KOU Defense Free (Free) by KOU is a typical castle defense game where the goal is to protect your crystal and your hero while destroying the enemy statue and opposing hero.

The games in Kou Defense are irritatingly long, and I was disappointed to find that defeating even the beginning levels took up to five minutes. Additionally, gameplay is just painfully slow, and there’s not enough variation between levels, which required me to attack the same statue over and over again.

As with most games of this type, there’s a currency (crystals, in this case) which are used to build troops. You start with simple warriors, but use collected coins (dropped by enemies) to unlock new types of units.

In addition to units, you are given a main hero, who must stay alive in order to complete each level. Heroes have special abilities, such as a lightning strike, that can be activated by tapping a button.

Coins that are collected from fallen foes are also used to purchase new special abilities and new heroes, and to upgrade existing abilities and units.

You must walk your hero forward into coins and the crystals used to build units in order to pick them up, which turned out to be a very frustrating gameplay element. Crystals and coins would often drop ahead of my hero, and walking up to collect them would cause him to get killed.

Of course, if I didn’t pick them up in a timely manner, they would disappear, causing my unit production to slow down, which allowed the enemy to overrun my troops. Either my hero needs to be more resilient to attacks, or loot needs to stay put.

There is no way to control what your units attack or what lane they walk in, including your hero, which was a disappointment. All you can do is build troops and walk forward, which means there’s very little strategy to this game beyond producing units as fast as possible and spam-tapping the special ability button.

The graphics are good, featuring cute little moles in battle attire, but graphics don’t make up for poor gameplay. There are a lot of good castle and tower defense games in the App Store, so I can’t recommend one that is clearly inferior. Take a pass on Kou Defense, at least until there are some major gameplay updates.

The free version features 20 of the 70 levels present in the main game, so you could always download it and give it a try yourself.