1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running this on a level 50 stone/ice tanker, +1/x1 with bosses on. Lookin’ for a little light nightcap.

   —

   Snow Owl (my contact) certainly looks the part, but he really needs some notation in the contact description noting the famous and outlandish stuff he’s been responsible for.

   Yeah, I was kinda expecting an elevator joke.

   When I enter I immediately get a clue — perhaps my ally was set to have no escorts, so he comes free immediately on entry? Even though allies don’t start following or fighting until you tag them, the objective to free them will still complete immediately if they have no guards.

   Anyway, I take the measure of the enemy group. Pretty believable period minion suits and powers, technicolor swords and all, but I’m not seeing descriptions. (And some of these powers are kinda ridiculous scale for minions. Ten Thousand Blades? Dragon’s Tail? Rain of Arrows?)

   One of the villain’s henchmen, an EB named Rain Delay, is apparently the next link in the chain. I find him on the fourth floor. Pretty clever concept, baseball bat/stormer, but a couple things. On somebody with KB resistance, Tornado can stack itself three or four times and lead to some seriously dire defense loss. Granite stands up to this, of course, but…

   At low health, he drops a Freezing Rain and runs. I mean actually runs, as in “stop this guy from escaping” runs. No soundoff from him, no warning in the briefing or the navbar, and he’s about 50 feet from an elevator. Mission failed. On a guy with multiple ways of slowing you, knocking you back, and making you miss, that just ain’t fair.

   So, trying it again.

   This time, I find Zed-boy on the third floor. No sign of Rain Delay yet.

   …he’s in a giant open room on the very bottom floor. (This map starts at floor 5 and goes down.) Oh lord.

   Fortunately I can pull him into an enclosed office and block the door, and when he’s not busy being pancaked against the walls, Zed-boy helps do enough damage to shut him down.

   He mentions a hostage on an upper floor, so now I go back through the entire office looking.

   …and the hostage is also on the very bottom floor. Well, now. That’s actually interesting. Explains why Snow Owl wanted us in the first place.

   To add inanity to injury, the Spoiler himself is right next door. He spouts off… movie references from the modern era, for some reason. I figured he’d be doing period stuff what with his opening quip.

   …also, he’s illusion/mind control, the man with two confuses. Good thing I’ve got Minerals.

   The Spoiler drops, and I wait around a bit for his pets to die too before the mission finishes. No longer will he haunt the Paragon City zoning board… but the future refused to change.

   —

   Storyline - ***. Well, I knew from the start this would dead-end. But I’m always up for a little retro-camp, and near the end I had a little realization about why I was getting involved to begin with, which is always nice.

   But things are pretty bare here. In particular there’s really no reason for the Spoiler to be there. I’m not asking for a good reason, just an entertaining one. I mean, like…

   “Ronnie Roberts was a humble ticket-taker and general dogsbody at the Paragon Cinemas. His only regret was that everyone always talked about the movies on their way out of the theater, so he never saw a movie he didn’t already know everything about. One late night in the stockroom, a freak bolt of lightning energized years of film reels, fusing them with his body and twisting him into the Spoiler, a nefarious ne’er-do-well intent on using his mastery of images to ruin the enjoyment of others by any means possible!”

   Design - *. This map may be good for demonstrating the madness of in-game building codes, but it’s terrible for objective placement. Maps illustrate what they consider to be “front”, “middle”, and “back” now when you’re choosing them, so if it’s important you can avoid picking maps that put the “front” deeper in than some of the locations in the “middle”, or have the “back” as a little stretch of corridor off in the corner of a floor with two giant open rooms.

   In this case it’s definitely important.

   The enemy group is a wonder in terrible technicolor, and the enemies generally have distinct ways of doing things to tell them apart.

   Oh, and there’s the surprise failable mission objective. There may be situations where this is appropriate, but this certainly isn’t one of them.

   Gameplay - *. The minions are sporting some crazy high-tier powers just on their own. The bosses… well. For Rain Delay, any one storm power would present a formidably challenging debuff, but he has, as it were, the perfect storm, and on top of that I basically had to exploit NPC pathing in order to prevent him from escaping. The Spoiler himself is, as noted, the man with two confuses, and he can put out a decent amount of fear as well. Many ATs don’t really have much defense against these particular badstats, and as a result the final boss fight presents the equally attractive options of “use break frees the entire time” and “wait to die”.

   Detail - *. The best parts of retro camp are the cornball conversations and outlandish stories, but the bosses rarely speak up (or do so inappropriately — the Spoiler should be “ruining” period work that anybody playing the story would already know about) and the rank-and-file enemy group didn’t even have any descriptions that I could see.

   Overall - *. A good concept for a comedy arc, but with little to no amusing detail and rather lacking in execution.

   Posted on January 13th, 2011 at 8:19 pm