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1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running this on a high-40s DB/fire brute, all bosses no AVs 2 villains at +1.

   —

   I gotta say, I don’t exactly believe the Prince of Lies here. I mean, isn’t treason against God like the worst thing you can pull off? Won’t that make things worse, instead of better?

   Anyway, time to claw my way out of a grave in Purgatory and watch out for a guy with a cuisinart on his arm.

   Okay. First, the First Sphere description calls them “the Fist Sphere”. Second… uh, I don’t know if you realized this, but Rise of the Phoenix (which both spheres thus far have) is a powerful AOE knockback and stun which gives its caster a long non-obvious period of untouchability. And it’s not like the Freak rez that only goes off sometimes - this one goes off ALL the time.

   Yeah, Third Spheres self-rez too.

   Oh, there’s an archangel here. Looks like fire control/willpower. Blessedly, he has no resurgence.

   I find a mystical portal called only “The Answer” with no system interaction text.

   Apparently it’s God’s entire invasion plan.

   Somehow.

   And it’s halfway through the mission, with at least four rooms left to go.

   But you know? I’m tired of being knocked around and unable to touch the guys that did it for an unspecified period of time, so I’ll click that exit button.

   —

   Okay, I have to give you credit for this one. Good will always triumph because Evil backstabs itself.

   But… defeat all? Defeat all on an outdoor map?

   …okay, it’s a tiny outdoor map.

   With a Snake fight! Although the Snakes are talking like there’s someone come to join the battle, which hasn’t happened in ever.

   Still. Defeat All is really Defeat All Twice here, so that’s a pain.

   —

   Okay, so some fallen angel has an anti-God weapon somewhere and I go spring him to find out where I was going to suggest you use “Fallen From Grace” since they added in Safeguard villains recently… but it turns out this “Dark Sabaoth” guy is ALSO a Rogue Isles Villain and a fallen angel.

   Man, what the hell. They even share a level range.

   Longbow are such a relief to fight. They don’t explode and knock me all over the place.

   Hmm. This map has a prison with reinforced doors in it. Obviously the “open the doors” isn’t going to be completed when they break, but certainly someone might try it.

   Ah, that’s how you open the doors. The computer has a reasonable description, but it’s just labeled “cells”. I don’t think this is accurate unless the cells are extremely, extremely tiny.

   So I spring DS, and a spawn of enemies appears around me. I’m a bit too busy dealing with them to notice the walls of text, and by the time I realize that that was actually the boss spawn with “Agent Crimson” (who bears a striking resemblance to Indigo) in it, DS has been shredded within an inch of his life, and I can’t pull enough aggro to prevent that last inch from vanishing down the chipper.

   Since I’m leading DS to the exit anyway, could you put the boss up front?

   —

   Oh well. Time to kill bAEbies.

   Hmm. The main mission group is PPD, but the heroes are escorted by Longbow.

   You may have wanted this to happen, it helps them stand out.

   Oh! Not ALL of them are escorted by Longbow. There’s an EB here who’s got PPD with him. …and if he’s stone armor, he didn’t put anything on. Also he fought with super strength. I guess that’s part of the… joke, such as it is?

   I have to say, this whole thing feels really off-tone. I can buy attacking greedy or otherwise viceful heroes, but when they’re pastiches of certain metagame styles (idle LFTer, RPist, canon copy, clueless “theorycrafter”) that just seems fake.

   Not that I mind his absence, but where was Lord Darkity Dark Dark of Darkness in all this? You’d think he’d be first on the chopping block.

   —

   Gabriel, Angel of Death, huh? You blow one Last Trump…

   Classical Judaism has Samael, who separates the soul from man. Later in the Catholic tradition, Michael functioned as sort of a “good angel of death”, but he’s already popped up in mission 1 so reuse probably isn’t an option.

   “2 Defeat Gabriel, the Angel of Death”? Hoo boy.

