Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Iron

Another iron mode, and another disappointment.  I'm afraid I have to chalk this one up to sheer bad design.  You're given two towers - Royal Archers and Paladin Covenants.  Because it's level 3, you're limited to level 3 towers, meaning no special abilities.  Given these constraints, what else are you going to do - what else even can you do - besides just spam Archers?  Sure, you might have had to build Paladins at some point to create a choke point if the enemies are getting too thick, but not even that happens on this map.  So it's literally just about impossible to lose this level, even on Impossible, and like I said, that's bad design.  I'm really sad Ironhide stuck with the iron mode design from Vengeance, because it didn't work there and I don't see it magically working here either.  Oh well, 'A's for everyone and we move on.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Iron

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Heroic

Again, nothing of substance to say about this one.  I can't say I feel like it's any more difficult than the campaign mode, which worries me.  One of the problems with Vengeance was that most heroic modes just felt like a shortened version of campaign mode, unlike the first three games where heroic mode definitely had a jump up in difficulty.  I'm hoping that's not the case here is Alliance, and I hope as we get further the heroic modes will provide a decent challenge (otherwise what is 'heroic' about them?).  In any case all 'A's again here and we move on to iron mode.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Campaign

Another campaign mode, another trivial, all-'A' map.  You'll notice that I did make a change how I do things in this one though.  In my very first post I talked about how Kosmyr was going to be my consistent second hero.  However, after some reflection, I realized that I need to change that a bit.  When doing Dark Army heroes, I really need my second hero to be Linerean.  That way all heroes get the exact same bonuses from the tier 2 upgrades in the fourth upgrade tree, making everything consistent.  To that end, when I'm doing a Linerean hero my second will be Kosmyr, and when I'm doing a Dark Army hero my second will be Broden.  Yes, Kosmyr is definitely more powerful and is already well on his way to taking the #1 spot in the final rankings, but Broden is not far behind.  Linerean heroes may have a slight edge when having to use the second hero for backup, but I'll try to account for that when assigning grades.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 3. The Heart of the Forest Campaign

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Heroic

These first few levels continue to be a formality - trivial and not needing grades - so we keep moving on.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Campaign

As to be expected, there's still no real challenge here and nothing worth giving grades on.  I almost decided to hand out 'A-'s to the heroes whom I had to summon reinforcements once for, but ultimately chose not to.  I don't think they should be punished just because I upped the difficulty by deciding to try to not use reinforcements.  It was only on heroes that don't have much in the way of AoE capability anyway, so that would be like downgrading a hero while doing a one-tower challenge with a tower type they don't particularly synergize with.  In any case, 'A's for everyone and we move on.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Campaign

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Iron

Sorry, nothing to see here.  All 'A's for all heroes and we move on to the next map.  I doubt we'll get grades on map 3, and probably not even on 4, but I'm hopeful that maybe we will on 5 on the heroic or iron mode possible.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 2. The Guardian Gate Iron

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Iron

Again it's of course no grades for this map, but what I do want to do is something I've done with my other challenges.  I'm going to guess what the final hero rankings will be based on my experience so far with the heroes, then at the end when I'm writing up the final report card entry I'll come back and compare to see how well I did.

With that said, here's what I think the final rankings will be:

1. Kosmyr
2. Broden
3. Lumenir
4. Anya
5. Warhead
6. Onagro
7. Therien
8. Raelyn
9. Grimson
10. Nyru
11. Vesper
12. Torres

You'll notice that I'm snubbing one of the dragons, Lumenir, slightly.  Dragons always rank high on the list of heroes in Kingdom Rush games, and this is no exception.  However, I'm really impressed with Broden so far, and slightly underwhelmed with Lumenir (for a dragon, anyway), so I'm guessing Broden will take the #2 spot.  There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Kosmyr will come out on top.

I'm loving Anya and Warhead so far, and I feel pretty confident that they'll take the fourth and fifth spots - although it may be Warhead who takes the lead.  As for the bottom half, I'm not feeling nearly as confident, and this is where I'm most likely to be wrong.  I feel like Therien and Grimson might be wildcards and could finish wildly different from my predictions.  I am, sadly, feeling pretty good about my choice for weakest hero, though.  Torres just doesn't have much going for him, and I would be shocked if he finished any higher.

