Kingdom Rush Origins (Steam) Impossible Hero Challenge - Blood Quarry Campaign

This is definitely not my favorite map.  All in all we got through it with only a fair amount of difficulty, but it's not exactly a fun map.  The bloodsydian stones add a high degree of RNG to the difficulty: get too many extra Blood Gnolls - or just a few at the wrong time - and things can go south in a hurry.  As usual the tactic is to try to manage the Blood Gnoll population, either through containing the Blood Ogres or keeping regular gnolls away from the bloodsydian stones as much as possible.

I will say that I do like having Malik as an extra hero on this map.  And not just that, but I like how he levels up from 1 to 10 just like heroes did in the original Kingdom Rush.  It's a nice throwback nod as well as lore addition.

Impressions

This is another "standard hard" map, and the grades are largely what you've come to expect on such maps recently.  I will say a fair amount of the grading was affected by whether the hero has a ranged attack that can help with the Perythons, which are actually the greatest danger for leaks here.  I know I made it sound like Blood Gnolls were above, but the real danger those pose is occupying your soldiers and reinforcements at just the wrong time so they can't attack the Perythons.

It was for this reason that Bravebark earned a rare 'B' here, which is really the only surprising grade.  Razz and Rags pull a 'C' yet again despite having the ranged attack I mentioned above.  It wasn't truly as hard to finish the map with them as a 'C' might normally imply, but their performance was definitely worse than our other 'B' students and I wanted to make that apparent.  As usual it's the combination of low DPS and few good opportunities for Changeling.  While not a major factor, their slow speed was definitely also an annoyance here, as this map does require a lot of lane dancing by the heroes.

Final Grades

• Eridan - B
• Arivan - B
• Catha - B
• Reg'son - A
• Prince Denas - B
• Razz and Rags - C
• Bravebark - B
• Vez'nan - A
• Xin - B
• Phoenix - A
• Durax - A
• Lynn - B
• Bruce - B
• Lilith - B
• Wilbur - A
• Faustus - A

Best Choice

This is another instance of Wilbur kind of winning by default.  His crazy DPS is a good solution for maps like this that have a mix of hordes and tough enemies.

Kingdom Rush Origins Impossible Hero Challenge - Blood Quarry Campaign