6 Responses

1. Joe Says:

   I attempted to play and rate this. Unfortunately, Story arc id number 241496 did not exist in the system. I will check back to see if this comes up again to play and rate it later on.

   Posted on July 19th, 2009 at 1:33 pm

2. Joe Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Here’s a great story arc with appropriate mobs, maps and dialogue. It is a creative with a well thought out premise and storyline; it’s worth playing for this alone. The only drawback to me is the game mechanics on some maps that cause players to get slowed up or stuck.

   For myself, I played a dual blade willpower scrapper. Very fast, unfortunately, this did me in on the hospital map. I either kept getting hung up in the air or the solider (escort) would trap me between an object as I’d step out of an elevator. Funny sure, but the only workaround I could do was open an Ourosboros Portal and hike back to the AE Building a couple of times.

   Still, it’s a great storyline and story arc. Fun and challenge. I recommend doing it; and I will do it again, but make sure I’m on a team with someone who can teleport who does a better job at navigating the hospital map than myself.

   Posted on July 19th, 2009 at 8:07 pm

3. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running on a spine/regen scrapper, high 40s, diff 2 for real boss fights.

   Wonder who the contact’s gonna be now.

   —

   Oh, that guy.

   Man, “as you know” is kind of a weird thing to say in a briefing. If I already know why bother telling me? (you can probably say “ever since the start of the Rikti invasion”)

   Well, all I can say is it’s a good thing I have an immobilize.

   …aw. I thought that intro clue was gonna be the false datafile.

   Hmm. Boss objective should probably be just the boss. His escort can spawn in the back room behind a couple walls.

   Good thing he doesn’t run, otherwise he could throw down detention field…

   The Rikti communicators have apparently come a very long way in sophistication of message. Unless they were actually trying to call out for pizza and Traitor McBackstab here just has a big imagination.

   Also these guys are recolored Longbow and I just fought a Ballista, didn’t I?

   —

   Hmm. Accept text doesn’t even need to be in “my voice” if you’re using it to restate mission objectives.

   Lots of repetitive character mash in here, both from Rikti patrols and from the Vanguard battles. Still, good to see the Garibaldi twins doing something with their lives.

   The lack of exit points on this map makes the rescues kind of hilarious. They just stand there with a vengeance.

   Man. Seems like every other spawn’s got a dang boss in it. Freakin’ diff 2. And this map is huge and the stuff is hard to pick out in general.

   I would really rather have somebody’s help here.

   —

   Oh boy, it’s the asylum map. The only-one-of-its-kind, terrible-ally-pathing asylum map.

   I don’t like this one much, if you can’t tell.

   Hmm. I think you got the escort/find text for the Vanguard guy reversed.

   Oh, this is another one of those “this map is the first half of a building” things. Okay. Okay. Still throws me a bit to hear people worried about something in the “next mission”.

   Thanks for sticking around and helping me fight, guy who completed the mission when I rescued him! Kind of bleakly hilarious this is the first guy to do so.

   —

   Hey, it’s the burning office again!

   The assault suit parks his fat behind in a doorway right into the second floor, so I can’t really slip past to find anyone, and the doctor who is apparently supposed to help me just tags along and never heals me or attacks anything.

   And what became of the vanguard soldier I may never know, as the bugged intersection of captives (Empathy) and timed objectives boots me out of the mission.

   —

   Sigh. Red Atlas.

   I know, I know, but… Red Atlas.

   Can’t find anything in Red Atlas.

   It’s got a minimap now, but everything hides behind broken down walls and nothing will follow you more than 25 feet without having to detour around a chunk of rubble or wall or…

   Huh.

   Well, looks like I actually don’t have to find much. One of the patrols wanders into the big boss and I follow the dialogue bubbles, and a quick loop around city hall gives me the bittersweet relief of not having to hunt anything down at all.

   Looks like I have to break the big man down all on my own, and so I do.

