The new missions were a pleasant surprise to me. They show the future of Spiral Knights. Not just the knights themselves(OP Recruits), but for the game.
The first new mission is like a tech demo of what's to come. Larger surface overworlds, complex dungeons, detailed towns, and tough bosses. Not just going down, but going up, down, under, over.
The second new mission has innovation with Crystal Blocks, Missile Launchers, and Creative Compounds. A new type of crystal block was introduced, and it can only be broken when an adjacent crystal block was broken. There were the new missile launcher. Green ones can be activated by being attack by weapon. Yellow ones can be activated by being hit by missiles from an other missile launcher. Compounds were nice. The last room has a split between two smaller rooms that had switches needed to unlock the exit. It does have the problems with lack of loot and the hoards of mini monsters, but those problems aren't so bad.
The third new mission prepares knights with the swarm. The elite difficulty's cheap extra monster attack and health made the last level too hard.
The new missions were great(Except for the last one, sorry), and I hope that whatever Three Rings comes up with next will be awesome.
-Pery
I just finished the new missions. I liked them each but I found them a bit difficult. That may just be me though, I haven't played in a while so I'm a bit rusty.
The Knight training mission is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. We finally get to see a bit more of friendly (and actually useful) NPC interaction. The AI is clearly recycled but I can live with it. After all, those recruits are much better than most other standard Knights we find. I only wish we had a longer experience with them. The rest of the mission had some neat stuff as far as dungeon crawling goes, but nothing too special.
The new blocks and rockets in the second mission are creative. I can see a lot of new puzzles being created with them. The mission itself was also refreshing to see. A bit like a Tier 3 version of the Battle Sprite rescue mission new players go through early on in the game. Wasn't too hard but the rockets exploding all over the place caught me off guard a few times.
The third mission gives me some mixed thoughts. We have another sight of the Swarm and possibly connections to Herex. I find it funny how so many Recon Rangers got killed off by it though. I didn't have many problems on elite mode myself. Then again, I was playing solo and had a Nitronome equipped at the time so I just cake walked the entire thing. However, I feel like this is taking away a big part of what Shadow Lairs had to offer. Sure, we won't get tons of radiants, rare armors, or corrupted boss stages in this mission, but that's not what bothers me. The Unknown Passage is what I loved the most about the Shadow Lairs. Such an incredibly creepy place made to force Knights to really prove their abilities via an all out onslaught at the end of something that was already unlike anything else in the game to begin with. But now that we can just pop in whenever we want to by just by going through two regualar floors, the feel that I absolutely must make it at all costs just isn't there.
Overall, I liked the missions. They may be mostly demonstrations of what is to come, but they do a good job showing it. I can only hope we can get more like these out a bit sooner. Seems like promos are slowing down and more content is coming out. I'm glad this game is finally coming out of a stall.