run through the campaign. On PC the requirements are modest: 64-bit Windows 10, a quad-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, Intel UHD 600 class graphics and about 3 GB of space, or a Mac on macOS 10.13 with an M1 or Intel Core M chip. The game ships in ten languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and both Chinese scripts.

Our take

Kingdom Rush has always been the tower defense series you recommend to people who do not play tower defense, and a prequel that revisits the original lands with the old hero is a smart way to bring back lapsed fans without asking them to remember five games of lore. The two-hero rule is the change to watch. It doubles the decision space on every stage, which is great for veterans and could be a little much for newcomers, so it is good that the Steam demo exists. At $6.99 on mobile with no wait, this is an easy pick for the week, and a nice change of pace from the Roblox tower defense games most of our readers grind. If those are more your speed, our All Star Tower Defense codes page has a fresh batch of working codes this week.

One thing we cannot tell you yet is the PC price, because the Steam listing had not unlocked at the time of writing. We will update this piece once it does. Ironhide is also selling a Vez'nan vinyl figure through Youtooz for a four-week pre-order window with no restock planned, which tells you how confident the studio is that the villain still sells.