5 Responses

1. Mister Squinty Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Excellent two tier custom villain group, tight, tense pacing. Superb map selection sets a spooky, creepy tone. Long hostage lead out on first mission only ding on gameplay, everything else very solid.

   Posted on April 26th, 2009 at 10:35 am

2. Captain Meson Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Sadly, for a horror story, which ought to be played solo, this is just not balanced. A pile of ambushes while escorting is both too difficult and not fun - and worse, getting killed while escorting causes bugs in the counts and makes the mission not finishable. I had no interest in repeating the frustration, so I’m afraid what looked like a fine story died before the first mission was over.

   A word to the wise: If you expect a story to be playable and fun for anything but a tank, brute, or scrapper, don’t put in hard ambushes.

   This story has so much potential that I may get my friends to come along and give it a try, just to see if the great creepy feeling is as well done all the way through. But solo-unfriendly and horror don’t mix very well.

   Posted on April 27th, 2009 at 1:15 am

3. TeChameleon Says:

   Quick comment from the author regarding Captain Meson’s difficulties: from what you’re saying, the ‘escort bug’ you ran into is actually a recurring difficulty I keep having with the navbar text, not an actual game glitch — the mission should have been completable without any great difficulty.

   And… “playable and fun for anything but” melee ATs? I did pretty much all of of my testing on my purple-less blaster, so it’s not THAT squishy-unfriendly.

   Posted on May 26th, 2009 at 4:42 am

4. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running on a low-40s DB/Fire brute. Diff 2 to fight bosses as bosses. Mission Engineer just keeps coming closer.

   —

   …good lord that kid’s got a freaky face. The combination of the angled eyes and the hair make it look like someone grabbed the top of his head and pulled.

   “The other two”? Kid, you and the HUD need to have a little chat.

   …wait, is that one custom lieut using Psychic Wail? There’s this “end recovery debuff” icon that shows up after the PBAoE.

   …and the HUD goes from “Get the last kid out” to “2 children to find and lead to safety”?

   Oh, I see. That other kid… showed up as a chained objective? Why isn’t he just on the map to start with? (also the system message checks assumes he’s spawning on escort complete but he really spawns on rescue)

   …and the custom minions are using Shockwave and Pendulum? Lordy. That explains why I’m getting shot full of more holes than a sponge at an augur convention.

   —

   …um, kid? How exactly am I supposed to go diving into the psychic plane? I don’t exactly keep a portal under my bed next to the questionable magazines.

   This office is, I’m pretty sure, not in psychic space.

   …yeah, it’s psychic wail. Lieutenants with a tier 9 psychic blast that stuns.

   I search the upper offices for a “strange feeling above”… after I’m halfway through the caves and realize there should be something upstairs. It’s hidden behind a wall, and…

   Oh. Hi, AV. Good thing I made my own luck.

   …wait, I’m inside Mother Mayhem’s mind? How the baloney sandwiches did that happen?

   —

   I guess given that this kid can rip open portals to the asylum like it ain’t no thang, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

   But I do dislike the asylum, there’s only one variation on the map and it’s frustrating to navigate because of all the tiny walls.

   OH COME ON NOW. Lietuenants with rage! They always hit me and do double damage and seem to gain resistance to lethal for some inexplicable reason and IT DOESN’T WEAR OFF in anything like a reasonable timeframe!

   And the tier 9 psychic blaster lieuts also get confuse now, and there’s another one with Deceive and buildup.

   Yeah, uh… why exactly am I bothering with fighting Mother Mayhem? And what’s with this whole puppet business? You’d think she’d be able to, y’know, READ MY MIND AND KNOW WHY I’M HERE?

   Anyway, after burning all my insps trying to survive the final boss’s… ESCORT… I am in no shape to fight another AV. Good thing they sell inspirations right outside the hospital.

   —

   Storyline - ***. I have no idea how I managed to find the second mission or what it really represents, and the SECOND fight with Mother Mayhem in as many missions just feels glued-on and unnecessary.

   Design - *****. Visually the custom enemies are very distinct and definitely built to look scary and otherworldly.

   Gameplay - *. But their power selection is unnecessarily brutal. Rage? Psychic wail? Two confuses? Tier 9 melee powers on minions? And the second AV fight shows up as a surprise when I’m tapped out from the first.

   Detail - ****. I’m betting that space issues kept the missions pretty sparse - there were an awful lot of customs. But sparse is sparse, though everything certainly fit.

   Overall - ***. Leave Mama M out of the third mission or give her a really, really GOOD reason to be there, and for cryin’ out loud psychic wail on a lieutenant is murder.

   Posted on June 7th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

5. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   http://cohmissionreview.com/2009/04/small-fears/ Small Fears (12285)

   @GlaziusF

   Rerunning this on the original DB/Fire brute, now at the level cap, +1/x2 with bosses on.

   —

   Hmm. That big whack of bold yellow text seems like it might make a nice mission start clue, as it doesn’t come from the contact necessarily.

