So in a major first, I just posted my first ever voiced video, doing a review of Kingdom Rush Alliance. I'll post the link here, but I also thought I would post the script of the video for those who prefer reading.
Transcript:
Introduction
Hello everyone, 40/30 Gaming here with my first ever voiced video. Now I apologize to those of you who were holding out hope that maybe this channel was run by a hot woman and are disappointed to find out that, in fact, it’s just another channel done by a fat, middle-aged man. Sorry, life is full of disappointments. So what prompted me to finally buy a microphone and do a voice reveal? Well, it’s the release of Kingdom Rush Alliance, and I wanted to share my review of the game with you. Now I was going to write a review on my blog that accompanies my YouTube channel, but nobody reads my blog, so I wanted to do a video as well because I am excited about this game.
Now while I’m talking about the game I’ll be playing some recorded footage from my Veteran campaign walkthrough, and the link to that playlist will be on-screen as well. However, I’ll be keeping it to the early levels only that the devs have already shown as I don’t want to spoil anything for you.
I’d like to start out by saying a big thanks to Ironhide. They provided me with an early access copy of the game a few weeks ago. Now Ironhide has contacted me a couple of times in the past, but I wasn’t expecting anything in regards to Alliance. After all, my channel does still have less than 1,000 subscribers. So a big thanks to them for not overlooking me when it would have been really easy to do so, and because of that I’m able to provide this day one content for you.
Heroes
So on to the review. What do I think of Kingdom Rush Alliance? Well, quite frankly it’s awesome and I love it. I know this is a cliche phrase to use, but it really is a return to form for the series. If you’re not familiar with the franchise, then you should know that the previous game, Kingdom Rush Vengeance, has a reputation in the community for being the quote-unquote “worst” game of the series. Now let me clarify up front that Vengeance is not and was never a bad game, and I think most of the fanbase would agree, but it did suffer in comparison to other games in the series. I’m not going to go into the full reasons why here - that would be a whole video in itself - but in short, Ironhide stumbled a bit in terms of tuning the difficulty, the pacing, and the hero and tower balance, as well as with the introduction of a new game engine that was not quite as smooth as the engine used for the first three games.
Well the good news is that Ironhide listened to the community’s feedback, and Alliance is just about everything we could want in a new game. So let’s get into the details of what’s changed and improved, and let’s start with the biggest change for the series: you now get to use two heroes. Yes, the game is now balanced around you having two heroes at once, and yes, having two heroes does mean you get two hero spells to use. The tradeoff for this is that there is no longer a spell like Rain of Fire, Thunderbolt, or Soul Impact from previous games. It now seems in retrospect that the weakness of Soul Impact in Vengeance that many people, myself included, complained about might have actually been Ironhide weaning us off gameplay that relied on a big impact spell. Personally I loved having a big “save butt” spell, but I understand the need for the change.
So what’s it like to have two heroes at once? Well, to me it’s a lot of fun, but it is also a lot of management. Now I’ve seen people on the Kingdom Rush Reddit expressing fears that Alliance would be too micro-heavy, so let’s just jump into the micro issue.
The Kingdom Rush series has never been especially heavy on micro. If you’re not sure what I mean by micro, it’s just short for micromanagement, and refers to things like having to precisely control your hero, like making sure they are blocking a specific enemy, or maybe positioning them to make sure that a big ability that’s about to come off cooldown, like an insta-kill, is used on the right enemy. For most of the Kingdom Rush series you don’t have to do this and can just park your hero at your main choke point and let them support it. Only on the hardest challenges does it really ever become something you need to do. In the first game you might need to maximize the combat your hero gets into to level them up as fast as possible, and in later games you might need to lane dance your hero on maps with multiple exits.
In Alliance you can definitely tell that Ironhide has balanced the game around having two heroes (and two hero spells). For one thing, from stage 3 on, every map has at least two exits. But I also didn’t find it as simple as just parking one hero in front of each exit. Now I will caveat what I’m about to say a little bit. I’ve finished the campaign on Veteran, but that’s starting from scratch with level 1 heroes and no upgrades. I’ve had limited time so far playing on Impossible with level 10 heroes and all upgrades, so the actual endgame experience might be a little different, but what I’ve found so far is that I am having to actively manage my heroes a lot more compared to previous games - in other words, micro is a bigger deal now.
Now personally I like this. Like I mentioned before, in previous games only for the hardest challenges do you really have to worry about micro too much. The rest of the time playing a level largely just consists of just sitting around waiting to earn enough gold for the next upgrade in your build plan. So I like it because it makes the gameplay much more engaging. However, I can understand some people potentially not liking this, having the attitude of “I came here to play a tower defense game - keyword tower - not a MOBA” or something like that. So this is definitely a case of your mileage may vary, but so far I’m loving it.
