As promised, I now move on to Kingdom Rush Origins. As always, the goal is 100% with no lives lost in campaign mode. I'm enjoying this game a lot, and it's nice when each game in a series is an improvement over the previous one. But whereas Frontiers was a nice incremental step up from the original game, Origins feels like a much larger leap in terms of game quality.
First of all, I like the campaign in Origins better than the first two games in that I feel more like I'm actually following a story. Contrast this with the first game, whose plot was basically "someone is invading the kingdom and you have to stop them", and Frontiers where some I guy I didn't know stole a MacGuffin in order to do something bad and I had to chase after him, only to predictably catch up to him just as he was unleashing his Unspeakable Evil, which I then had to defeat. This isn't to say that there is a complex, engaging plot to this game - there isn't - but it is an improvement.
But the bigger issue is the gameplay itself. Now the game mechanics are almost identical to Frontiers. The only major change is the introduction of Hero Spells, which like Rain of Fire or Thunderbolt are powerful abilities on long cooldowns but are different for each hero. There is additionally a bigger emphasis on environmental aids on the maps - things you can click on to do damage to the enemy or some other beneficial effect. Between these two things it's nice to have more buttons to push compared to the first two games. Of course, this additional firepower means that enemy waves are generally more powerful as well, so overall the gameplay is more intense, which is very nice.
The next improvement besides the more intense gameplay is the better balance of the towers. The first two games suffered from having towers that were so powerful it felt pointless to build anything else. In the original Kingdom Rush, once you got the Tesla and Sorcerer towers that was pretty much all you used. You'd build Tesla towers to do general damage, and then Sorcerer towers if the map had super-powerful enemies that you either needed to tank with the Earth Elemental or insta-kill with Polymorph. I think the developers even realized this in that a lot of bonus level iron modes forbid artillery, which made them some of the toughest maps.
Frontiers was a mixed bag in this regard. The DWAARP and the Mecha weren't quite as all-powerful as the Tesla, but they were still really good and they each had separate use cases, which meant you used both, unlike the poor Big Bertha in Kingdom Rush which just couldn't compare to the Tesla. The magic towers were very powerful as well - the Necromancer tower especially so, and a lot of maps relied on building it in order to generate enough blockers, while the Archmage tower made a tremendous last line of defense. The developers also used enemy design to force you to rely on magic towers more ("Here's a bunch of powerful enemies with high armor - oh and this one is specifically immune to artillery damage"). However, the ranged towers were rather poorly designed, and since the artillery was so good you almost never used them unless you had to. And while you pretty much always have to build melee towers, the Assassins and Templars just felt overpriced and uninspired.
Enter Origins, and there is a new level of balance here that is refreshing. The artillery towers here are powerful and useful - but no more so than any of the other towers. In particular they don't completely overshadow the ranged towers, which are now really good. In fact subtle differences in map design mean that you'll use one, the other, or both in combination depending on the circumstances. The mix of enemies also ensures that you usually have to rely on both physical and magical damage to handle a level, and the magic towers are both fun and powerful. Finally, the melee towers have been significantly amped over the previous games, and instead of feeling like a begrudged necessity they now actually are enjoyable to build. The level 2 and 3 melee towers have a built-in ranged attack, which is amazing. Bladesingers are complete awesomesauce - arguably competing with Paladins in the first game - and Forest Keepers are pretty awesome also - although sadly you don't end up building them often because they really need to be supported by Bladesingers.
The final element that makes this game such a leap from the first two games is the heroes. The heroes in the first two games just didn't feel very fun to use. It was more an exercise in picking the right tool for the job. Do I need a heavy tank? Single target DPS? AoE DPS? You pretty quickly identified the hero that did the best at each of these roles and then just used that subset. In Origins each hero does still tend to fit a role of course, but their design is just so much more inspired and I find myself wanting to experiment with all the heroes just to have fun with them. The Hero Spell mechanic is a major part of this of course, and they're all really well designed and fun to use. But a lot of the other hero abilities are just more fun than in previous games as well - I love seeing Phoenix's Purification ability take out a leaked mob, or when Faustus' Teleport Rune activates at just the right time to catch the Twilight Golem that had broken through my defenses and give me another chance.
Well I've gushed enough for now - onto the walkthrough! There is an impossible mode for the game as well, but you have to complete the campaign first to unlock it. As such, this veteran walkthrough will just be the campaign. After that is finished I'll do a new playlist of all maps on impossible difficulty, as there's no point in doing the bonus stages twice. In any case, here's the veteran walkthrough:
