Having completed my Impossible Hero Challenge for Kingdom Rush Origins and taken a relaxing vacation, I've been plenty stoked to jump right into Kingdom Rush Vengeance. I intend to do an Impossible Hero Challenge for this game as well, but first things first - we have to actually unlock Impossible difficulty.
As with Origins, Impossible is unlocked by beating the campaign, so I've done a walkthrough for the campaign on Veteran difficulty (the next highest available). As always the goal is no lives lost on any map, but there are a few differences this time as well. First, unlike my Veteran walkthrough on Origins, I'm not including the heroic or iron modes this time around. In Vengeance you only unlock upgrade points on the campaign mode, unlike previous games where you got an extra upgrade point when completing heroic and iron, meaning there's really no point in doing the heroic or iron modes on Veteran (for which I am thankful - it saves me a lot of videos). Second, I did this walkthrough with only the heroes and towers that are free on the mobile version, so that the videos are equally applicable to that version. I didn't do this on my Origins walkthrough which is one of my regrets.
I have played around with the non-free heroes and towers. For one, this game took the unusual step of making some towers and heroes unlock from the elite bonus stages. In previous games everything unlocked with the campaign only. So I have run through all the elite stages (just on Casual for ease) to get everything unlocked, and of course I also have to level all heroes up to 10 before starting my challenge, which I'm most of the way done with at the time of writing this.
Having done all that I have some initial thoughts on the game. I think the biggest thing I've noticed is that the pace has been slowed way down compared to Origins. Whereas campaign mode for most Origins maps usually took no more than 15 minutes, here they are taking 17, 18, or even 19 minutes. That may not sound like a big difference, but believe me you feel it while playing.
It's not a difference in waves, as both games stick to a standard 15 waves. Nor is it a difference in my play, as I feel I'm early-calling waves at about the same frequency as I did in Origins (which is to say most of them, so you can imagine how long it would take to do a map with no early calling). It's just this game is much more akin to the pace of the original Kingdom Rush game. I find myself missing the heightened intensity of Origins.
Another thing I've noticed is that they eliminated all of the environmental doodads to click on compared to Origins. I'm ambivalent as to this change. On the one hand it was nice in Origins to have more things to do, but I can't say I overly enjoyed any of them. They all felt either too weak (Magic Blossoms), too important (timing Venom Vines to eliminate Gloomy packs), or had too much RNG to be truly useful (Sorcerer's Stones).
Of course the biggest change in the gameplay of Vengeance is the towers. Instead of the level 4 upgrade of each tower being a choice between two specializations, now each tower's level 4 upgrade is just another upgrade of the tower's stats and an unlock of its special abilities. In exchange, there are now 18 towers total (9 free, 9 premium), and you select up to 5 to use at a given time. It may seem like it, but to me this isn't really that big of a change. If I were to go back through my Impossible Hero Challenge for Origins I'm pretty sure I'd be hard pressed to find maps where I used more than four different towers - and often it was just three. I'm pretty sure I never used six or more tower types at once, so I don't feel limited by only being able to select five. And since I've limited myself to the free towers I basically have just one more to choose from compared to the 8 specializations in previous games.
As with this walkthrough, for my Impossible Hero Challenge I intend to only use the free towers. I'm a little bummed because I've tried out the premium towers and some of them are amazing (which you would expect if you're having to pay for them). Let's just say that Blazing Gems and Swamp Things are ludicrously overpowered. I wish I could use them for the challenge, but it's important to me that my videos be applicable to people playing the free version on mobile. For the heroes it doesn't matter since I do both the free and the premium heroes in the challenge, but I don't want anyone saying "Well of course you can beat this map if you use Swamp Things!".
As for the heroes, I really like some of the premium heroes. I don't want to say much now, because I don't want to bias myself too much before starting the challenge proper, but let's just say I can already tell who's going to be the Phoenix and Wilbur of this game. On the flip side, I can also see who's going to be the Eridan and Razz and Rags as well :).
I liked the difficulty curve of this campaign. It's hard to rate the overall difficulty of the game since I haven't done any heroic or iron modes yet or the elite levels on anything but Casual, but I felt the campaign provided some decent challenges without ever being frustrating. I really liked the boss fights. The first one is very standard and nothing special, but I really loved Jokull's Nest and Denas's Castle. The special mechanics made them memorable, and they did a great job of communicating them to you purely visually.
The storytelling of the games has gradually been getting better ever since the first Kingdom Rush. Here I appreciated getting to know Vez'nan and King Denas better, so that it feels like there are actual personalities behind the events of the game. I especially liked (minor spoiler) facing off against heroes from the first game in the last three levels before Denas's Castle.
So my bottom line review is this: each game in the series has been an incremental improvement over the previous one, and Vengeance is no exception. At the end of the day you're just getting more Kingdom Rush. If you've loved the games so far, you'll love this one. If you haven't, there isn't anything groundbreakingly new in this one to change your mind.
With that, here is the walkthrough. I'm looking forward to starting my Impossible Hero Challenge series and I hope you'll join me for it.
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