Of course what helps make this manageable is the fact that Ironhide added hotkeys to select both heroes in the Steam version. The ‘4’ and ‘5’ keys select the first and second heroes respectively, and it’s a major help in managing everything. Now I do wish Ironhide would allow hotkey remapping, but maybe we’ll get that in Kingdom Rush 6.
What do I think of the heroes themselves? Well I haven’t gotten to play with them all extensively just yet, but what I’ve seen so far I like. I especially like that the two heroes you start with, Vesper and Raelyn, feel really useful. In Vengeance the first three heroes - which are also the heroes that are free on the mobile version - just felt super weak. Now of course you expect free heroes to be bottom tier compared to heroes you have to pay for, but they should still feel somewhat useful. In Vengeance it just felt like they all hit like wet noodles, but here in Alliance it feels like they really get work done.
Now I haven’t played with every hero enough to really go through and comment on them all, but I will say that I have played with the two dragon heroes a little bit, and I’m happy to say that they feel powerful without feeling completely OP like the dragons in Vengeance were, so I’m getting a good feeling - so far at least - that Ironhide has done a good job of balancing the heroes. I will be starting an Impossible Hero Challenge series for Alliance soon, though, and we’ll find out for sure.
Towers
So we’ve covered the heroes, now what about the other major aspect of the game - the towers? First off, Alliance does use the same tower selection system that Vengeance did. I know I’ve seen some people complain about this, but personally I like it and felt it was one of the better things Vengeance introduced. Instead of being limited to 8 different towers like we were in the first three games, now we can have as many towers as Ironhide wants to create. I know some people don’t like being limited to only five tower types at a time, but let’s be honest, there’s never been a level in any Kingdom Rush game where you really needed six or more different types of towers.
As for the towers themselves, I’ve tried all of them at least a little bit, so I’ll give my hot takes on each of them really quickly, but I reserve the right to change my opinion as I get more experience. Let’s go over the ten free towers first:
The first tower is Royal Archers, which you start the game with. They’re very basic and a little boring, but they do decent work.
The second tower you start the game with is the Paladin Covenant. Again, basic and boring, but you’ll be relying on them a lot, as they’re the only 3-figure barracks in the game and the only one geared towards hardcore tanking.
The third starting tower is the Arcane Wizard, and it’s basically the same as the Arcane Wizard from the original Kingdom Rush. It even has the same insta-kill ability. However, instead of the teleporting ability, it’s second ability is now a tower buff like the Melting Furnace from Vengeance, so overall it’s pretty awesome.
The Tricannon is the first artillery tower you get. It shoots three projectiles at up to three different targets that all do AoE damage. At level 1 it seems pretty pitiful, but fully upgraded it’s a monster of a tower and was a mainstay of my Veteran walkthrough. It’s not as OP as the Tesla or the Mecha, but still really good.
The Ballista Outpost is an alternative for the Royal Archers. If it’s really better I haven’t been able to tell so far in my limited experience. I need to do a deep dive on the numbers for both towers to calculate their DPS and gold efficiency.
The Arborean Emissary is a magic tower that has faster but weaker shots than the Arcane Wizard. So far I haven’t been very impressed with it, but its shots do debuff its targets, I believe causing them to take additional damage. Again I need to examine the numbers on this one before making a final judgment.
The Demon Pit is an interesting melee tower. Instead of fielding a fixed number of blockers like normal melee towers, imps keep coming out one at a time as long as there are enemies in range. The idea is that the imps have fairly low health, and when they die they do AoE damage and a stun. This isn’t the kind of tower you put at your choke point where you need reliable blocking, but something you’d put forward on the path to try to weaken and thin out incoming enemies. It’s fun to use, but the jury’s still out on how useful it actually is.
The Dwarven Flamespitter is the other available artillery tower. In my limited experience I liked the Tricannon better, but I feel I need to work with it a lot more to find its proper niche.
Rocket Gunners are fantastic and one of the most fun towers so far. They’re a mixture of a melee and a physical ranged DPS tower. Their upgrades give them AoE capability as well as an insta-kill. I’m not for sure yet, but I’m kind of expecting them to become a staple tower going forward.
Finally, if you’ve played the other games in the series, then imagine if the Tesla and the Blazing Gem had a baby. That baby would be the Eldritch Channeler. It starts out working much like the Blazing Gem, but unlike the Gem there is a limit to how long it will attack a single enemy before a short cooldown. Then one of its upgrades, which I feel is practically a must, allows the beam to spread to up to three other enemies, making it work much like the Tesla’s main attack. I know the idea of Tesla plus Blazing Gem sounds incredibly OP, but it’s really not. It’s powerful, but not overwhelmingly so like those two towers were.