   Okay. So there’s a minion here with Fearsome Stare and a stealth power. That, uh… that’s not good. Fear is a debilitating status effect and very few power sets get any kind of resistance to it.

   I find a kid and get him to the door, though he doesn’t get an objective arrow on it, which is weird. Spawns a nice ambush, though.

   After I spring him, the counter in the navbar stays at 2? kids throughout the whole mission. That’s… that’s not a lot of help there, navbar. As it is I feel like I broke the mission when I freed the last kid on the top floor.

   The optional boss is, well, optional, but he’s got build up and perma-Deceive.

   —

   Office mission is a bit better set up this time. Mother Mayhem uncorked something terrible at the BAF and she just bolted across the dimensions. Her escort is a mix of diviners and her old children of anger, but she goes down pretty easy.

   —

   Despite some talk about going through to Praetoria in the last mission, this one seems to take place in an abandoned hospital on this side. …which is a real shame because somewhere in the maze of cots Fearsome Stare will always be waiting for me.

   It’s quiet in here. Too quiet.

   …no, seriously. First and second floors are both empty, except for a single patrol. Did something go wrong?

   Wait, maybe I am in Praetoria? There seems to be some stuff of Dark Numina’s sitting around here, presumably to summon whatever monstrosity is waiting at the end.

   The monstrosity isn’t so bad, considering — just a miasma dark blaster, apparently without Blackstar — and I find out why it was so quiet, as wars break out en masse between Mother Mayhem’s security and fear demons, including two bosses I haven’t seen before.

   Mother Mayhem comes back… and gets chumped by one of the warring groups of fear monsters. Seriously. I come downstairs and she’s getting shivved in a corner by Pain. I’m almost entirely certain that was a coincidence, as it runs back down the hallway to a reset position once she bites it.

   After remembering there’s a weird little nook in the first room around a blind corner and down some stairs, I take the focus binding the fear demon to this world, and… arc over.

   —

   Storyline - ***. The progression of what goes on is quite a bit clearer: Mother Mayhem is experimenting, summons a fear demon, has it take over, and then she carves a hole through to our reality through sheer force of will to get away from it all. A young sensitive psychic picks up on it, and enter the hero.

   Though this rating hasn’t changed, because, well, Praetoria has changed. It used to be pretty simple: Tyrant was worried about his various Praetors turning on him so he played them against each other, and as a result both he and they were weaker and more given to your average Saturday morning cartoon mishaps, like the old “ancient fear demon in the research notes” trick.

   But things have gotten a little more complex. Mother Mayhem and Diabolique have a much better reason to be at each others’ throats than just infighting, and Diabolique doesn’t even need to get a fear demon from another dimension to raise an army of fear warriors. If you can, play through the First Ward content, you’ll see what I mean.

   Design - ***. The fear demons are still pretty nice, but I really would like to have seen some kind of Praetorian map instead of just the asylum for the last battle. The asylum’s so cramped it’s just a chore to navigate.

   Also, you could stand to break the parts of mission setup that I do for myself — the ones that show up in bold yellow text — out from the briefing itself and into mission setup clues, as the contact isn’t really providing them.

   Sometimes MA seems like it’s bugging out but really operating as intended, like with the counter for rescues in the first mission not going down, or the last mission being completely empty but for a couple of patrols. (It also kinda reduces the impact of the powered-up fear demons when we only meet a handful of them before it’s time to throw down with the end boss.)

   And Mother Mayhem getting mowed down in the last mission before I even had a chance to engage her is rather darkly amusing, but I can’t believe it was intentional.

   Gameplay - *. So there’s a minion with heavy stealth on it that will try to fear you as one of its initial attacks. If your build doesn’t resist fear, and there are very, very few who do, you can only make one attack or briefly run away about every ten seconds.

   I realize it might sound silly to complain that the fear demons are fearing me, but seriously once you are feared your options are pretty much “pop anti-status insp” and “wait to die”.

   Also, seriously, one of the custom bosses mowed down Mother Mayhem before I could even process what was going on. They may be pitched just a little too high.

   Detail - ****. Overall there are just too many viewpoints crammed into the briefing. Our kid contact, his little finger Tony, and the narration that describes the actions we take.

   That, and, well, I’ve gone into this before. There are three types of horror in video games: shock, suspense, and Castlevania. It’s really hard to do anything other than Castlevania in the Mission Architect, and talking up suspense in the mission briefings when the missions themselves are mostly straightforward brawls just kinda rings hollow.

   Overall - ***. Canon has changed under a lot of arcs, not least the ones set in or partly in Praetoria. I don’t expect everybody to necessarily keep up with it, but in this case taking the current Praetoria into account might be beneficial.

   Also, peeling Fearsome Stare off the minions would make battles a lot less frustrating but not really up the difficulty much.

   Posted on March 5th, 2012 at 7:58 pm