4 Responses

1. Desmodus Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   A fairly simple storyline about a villain that keeps coming back stronger each time you beat her. Five missions, each pretty short and straightforward, but with a lot of entertaining and appropriate details.

   Take the designer’s note seriously and run this with a character you want a challenge for. I took my fairly IO’ed-out 50 Earth/Storm controller in on heroic, and for the first 4 missions, I was thinking maybe I should rerun it on a higher level.

   Then I fought her final (EB, down from AV) incarnation.

   In the end, with liberal inspiration use, I beat her without any deaths, although I did have to resummon my animated stone a couple of times. But for a while there, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to defeat her at all. When I did, that was a very satisfying victory.

   Definitely recommended, but not for every character.

   Posted on May 23rd, 2009 at 11:45 pm

2. Glazius Says:

   @GlaziusF

   Running this on a high-30s ice/axe tank, on diff 2 so bosses is bosses. I really wish Mission Engineer was global.

   —

   Hmm. I guess she sticks a cyanide capsule in the mouth or something so she doesn’t get juked into a caged body with no way out.

   There’s a nice amount of incidental detail on this map (the destructible especially) but eventually I tire of punching robots and start jumping around in search of the boss.

   And again…

   And again…

   And again…

   There really is a lot of ground to cover in this map.

   …you know, I have to wonder what feeling the pain of death but not dying does to somebody.

   I also wonder how the doc knew she had this power. It’s not the sort of thing that you try out, you know?

   Hmm. It’s not that the robots aren’t interesting to fight, but you might want to make them a little more battle drone-y. Huge model, tiny stature, just so the walk matches?

   —

   Wow, yeah. She’d make a great suicide bomber. Except for the part where she’d feel a bomb go off strapped to her ribcage, anyway.

   Seems like she’s something of a household word for underperformance, even the bank staff are ribbing her.

   Size isn’t exactly an obstacle to using technology, but then again you can only miniatiurize so far down.

   —

   Ooh, yeah, that’s something else she can do. Destroy a body with performance-enhancing drugs.

   …of course she fails to take into account that the Family also lose to heroes all the dang time.

   And I thought she was running low on cash after the first excursion. Where’s the money coming from?

   —

   Well, it certainly was an interesting way to introduce a new enemy group.

   …wow. Psychic fragmentation?

   Hmm. “It isn’t even top of the line” (from the talking mark 3) doesn’t make much sense. “Top of the line” is the best you can get.

   …I’m drawing conclusions from a serial number? Maybe a faceplate with the designate “tube 00105″ or something but serial numbers are just facerolls on keypads for all they mean about how many things there are.

   Oh, so she actually does have an income stream now. Okay, makes sense.

   Awful lot of things to click in one tiny, tiny boss room. Probably a random lab map, I imagine in a proper room they’d be all spread out.

   They do a good job of showing just how far she’s going with this whole thing, and a gradual descent into self-obsession.

   —

   Man, with all the stuff I grabbed from the last lab, wouldn’t DATA or SERAPH have something to work on already?

   Ah well.

   Man, the cop is the only one worried about the threat level. Everybody else is all “where does she work out”? If she’s mishmashing a crapton of different technologies together to create awesome, shouldn’t she be getting more and more monstrous?

   Final boss succumbs to the old tricks. Trigger rage, run and wait, trigger unstoppable, trigger rage, run and wait, and then it’s over, with a little assist from my squishy pal who’s rad to be with.

   —

   Storyline - ****. Needs a little, at least, speculation early on about how the villain who’s scraping up pennies in the first mission gets the funding to embark on a massive program of self improvement. As it was that was nagging at me until after I beat the boss of mission 4. Also the ending’s a little unsatisfying. It makes it seem like I dodged a bullet, that it just so happened she wasn’t able to bail. (If nothing else you’d think she’d get rather uncomfortable in the Zig and eventually jump ship.) I can see two opposite ways for it to go:

   - Dr. Lashion’s psychojump power is fueled in part by her revulsion at her current body and its current predicament. The final showdown is the fight, and the body, she’s always wanted to have, or at least near enough as makes no nevermind. So she can’t leave, but on some level she doesn’t really want to. While she’s writing you hate letters from the Zig, most of the rancor is gone. Like most people in what the cops are calling “the $name wing”, she hates you because you kicked her ass in her moment of triumph, not because you represent everything the world has ever dumped on her.

   - Dr. Lashion’s new bodies are less and less psychically capable. She realizes this is a design flaw but goes into the final form knowing it’s almost certainly going to be a one-way trip, because it’s her best work and surely it can take you down. But her best just isn’t good enough. The hate letters are increasingly irrational and paranoid.

   Design - *****. The customs are nice visuals, one and all, and the last map is a pretty nice restatement of the first.

   Gameplay - ****. Mostly for having to boing back and forth across the first map so many dang times trying to figure out where she’d gotten off to this time.

   Detail - *****. Despite the little quibbles I had above the detail is fairly solid and does a nice job of fleshing out the central story.

   Overall - ****. The ending strikes a bit of a sour note, and while the boss for Mission 4 was a pretty good fight, the end boss was basically that same fight with two intervals where I jumped away and stared at a wall for a few minutes. It needs a little more of a wrinkle than that.

   Posted on June 10th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

3. CoHMR Admin Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   (Adding back Glazius’s ratings. For some reason, the stars didn’t come through.)

   Posted on June 11th, 2009 at 9:28 am

4. @PW Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   The concept for Dr Lashion/Escalation and her body-hopping was actually pretty cool. Her personality really showed through her dialog and the various challenges she kept issuing through the contact. But, the missions seemed pretty straightforward and it felt like there wasn’t that much to do in each mission except for the part where you interact with Dr. Lashion/Escalation; I think you could stand to add a little more material in those areas. Her robot army was a little bland, perhaps more could be done with them; maybe give them some robotic dialog or stuff to do (guarding hostages or items or something).

   My teammate thought the arc could use some more clues; I think the briefings are pretty explanatory of what’s going on, but perhaps a clue after the first upgraded Dr Lashion explaining the cycle of escalation would be helpful.

   I thought it was witty and fun though.

   [Note: The above was written on 7 May, and I re-ran this arc later, after the author had incorporated a number of changes in response to the above specific comments. I liked the changes a lot and increased my rating accordingly.]

   Posted on June 16th, 2009 at 12:38 pm