Now let’s take a look at the five premium towers (i.e., you have to pay for them on mobile):
First is the Battle Brewmasters, which are another artillery tower. They’re at least comparable if not better than the Tricannon, but I haven’t gotten to try them as much as I’d like so far.
Next up we have the Necromancer returning from Kingdom Rush Frontiers, and it’s just as awesome as you remember. This is now the tower that can store charges, which has become a thing in every Kingdom Rush game since the Archmage tower in Frontiers. The special abilities are different from those in Frontiers, and I think they’re even better. The Death Rider ability is especially awesome.
Dune Sentinels I feel are a callback to the Goblirangs of Vengeance, in that their projectiles can hit multiple enemies, but here they bounce between enemies instead of relying on them all to be in a line. I feel like this will become the go-to physical damage tower unless it’s overtaken by the Rocket Gunners, I’m not sure yet.
The Elven Stargazer is another magic tower, but it’s already facing some stiff competition from the Arcane Wizard, Eldritch Channeler, and Necromancer towers. So far I can’t say I really feel like it’s superior to them, but again this is a case where I need to crunch the numbers.
Finally we have the Grim Wraiths, which is the tower that can teleport around the map that everyone’s been excited about. The tower only has two figures, and kind of like the Elite Harassers from Vengeance, this is definitely more of a DPS-focused melee tower than a tanking-focused one. The Wraiths seem cool, but I haven’t yet been able to explore how useful the teleporting ability will be strategy-wise.
The thing I will say about the premium towers is that, so far at least, I don’t feel they obviously stand head and shoulders above the free towers. In Vengeance the premium towers were extremely powerful, even to the point of being broken like the Blazing Gem, at least in general (I’m looking at you, Deep Devil’s Reef). Now I’m glad the towers here don’t feel OP, as otherwise it would feel like the series was slipping towards pay to win mechanics, but at the same time with towers like the Brewmaster and the Stargazer I’m worried that Ironhide has maybe not created enough of a value proposition to incentivize people to buy them. I could be horribly wrong. Like I’ve said, my experience is still very limited and I need to do DPS and gold efficiency calculations on a lot of the towers to really understand them. As I said, this was just my hot takes on the towers after a very short period of using them. I’d love to come back later and do an in-depth video on them, but that will probably depend on how well this video does.
Engine
We’ve talked about the heroes, we’ve talked about the towers, now let’s talk about the game engine. As I mentioned, Alliance is based on the game engine from the first three Kingdom Rush games, not the new one introduced in Vengeance. Now Vengeance’s engine wasn’t bad, but it did have some minor issues. Sometimes clicks wouldn’t register or would select the wrong thing. It wasn’t much, but just enough to create a slight friction when playing the game sometimes. With the return to the previous game engine I’m happy to say I haven’t encountered any issues like that at all in Alliance.
But it’s not just about lack of bugs. Ironhide has taken the best of both worlds when it comes to game mechanics. Let’s take hero abilities. One of the changes in Vengeance’s engine was that hero abilities went on cooldown as soon as the animation started. This was really annoying as it meant that if you happened to move your hero just as they were starting to use an ability, it canceled the ability but still put it on cooldown, completely wasting it. Well with the engine change, we’re back to the way things were in the first three games where hero abilities do not go on cooldown until the animation ends, meaning they can’t be wasted.
But Vengeance also had a nice improvement over the previous engine in terms of tower mechanics. In the first three games, upgrading a tower would reset its firing cooldown, which meant you were always waiting to upgrade towers right after they fired to minimize downtime. In Vengeance, when a tower was upgraded it would immediately fire, so you never had to worry about missing out on a shot. Well I’m happy to say that Ironhide merged this feature back into the original engine. Now if you play the same game as before and upgrade towers right after they fire, you can get back to back shots off with them, which is nice.
But it still doesn’t end there. When it comes to tower special abilities, they fire for the first time as soon as you purchase them, and this is new to any Kingdom Rush game. You may recall that I said the Arcane Wizard has an insta-kill, so yes, it goes off as soon as you purchase it, giving you a semi-controllable insta-kill with a tower. Now this doesn’t apply to purchasing levels two and three of an ability, but still, it does allow you to pull off some cool plays. In particular, the Arcane Wizard’s insta-kill can now be used on bosses, where it does massive damage instead. You can use this fact to ambush bosses when the fight begins. Just surround the spot where the boss appears with Arcane Wizards, save up some money, and as soon as the boss fight begins buy the insta-kill. They’ll get hit with massive damage. I actually use this strategy in my video where I show how to get the Tangled Up achievement on the first boss, which I’m linking to right now so you can see it in action.