   —

   Storyline - **. Yeah, it seems unreasonable, I know. But I’m just thinking about the plan as presented. This whole thing was supposed to be a feint to draw this one group out, but judging from the aftermath they just got mowed down in the same sort of general street fighting and dropship lasering that wiped out so many other heroes. And as the one person who actually followed the feint all the way through, I… miss the dropship pass completely and jab spines into the fleshy bits of the guy who masterminded the whole thing? I mean, I realize everybody’s got to die at the end (THE SHIP SINKS!) but I showed up too late to catch it, just like I showed up too late for everything else.

   Design - ***. The last map’s got all the game trappings of a climactic final boss fight, but the real action has already happened. I’d prefer… well, either a truly empty fight, against a guy who came out of his battle armor to gloat (no ally patrols in this case), or a 5-10 minute “impossible timer” that actually puts me in the fight with the collective so I can get a feeling for the impossible odds. (I wonder if you could reframe this as a holo-recreation of sorts, so that you could actually “get obliterated” in the last battle and still have that in the frame, so to speak.) That plus all the hero rescuees that never actually helped — well, I felt detached, like I wasn’t allowed to be involved in events as they happened, and that puts a damper on any combat high.

   Gameplay - ****. Mostly for doing laps and laps around the giant circus tent map without ever managing to find anything but boss fight after boss fight. I really need to learn where stuff is on that mess.

   Detail - *****. Generally solid, with exceptions as noted.

   Overall - ***. My main beef here is that, for something that’s supposed to be an experience of the original Rikti Invasion, I spend a whole lot of time either backstage making sure the people who experienced the original invasion can get out there, or on stage after the production is over sweeping up.

   Posted on July 21st, 2009 at 11:21 pm

4. SRS Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Storyline - This arc has been improved significantly since it was first written, and since the earlier reviews were done. It’s tight and makes very logical sense. Although it does continue from the first arc, and it’s an even stronger story when played together, it stands alone just fine.

   Design - Several map changes have made this arc really solid. No more Carnival of Thorns tents. Instead the map it’s been replaced with fits the them ideally. Timers are gone and, though it’s still there, the hospital map is written to avoid earlier problems and is probably the best map for what the writer is trying to accomplish.

   Gameplay - Very solid. Each mission makes good sense and leads to the next very well. Two bosses through the entire arc are definitely not too many.

   Detail - Extremely catching story. Well written, with strong dialogue and some gut-wrenching drama. Should be part of CoH canon for anyone who has a thing for the Rikti War.

   Posted on March 14th, 2010 at 7:49 pm

5. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Rereview as there have apparently been significant changes.

   Playing this on my level 50 spine/regen scrapper, +1 x2 with bosses on.

   —

   Huh. Okay, so it turns out I did do something worthwhile in the last arc after all. Good to know.

   So now we’re trying to turn the tables and feed the Rikti false information.

   On the one hand, I like the idea of less awesome recolored Longbow standing in for the Vanguard. On the other… poor Longbow. Then again, if this was the best tech on offer at the time maybe their current incarnations actually are an upgrade.

   “How’d that hero get in here? Get her, before he ruins everything!” I think you missed something there.

   Interesting wrapup.

   Things I didn’t know before but found out accidentally: it seems like the mission complete popup will actually show up in the mission description you get by clicking the “exploding i” button when the mission’s complete.

   (I was looking for what those coordinates meant.)

   —

   I enter the next mission and… damn. Total chaos. The boss gets taken out by the base turrets while I’m still pinned down dealing with the approximately four Rikti bosses that have showed up inside the bunker from one source or another.

   The destructibles are too far out from the bunker to complete without any involvement on my part, so that’s a bit of good news at least. But the heroes can get a bit close, and I had the devil of a time freeing Captain Superior before I hopped back into the bunker and found the last element of his escort tangled up with another two bosses.

   The hell did they all come from?

   My accomplishments from last time continue to be treated like they were breakthroughs. Captain Superior’s also mentioning the alpha/omega plan, which I don’t remember from last time. Makes me wonder.

