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
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