But in terms of engine mechanics I’ve saved the best for last. Finally, after five games in the series, you can move reinforcements. Yes, it’s amazing. You just click on them and then click where you want them to go. I don’t know why it took five games to get this feature, but I’m so happy I don’t care at this point. Even better, it’s not just reinforcements. Raelyn’s Dark Knight and Anya’s ghost of Dante can also be moved this way as well. Ironhide has even added a hotkey for moving units like this on the Steam version. The ‘6’ key selects reinforcements to allow you to move them. Now if you have both reinforcements and a Dark Knight on the field at the same time, it seems like the ‘6’ key is supposed to select the most recent unit, but I have seen some buggy behavior here. Now this doesn’t apply to quite everything. The builders summoned by Torres, for example, can’t be moved this way, nor can spawned units like the imps and skeletons spawned by the Demon Pit and Necromancer respectively. Still, it’s a massive quality of life improvement.
Upgrades
I also want to talk about the upgrades in the game, because there are some flashes of brilliance here that I hope Ironhide doubles down on in the future. The upgrade system is again very much like the one from Vengeance. There’s a tree for towers, a tree for heroes, a tree for reinforcements, and a fourth tree we’ll talk about in a second. Most of the upgrades are not terribly remarkable. Just like in previous Kingdom Rush games, most upgrades are just passive stat bonuses to one thing or another that are certainly nice to have, but that don’t really affect your strategy or gameplay in any way.
There are a couple of exceptions, though. Just like in Vengeance, in the reinforcement tree you have branching paths, one of which makes reinforcements better at melee, while the other gives them a ranged attack. And just like in Vengeance, the right choice is the ranged attack.
But it’s the fourth tree I want to talk about in more detail. In Vengeance the fourth tree was dedicated to your Soul Impact spell. Since there is no major spell in Alliance, this tree now has a different character. Now it largely focuses on giving you different buffs depending on your hero and tower selection.
One thing I didn’t discuss when talking about heroes and towers is the fact that they’re all classified as either Linerean or Dark Army. With the 12 heroes there are six of each, and with the 15 towers there are 8 Linerean and 7 Dark Army. The final upgrade tree grants buffs based on your “allegiance”, so to speak, to one side or the other. For instance, on the bottom row are upgrades that increase hero health based on how many Linerean towers you build, as well as increase hero damage based on how many Dark Army towers you build. In the second row you have two similar upgrades. For each Linerean hero you select, it decreases the cost of towers, while for each Dark Army hero you select, it increases your towers’ damage.
Now these are interesting to be sure, but I doubt that they’re really going to change anyone’s hero selection or build plan solely based on them. You’re probably going to select the heroes you want to use regardless of what upgrade buffs you might get, and similarly your build plan is probably not going to change much based on the bonuses. If you’re interested in the numbers, your heroes gain 4% of their base health for each Linerean tower you build, and while I’m not sure of the exact formula, it looks like they gain about a half a point of damage for each Dark Army tower you build. Similarly, for each Linerean hero you select, it reduces the cost of each level of a tower by 5 gold (although it doesn’t affect special abilities), and for each Dark Army hero you select it increases the tower damage by 5% of the base value. So altogether you could get 10 gold off tower costs by going with two Linerean heroes, or 10% extra tower damage by going with two Dark Army heroes.
Like I said, those numbers are okay, but not game changing, and this is where I feel there was a bit of a missed opportunity. I wish Ironhide had leaned a lot harder into this and gave us something that really forced us to make hard choices about our hero and tower selection. I wish there were some really significant bonuses that tempted you to go either all Linerean or all Dark Army, and perhaps some kind of mechanic where if you split it down the middle, levels might be harder at first, but you have the chance to unlock some sort of really powerful synergy between the two factions if you can survive long enough. In other words, I’m longing for upgrades that really change how I play the game.
And that brings me to the final upgrades I want to discuss, which are the capstone upgrades in this tree. The Dark Army one, Ominous Curse, slows all enemies on the screen, while the Linerean one, Blessing of Vitality, causes Linerean hero spells to now heal and respawn all your units. Ominous Curse is nice, but Blessing of Vitality is a serious game changer. Once I got this upgrade, I found myself considering when to use a Linerean hero spell not just based on what the spell itself did, but also based on getting this secondary effect. There are some major enemies in later stages that require serious tanking, and having a global heal and respawn spell is incredible. I love this upgrade not just for what it does, but also because it changes how I play, and man, do I want more of this.
