Kingdom Rush - Tower Defense

Since I'm not actively playing in any tabletop games, I'm having to find other ways to get my dungeon crawl fix.  I've always liked tower defense games, they sort of feel like reverse dungeons.  Anyway, a friend recommended Kingdom Rush and I'm liking it pretty well.

The games are pretty straight forward with a set path and specific build locations - which I'm usually not as found of.  But, these are well located and force you to carefully consider what type of tower to place where and not all the locations must be used to have a successful map.

Tower Types:
The barracks provide troops you can use to block advancing mobs.
The mage tower is your standard magic damage tower that attacks both land and air.
The arrow tower is the fast firing, low physical damage tower that attacks both land and air.
The artillery tower is heavy physical AOE damage (initially, hint-hint) against land targets.

You also have at your disposal an AOE flame attack and the ability to summon two "helper" troops that are effectively armed farmers.

Depending on how well you complete a particular map, determines how many talent points you get to spend between levels.  The talent trees are interesting and call for some hard choices once the obvious selections have been made.

Each tower has several levels of upgrades, then a specialty choice (i.e. marksman or rangers for the arrow towers, mage or sorcerer for the magic tower).  Once you choose a specialty, then you get to pick from special powers made available from picking your specialty - yes, you can choose poorly.

The mob spawns are creative and various - goblins, orcs, wolves, wargs, spiders, bandits, demons, yetis just to name a few.  Just about all have something special or unique - high armor, fast speed, etc.  Some have special powers that augment other mobs, some heal other mobs and some have really interesting abilities that have surprising in-game effects (hint-hint).  There are creative spawn locations on certain maps and short-cuts that mobs will sometimes use to their advantage.  The pathing is interesting and if you don't have troops in just the right place, they are doomed against certain mobs or the mobs will bypass them - not sure if that's a programming flaw or working as intended.

On the whole, I give Kingdom Rush a 7/10 for Internet flash games overall and a 9/10 for the tower defense genre.