   —

   Now this I don’t remember at all.

   So McKnight has been making all these bodybags, huh? Dude must have a serious hate on; then again the Midnight Squad got freakin’ wrecked during the same action the last arc put me in for.

   There’s a stone altar on the second level, long before I find McKnight. It’s not active, either, Hoo boy. Odd.

   Man, some of these bodies show up in the weirdest places. Found a couple actually in burning parts of the base. Makes me wonder if Alistair is actually the one who put all the flames here.

   Ah, I see. It’s an emergency backup if you fail this destructo. …man, how does that work? I admit I like the idea, but I didn’t see it pop up in the navbar and the mission completes when I successfully defend it.

   Well, anyway, time to try and save the day.

   —

   “Sarah Lexis is an expert in meta-human physiology and head of the research staff at Paragon University. Because of her expertise, and latent meta-human skills, she became your contact by default.”

   My… contact? Is there a part three to this series that’s eluding me?

   The elite boss fight is a little harrowing because I don’t know what’s an AoE and what’s not and keep getting her caught in the blasts, but afterwards it’s pretty smooth.

   The debrief should probably be in a different font or italicized or both, since it’s internal monologue.

   —

   Wait. Statesman’s aid? Suicide assignment?

   Okay, so this is part of the alpha team action. But I don’t remember anything like that in the briefing for mission three. Cap’s clues seem to hint at it, very obliquely, but that’s about the extent of it.

   Or… maybe it isn’t? It’s an action to buy time so Alpha Team can put their plan into motion, which is to… engage the Rikti to keep them occupied?

   Which is what’s just happened?

   Or is the Alpha/Omega maneuver still a long way off?

   Hmm. And the souvenir says it was Cap’s clasp that did the recording, though for some reason I thought it was Blastion’s ring. That was a communicator, right?

   —

   Storyline - ****. You’ve done a much better job of putting my actions in the context of SOLUS. Few things I’m less sure about though. First, as far as I knew, Lazon wasn’t actually killed directly by the Rikti so much as contained until he had no choice but INFERNOVA. I think it was the opening popup to the last mission that mentioned this.

   Second, how exactly did the giant laser-spewing dropship crash? I can’t see it go down through Cap’s recorder unless it’s what hits the building. I realize I can’t exactly be one-shot by a giant laser (unless you decide to make this a defense task on an impossible timer with the laser going off when time runs out) but it just feels like luck to have the ship gone.

   Third, Cap only hinted at it roundabout, but what role exactly does this play in the who Alpha/Omega plan? I thought going into this I’d actually get to play a bit of a role in the struggle of poor doomed Alpha Team but this seems to have gone on a bit before that.

   Design - ****. Things have gotten a bit more manageable since the last go ’round. The large tent map is gone and all the hunting with it, replaced (?) with a burning lab with much more active rescuees. Or did it go from large tent to bunker?

   The bunker map’s a bit of a problem still, in that the turrets can complete several objectives without hero intervention, and with all the fights going on there’s potential to have a big clump of bosses crowded around the entrance. Why not use an actual Rikti bunker? They’d been building those things for a while before the invasion kicked off.

   Gameplay - ****. Pretty solid. The only hiccup was trying to find the necessary mobs to complete objectives in the bunker map when they’d been scattered about by turret fire.

   Detail - *****. Aside from a couple of typos as noted and the somewhat inexplicable description on Dr. Lexis, not much wrong here. My worry with the story is more where it fits into the larger picture; the detail does a good job of fixing it where it is.

   Overall - ****. Much improved from its initial incarnation, with the problematic maps gone and a little more active role in the overall action for my hero. I still have misgivings about that bunker map and the way the turrets can scatter and/or complete objectives.

   Posted on April 25th, 2010 at 11:12 pm

6. PW Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   A well-polished, well-written and moving story. Everything I had commented on critically before seems fixed; found a few quibbles with some of the new material, but nothing serious.

   Posted on July 29th, 2010 at 10:37 am