Above I talked about how the Kingdom Rush series has struggled with having meaningful upgrades. When most upgrades are just passive bonuses, it doesn’t really change how you play the game, it just alters the baseline of stats. Once you’re playing endgame and have all the upgrades, you never think about the fact that your towers have 10% extra damage or whatever - that just becomes the norm of how powerful the towers are. But having upgrades that actually change how you play the game is far more interesting, and that’s what Ironhide has touched on here. So Ironhide, if you’re watching this, please go harder on this in the future. Give us upgrades that really alter the gameplay, and give us more mutually exclusive branching paths that force us to make hard choices about how we want to play. I know it’s one more thing to have to balance, but it has the potential to really expand the depth of the game.
Also, if you’re still listening Ironhide, I hate to end this section on a down note, but please get rid of upgrades that involve RNG. In Vengeance it was very annoying that your experience on the harder challenges could be greatly influenced by how often you got Demon Lords when summoning reinforcements. In Alliance there’s now an upgrade called Favorite Customer, where special abilities on towers have a chance to cost a lot less when purchasing them. This again is going to lead inconsistent experiences. One time you play a level you may get lucky with it several times in a row, allowing you to get further ahead in your build plan because you have more gold, while other times it may never proc, making things more difficult. I think I can safely speak for a lot of players in saying that RNG-based difficulty is rarely ever fun.
Gameplay
So we’ve talked about the components of the game - the heroes, the towers, the engine, the upgrades - but how does it all come together? Is the gameplay fun and challenging? Overall my answer is yes. Earlier I mentioned the problems with difficulty and pacing that Vengeance had, and I’m happy to say that I feel like Ironhide has really addressed them here. Now once again let me hedge my remarks, as I still have limited experience on Impossible difficulty, plus we’ll have to see what the bonus levels are like once Ironhide releases them.
Just like previous games, the game is divided into three acts, each of which ends in a boss fight. Act one was alright, although it felt a bit like an extended tutorial, but the game really hit its stride in act 2 where the difficulty also notably increased. In act 2 you start fighting the cult itself, and I love here how all the cult enemies are callbacks to Legends of Kingdom Rush. The mechanics of the enemies are lifted straight out of Legends, which I love, since I think Legends is a criminally underrated game.
Act 3 really ups the difficulty even more, and the theme of the enemy types here is containment - there are a lot of enemies you have to “contain”, so to speak, lest they get out of hand and overwhelm you. I don’t want to go into too much detail as I don’t want to spoil the game mechanics for you. Similarly I’m not going to spoil any boss fights, but I really loved the end of the game. The final boss fight is possibly the toughest one yet in the series - yes, even harder than Umbra. Let’s just say there’s a LOT of RNG involved, which is frustrating, but at the same time adds a lot of challenge and replayability.
What about the other elements, things like graphics and sound, story, etc? I’ve never been a graphics and sound snob, so my bar is pretty low when it comes to such things, but I think they’ve done an excellent job here. The art is colorful and vibrant, the soundtrack is moody and tense, matching the story, and they’ve really taken things up a notch with the animations. In particular I have to call out the hero Grimson. His animations are simply fantastic, and I love playing with him just to watch them if nothing else.
As for the story, well, story has never been a huge part of Kingdom Rush games, and this one is as good as any of them. I know the devs tried to explain how the story of this one relates to the story of Legends of Kingdom Rush, but I’m not really sure I understand it. In any case, rest assured that the ending definitely leaves the path for a sequel open.
Conclusion
So in conclusion I really like Alliance and feel it is a worthy addition to the franchise. However, I am reserving final judgment for now, since the true test of the game comes when playing the endgame - that is, playing on Impossible difficulty with level 10 heroes and all upgrades, which I’ve had very little time to do just yet. But as I mentioned, I’ll be starting my Impossible Hero Challenge series soon, which will give me all the experience I need to render a final verdict on both the heroes as well as the game as a whole. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do it just yet with the new two hero system. I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do - I’m not going to do every possible combination of the heroes. With 12 heroes that’s already 66 combinations, and you know we’re going to get several more heroes as time goes on. I just don’t have the time or the patience for that.
I feel confident that Ironhide is on the right track with Alliance, and I can definitely recommend it. I’m looking forward to the future updates, and I’m looking forward to getting my Challenge series started. If you’re new to the channel I hope you’ll return for that, and if this video gets a positive response then I’ll probably plan other voiced videos in the future. I’m going to keep my commitment that my gameplay videos stay voiceover free, but I may do other kinds of videos like a tower review as I mentioned earlier. Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll see you around.
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