At any rate, this is part of the reason I do these Impossible Hero Challenges, so I can definitively rate the heroes based on using them in every single map.  I hope you'll stick with me for the journey.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Iron

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Heroic

Nothing of note here, of course.  When the first level only has two enemies types and you're limited to level 1 towers, there's just not much they can really do to make heroic and iron modes actually challenging.  A trivial map and we move on to iron mode for more of the same.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Campaign

I apologize for the bit of hiatus the channel has been on.  Life has been unspeakably busy lately, and any video game time lately is time that has been guiltily borrowed from other things I should be doing.  Work - normally a stable, 8-5 kind of proposition for me - has been completely unhinged the last few weeks, and I've been working a lot of extra hours.  Let's just say a major project that went live has not had the smoothest of launches.  We've also been dealing with some major life changes that perhaps I'll talk about in the near future.  This is actually good stuff, but it's still up in the air and little premature to mention now.

In any case I've managed to get my Impossible Hero Challenge for Kingdom Rush Alliance started.  Skyrim will probably / hopefully return next week, but for now I know YouTube denizens are hungriest for Alliance content.  Fortunately the first few levels are always very easy, so I can crank them out well in advance, and hopefully a few weeks down the road life will have settled down a little bit - or possibly not!

I've decided on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday release schedule for this challenge, which equates to one map a week, or 16 weeks in total to get everything out.  That's a little more ambitious than how I finished my Vengeance challenge, which was just Tuesday / Thursday.  Even though time is precious right now, I've got to get cranking on all this, as they've already announced the first content update (probably a new hero and new levels) will be in October.  Then of course for reasons I don't completely understand, we're getting a new DLC for Vengeance sometime after that - around year's end would be my semi-educated guess.

To be perfectly honest, the biggest roadblock to getting this challenge started has not been the time issue, but just figuring out how I wanted to go about it.  I love the new two-hero system, but it's throwing off my standard operating procedure for these challenges.  I really didn't want to actively use two heroes at once, as it would make it too hard to judge how much each hero was contributing.  As I mentioned in my review, it's just not as simple as parking one hero in front of each exit like it might have been in previous games.

For a long time though I didn't see another way to do it, and had just about resigned myself to doing hero pairs.  After all, you start the game with Vesper and Raelyn and I used them to do my entire Veteran Walkthrough.  There are two more free heroes, Nyru and Grimson, so that made a natural pair, and of course the dragons make a natural pair.  Since in each of those cases there was one Linerean hero and one Dark Army hero, it seemed like a decent system, and I almost went with it before coming up with something else.  I was going to do Vesper / Raelyn, Nyru / Grimson, Torres / Therien, Anya / Onagro, Broden / Warhead, and Lumenir / Kosmyr if you're interested.

After giving it a lot of thought, what I settled on was pairing each hero with Kosmyr.  Kosmyr will sit in the back, not actively contributing unless absolutely necessary, while I try to complete the map with just the one hero.  Now it's not going to be possible to complete the harder maps in the game with just one hero, so part of my grading decisions will be based on how much I have to rely on Kosmyr.  When it's Kosmyr's turn I'll pair him with Broden.  Lumenir might be the obvious choice, but she has abilities she can use from a very long range, so Broden is the better choice for minimal involvement.

With that decided, we begin.  Now of course the first map is trivial even on Impossible, and completing it is just a formality.  I wish my OCD would let me skip it entirely, but my brain simply does not work that way, so enjoy 16 videos of heroes trivially blazing through...whatever the first enemies are called.  I honestly can't remember, and I don't feel like looking it up on the wiki.  They remind me very strongly of the initial gnoll enemies you fight in Origins - the bears that start appearing in the next stage even remind me of the large gnoll enemies whose name I also can't remember.

As usual, it will be a few maps before we start getting actual grades.  I know for a fact that in this game we'll have plenty of graded levels in the main campaign, unlike Vengeance where I think there were maybe two?  I'm happy that Ironhide has addressed the difficulty and balancing issues that Vengeance had.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 1. Sea of Trees Campaign