1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Since this is supposed to be solo unfriendly, playing this on a pretty tough solo: my level 50 spine/regen scrapper. All bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

   —

   Wow. Taking orders from a box of scrap electronics. How the mighty have fallen.

   Well, not like I have any better leads on this strangeness among AIs. …or any idea what it actually represents.

   When I spring the ally in the mission (grav/kin seems to be a natural synergy) I get a clue from DATA that “the outbreaks are getting worse”. Well, okay, but… WHAT’s getting worse? Are they shutting down? All facing the same direction and listening? Doing multiple indefinite encores of Hello Dolly?

   Fighting goes pretty well, but this dude needs to not have Dimension Shift. He pulls it out rarely enough but I’m talking, like, EVER.

   Ah, that’s what we’re here for. The HVAS.

   Something… else (?) cuts in through its battle diagnostics as it goes down.

   Apparently its mobo got gooped up but given how much blue the weapons put out that’s not surprising.

   My contact seems to think he knows what’s going on and we can take care of this easily, but the arc length suggests something else is at work.

   —

   My contact says “this time it’s an Arachnos lab”, which I guess means that’s where the next.. major outbreak is? Or clue to what’s going on here?

   On springing an Arachnos trooper I find out that the virals had better not get at the Arbiter drones. But.. aren’t they kinda made of people?

   This mission features a larger cast of viral robots, including what looks like custom repair bots and drone controllers.

   Robot chatter is kinda amusing. The boss less so, since he manages to land a Siphon Speed, run away, get stuck behind some crates, and summon up a giant swarm of robots while we’re dealing with his entourage.

   Interesting concept though.

   —

   My contact seems to be throwing more and more apostrophes in as time goes on. He’s getting a bit impenetrable.

   Hmm. It looks like, in creating the “besieged Malta”, you’ve broken the usual moratorium on Sappers the game generally imposes.

   Sometimes they show up multiple times per spawn!

   I spring Crimson, who talks up my contact but I get a note in the clue window that there’s something suspicious about him.

   Apparently this is supposed to come after I find the intel about Crimson being in China, but it’s in the last compartment (along with the parts) and Crimson was in the first one.

   —

   Hmm. Does the end of the briefing suggest that my contact is being compromised, too?

   There seem to be two quarreling factions here. It doesn’t look as though the conversion process works well on things from a parallel earth, as they’ve just started fighting everything.

   Inside I find… oh. A PPD Quantum who has… somehow conjured up a stone mallet to beat on some robots?

   Anyway, I free him and then take on a boss… with an escort made up entirely of other boss robots.

   Once he goes down, the system text says something about how the news is both good and bad and I should get back to my contact… but I haven’t found any clues on this mission at all.

   I go back through the mission, find another Quantum, but… that’s it. No clues to be had.

   —

   So, one last mission.

   I’m not really sure why this one is supposed to be the hard one considering the hoops I’ve jumped through before. Is it the last ambush of lieutenants?

   I get three boss allies, two of whom slaughter their guards before I get there thanks to their damage auras.

   Four destructibles later, it’s all over. Not even a final boss to kiss goodnight.

   —

   Storyline - ***. This is a hard one. I picked up that something was weird when the bosses started calling me “variable” in the middle of their rants. At first I thought it might be a perjorative, but no, it was being used literally. I’m not sure exactly how to interpret what’s going on here, though. The underlying “test” slips through more and more each mission, my contact is furthering my distrust of it by calling out its own mistakes — and apparently my hero takes the last mission at face value? I get that the whole thing is a dry run by some would-be AI overlord but how am I supposed to take the souvenir? “Well played old chap see you next game”? Weren’t people actually getting attacked by these things? How much of it all was a lie? Because I’m disposed to toss a comically-large anarchist bomb into that bin of parts and start hunting down the Perfect Machine fo’realz. Putting innocent people in harm’s way just so you can avoid doing it on a grand scale is hardly laudable.

   I can buy the idea of finding myself inside a robot uprising and having it turn out to just be a test, but… an actual test, on a more limited scale. Maybe DATA’s looking to get some more combat data off a bunch of captured robots, and “what do you mean they called you fleshbag and ranted about organic tyranny, oh these heroes and their fantasies”. Or just… someone, somewhere I can actually trust.

   Design - ***. Not too sure about the wings on the summoner robot. They seem a bit extraneous. Aside from that the customs are pretty reasonable.

   Not sure about the progression, though. Elite boss first map, normal boss second map, boss clusters on the third and fourth maps (on the third map they take out my supposed ally)… and the last map is just a bunch of destructibles, without any guaranteed boss?

   There’s a problem with the order objectives show up on the third map, in that I find Crimson before anything vouching for him, and I had Titans show up blocking the door of several compartments so Crimson actually bit it trying to fight them.

   I realize you’re supposed to avoid the Titans, but since they can park themselves in front of the passages between compartments it may be better to put some Herc Titans in the rogue spawn as well. A sufficiently difficult battle will put a Zeus in sometimes anyway.

   Gameplay - ***. And peel out the Sappers from the rogue Malta, can you? Not using the standard Malta spawn means Sappers are fair game in spawns, sometimes multiple times per. If you wanted to make a balanced Titan squad you could put together some sapper stick/gun drone amalgam to be a minion, maybe. Trying to endure focused fire from five bosses in mission 5 while beating down one of them was also a bit much, even if I had two potential bosses as distractions.

   Also, mission 4 had me backtracking looking for some kind of clue I was supposed to have found, per the system message for the police chief defeat — but as far as I could see there wasn’t anything there.

   Detail - ***. Or maybe I can actually trust my contact, I just can’t understand him because of all the faux folksy apostrophes. Here’s the thing about English - it’s only 25% efficient, so it can tolerate a bit of noise and still get the message across. Tossing in apostrophes constitutes noise, and there are usually far too many for me to understand a sentence at a quick run. Pare them down by about half, maybe more.

   Aside from that, everything looked more or less alright, but putting a faction of “shameless self-inserts” in the last mission massacred the last chance I had of taking it remotely seriously.

   Overall - ***. A more understandable contact, a plot that left me sure of something, a final mission that was actually as challenging as advertised, or prior enemy groups that weren’t composed entirely of bosses would help this out.

   Posted on November 22nd, 2009 at 9:37 pm