To be honest I kind of find the Rising Tides elite campaign to be a bit tedious, but the Shadowmoon campaign we start today is my favorite in the game. I'm a little disappointed in some of the asset reuse from the original Kingdom Rush (I could have happily never dealt with Abominations ever again), but overall it is incredibly challenging, perfectly walking that line of being fun without frustrating.
Bonesburg starts off as a bit of a poverty map - you don't start with much gold, and while Zombies appear in large numbers, at 7 gold per kill it still takes a ridiculous number of them to accumulate anything. But that's part of the interesting challenge here - if you can survive the first two or three waves, you're probably okay until around wave 12 when the waves of Abominations start getting ridiculous.
Necessity dictates a lot of our tower choice here. While I spent the main campaign singing the praises of the Mecha, for Zombies and Abominations it's just not enough, and we return to the trusty DWAARP. Placing them on corners where they cover a huge amount of path, we guarantee both of these slow enemies will spend a huge amount of time getting pounded by them, as well as taking at least a couple of Furnace Blasts.
The map mixes things up though by throwing in Bats, so we can't go all-in on AoE. We fill all remaining spots with Archers, except one which will be a Necromancer to generate some extra blocking for us down the line. I found the most effective strategy for this map to be upgrading all towers a single level at a time, as opposed to rushing a level 4 tower early.
Wave 13 is when things become make-or-break. The Abominations that appear from the top don't have a lot of path through your defenses to go through and thus need a lot of attention, but at the same time you have an absurd number of Abominations and Werewolves coming in from the left. Careful use of Rain of Fire is critical here to keep things manageable. If you can survive through wave 14 you should be home free, as wave 15 is more of the same but you should have a more than adequate build to deal with it now.
I will say this is one of the maps where I could have greatly reduced the difficulty by not insta-calling the next waves, but I decided to persevere and find a solution while still doing that. I'm proud of the fact that for this entire challenge - with the exception of just a single map I believe - I've insta-called every next wave.
Impressions
This map asks a lot of the heroes, unlike most other maps in the game. For a great deal of the map they will be in "putting out fires" mode, racing from hotspot to hotspot on the battlefield. Whether it's killing stray Zombies that appear from the sidelines or helping group up enemies for a Rain of Fire, they don't get a moment's rest. So it was surprising to me that the grades weren't nearly as bad as I might have guessed.
We only have two 'C's for the map, and they are unsurprisingly Mirage and Dierdre. We need a lot of DPS on this map to take down the ridiculous number of enemies, and of course these two just don't have it.
Most of the 'B' crew shouldn't be surprising, although Grawl sadly does join them. Mobility is another key metric for our heroes here, and he just does not have it. Also, due to his Bastion ability he constantly is losing DPS as you move him around the map. But it's still a testament to his general greatness that he only earns a 'B' and nothing worse.
Final Grades
- Alric - A
- Mirage - C
- Captain Blackthorne - A
- Cronan - B
- Bruxa - A
- Nivus - B
- Dierdre - C
- Grawl - B
- Sha'tra - A
- Ashbite - A
- Karkinos - A
- Kutsao - B
- Dante - A
- Bonehart - A
- Kahz - A
- Saitam - A
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