Ranger of the Jungle is a half-arsed mobile port and also a half-arsed Chinese to English translation.
I like my tower defense games and I particulary like Kingdom Rush. Ranger looked to be a decent Kingdom Rush clone so I snapped it up pretty quickly, but sadly it's not.
The gameplay is slow which doesn't make things easy, it just makes it tedious to watch a mistake play out. The larger-than-Kingdom-Rush characters and enemies make the game appear even slower. The characters - particularly in the towers - aren't consitently sized either.
The art, whilst generally good, is also not entirely consistent. Some of the sprites appear to be at lower resolutions than others and appear slightly blurry. The heros too are not similar with some cartoony and others more realistic.
Slow gameplay and okay art are hardly reasons to not recommend a game but when coupled with tedious stages that need to be replayed to level heros, that recommendation starts to wane. There's not a chance you'll beat a map on hard without significant grinding first.
Ranger of the Jungle is a skill based game that teeters on the edge of time-based / casual gameplay. Unlike Kingdom Rush, where letting an enemy slip through was a huge failure, Ranger will still award three stars even if a mass of enemies make it through.
The music is servicable but gets repetitive. The stage music is badly looped and ends abruptly before a starting again. The long stage play times make this really obvious. The sound effects are pretty minimal and utterly forgettable. With one exception: the enemy escaped sound is copied straight from Kingdom Rush.
Ranger's greatest failing is that it's unfinished. Clicks sometimes don't register on powers. Buttons are grey'ed out even though they are not disabled. Button text is sometimes in Chinese. English paragraphs just stop mid sentence. There are no graphics options, including fullscreen or resizable windows. There isn't even an exit button as, obvisouly, the mobile version didn't need one. Keys can't be rebound and the only actual keyboard shortcuts are for selecting heros and powers. There are no shortcuts to start the next wave, pause, navigate menus or skip tutorials.
Lastly some of the stages are copies of Kingdom Rush's, though generally mirrored horizontally. The towers are replicas of Kingdom Rush's with only the dwarven bombard tower replaced by a tree called The Ancient of War. The upgrade progession is identical with three general upgrades followed by a specialist choice.
All the similarities - and I'm being generous with the term - only serve show just how mediocre Ranger of the Jungle is when compared to Kingdom Rush. It didn't scratch my tower defense itch. Play Defense Grid instead.
