Just like I've seen many other people say, Kingdom Rush changed the concept of tower defense games for me. Saying that, it was another nine months before I found a rival.
Check 'Keeper of the Grove' out in armour games and give it a chance.
Somebody has put a huge amount of effort into this to get the difficulty level perfect.
The cute-style graphics are very highly polished (it always makes a difference when you see the developers have really cared) and there is a nice range of fun and towers.
They've copied some of the style of kindon rush with 'new unit' pop-ups but there is plenty of original content too. In fact it's not about how many enemies manage to get through but about stoping the ones that pick up your crystals and try to get away with them (the only real solution being to kill them all.. don't worry).

It would possibly be blasphemy to say it were as good as Kingdom Rush in this forum ;) and quite right too.. KR got the praise it deserved, and kingdom rush is still a little better and quite a lot longer. KotG is just a very decent rival and I hope it gets the respect it deserves and a slightly higher rating than the 7.2 it currently has.

Check it out!

I agree with you. Kingdom Rush is obviously a better game but Keeper of the Grove is good too. It has a decent variety of enemies just like Kingdom Rush without having too many you have to check their stats every time you see them. The taking gems is similar to Cursed Treasure another tower defense game except in KotG you keep on going along a different path connected to the same one instead of turning around. Over all, I think that KotG is a pretty good game.

It's basically Kingdom Rush aimed at a much younger audience. I found it to be a bit limiting in terms of towers and places to build them, and it was hard to keep track of the towers and the enemies because it was all pretty abstract.

If you're new to the TD genre, this game is alright. Otherwise, this game didn't add anything new to the TD world except cute graphics, so I don't recommend it to any serious TD players.

So what is the second best Tower Defense game?