1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Playing this thing on a high 30s ice/axe tanker. Diff 2 so I get some boss fights.

   —

   Oh boy. Fighting Longbow.

   Nah, it’s not your fault, we really need another hero-type group that shows up at all levels, is all.

   Nice custom dude. Nice attempt at distractoglowies, but the comps I was looking for showed up in the first two rooms. I clicked anyway and had a laugh.

   …okay. That’s kind of interesting. Wonder how the contact’s going to react to this.

   —

   I’m not surprised he’s suspicious. Alright, then. PRISON BREAK!

   I did love this map the first time through, and it’s not bad on the replays either.

   Hmm. So I’m expendable, eh? Alright, I think I know what the final boss is going to be, here.

   —

   Crey. I’m getting a bad feeling about this. A genetic duplicate-y kind of feeling.

   Ooh, chaos coming in the door. For some reason the Crey seem to be handing the customs their asses.

   Oog. Yeah. I am not relishing this debriefing. It’s going to be ugly.

   Nice work with the agent blocking the path back to the door, but check his alignment - some of his Longbow were firing at the wandering patrols that silently spawned.

   —

   Well, that’s certainly not an ominous setup.

   Is this gonna be the damn asylum?

   Oh. Oh, no. This is gonna be awesome!

   Let’s trip the psyche fantastic!

   Ah, the stages of grief, or whatever the technical name is.

   And they actually show up in order! Either the mission is being considerate or there was a lot of time spent tricking the placement.

   …oh dear. Yes, that’s a reasonable response from the last phase there.

   So I wonder what all that did. Ah well, Onyx was mindblasting right there with me and if there was a problem she would have said something.

   —

   Well, things seem to have been handled alright… but while I was gone from the land of the living apparently things have gone far, far south.

   Might as well try to help this guy. He needs to have a face-to-face with his daughter at least.

   Wow. And I almost don’t make it on time. I jump through the map, my ally radar pinging on some captive operatives and battles going on, free him at the back…

   Targeting Drone boosts perception, which means it boosts aggro radius, and he didn’t want to break off a fight to come follow me. It’s due mostly to runners moving in fortunate directions that I was able to get him to the exit with seconds to spare. If he’d aggroed one or two more groups it wouldn’t have been possible.

   Can you boost the requirement just a little bit? 15 minutes isn’t unreasonable and will probably prevent this mission from failing because of bad luck.

   —

   Storyline - ***. Feels rather severely truncated, honestly. This guy spends all the time building a private army, it gets to fight one skirmish in the lobby of a Crey building, and then suddenly it’s in shambles and the Freedom Corps are raiding his HQ? Also, what happened to the other two colors? What was this unit that got lost during the first Rikti War?

   Design - *****. Great custom work pretty much all around. The customs are pretty well done, what little I saw of them. Maps make good sense, and you didn’t fall into that old asylum trap.

   Gameplay - ****. I spent most of that last mission dreading that my ally might run into a knot of mans and chain aggro himself beyond any hope of exfiltration.

   Detail - *****. Nicely proofed text, bonus descriptions on everything, even some enjoyable extra bits scattered through the missions.

   Overall - ****. An arc that does a lot of good things, but that tries to cram ideas too close together. Is this maybe a 7 or 8 mission arc that got pared down to 5?

   Posted on June 16th, 2009 at 9:47 pm