   And there’s no minimap out here! Double hoo boy!

   Gabriel exhibits a distinct lack of Last Trumping and a whole lot of darkity dark dark.

   Seriously, dude. Samael.

   So I drop one Gabriel. He Soul Transfer/Dark Consumption/Siphon Lifes himself, and for a moment I think this is what the 2 means.

   Buuut no. Just down the beach is another one calling out for the minions of Arachnos to come out and diiieeeee.

   He goes down. And ST/DC/SL and down again. (it’s full XP even though he comes back with just a sliver of health, so, uh, small favors I guess?)

   And there’s still an objective to defeat him. This is a level beyond double hoo boy. I call it “Hoo boy 3″.

   Okay, judging from his dialogue, this is apparently “form 2″ of Gabriel, and form 3, which was supposed to chain off it, spawned in when the map loaded and I fought him first.

   That explains why the system text when I dropped the “first Gabriel” said I’d backed him off for good.

   …oh, come on. The “orders from God” which I retrieved in the first mission were all a plant from Satan? Nice job breaking the ranks of the angels, villain?

   Dude. I’m PURE EVIL. If you were all “hey broski we’re gonna tweak God’s nose here’s some fake orders go plant ‘em in Purgatory” I would have been on that like white on rice.

   —

   Storyline - *. I just fought six Extreme DM/Extreme DA elite bosses. Yes, technically there were three of them but THEY ALL REZZED AND HEALED THEMSELVES RIGHT AFTER. And when I get back to my contact he laughs at me for being a chump. Really ends things on a high note. The metagame characters in the fourth mission feel out-of-place in an arc that the other characters I encounter are taking seriously. If you want to put “heroes” in suffering from, say, Wrath, Greed, Pride, and Envy that’d work fine. Maybe recolor some villain models - Greed is a Malta Tac Ops, Pride is a PPD Peacebringer boss, Envy is a Dark Ring Mistress, Wrath is a Vanguard robot… something along those lines. Frees up the file space too.

   Design - *. The angel design is pretty nice. All one of it, not counting Mike and Gabe. Needs some variety in costuming so as to distinguish among the various types. Maybe just accent colors on the sleeves and pants. But the powers… good lord. Everything has Rise of the Phoenix. Everything. Except Mike, who stays down, and Gabe, who has Soul Transfer, which actually stuns through my defenses, unlike Rise, which just knocks me back forever. And both those rezzes have an untouchable period without an obvious trigger for it to fall off. If you free up space in mission 4, maybe just add two identical minions and one identical lieutenant and boss who just don’t self-rez, so as to cut down on the number of times it happens. And then there’s the matter of the AV spawning right exactly over my ally in mission 3. That was a fun surprise when I finally figured out what was going on.

   Gameplay - *. Every mission with the angels in it was a slog. Drop one, get blown back 20 feet, stand up, try and pick out which of the identical white mass had just gotten up and wouldn’t be damageable for the next 20 seconds… every. single. time. And then there was the last mission, which contained both an outdoor map without a minimap on, so I didn’t know where I’d been, and three/six absolutely identical boss fights.

   Detail - *. Agent “Crimson” is pretty obviously Indigo. The clickie in the first mission doesn’t even have any text describing what I’m doing to get these invasion plans for Earth. I’m pretty sure you got Gabriel’s exact flavor of death wrong, though there are darkity dark dark angels to be had. And Satan revealing he’s lying at the end is just a brick to the head outta nowhere that didn’t even have to BE there.

   Overall - *. Esc, I gotta ask, is this another mistakenly uploaded version? Agent “Crimson”’s location on the map and actual identity, and the broken chain of bosses at the end, are things that should’ve been caught in test. The customs are a real annoyance to actually put down for the count, and the arc ends in a giant soul-sapping sextuple boss fight on a mapless outdoor map, followed by a tossed-off narrative gut punch.

   Posted on October 13th, 2009 at 11:07 pm