2 Responses

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Level 50 spine/regen scrapper for kicks and win buttons. Two heroes even-level all bosses no AVs.

   Let me say something that’s always true and likely relevant: all my reviews are MY reviews. “Objective” is something you put in a mission. I don’t pretend that I’m speaking for everyone — when you read something it’s my genuine reaction.

   —

   Most people think time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of time and I can tell you: they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm.

   So I can tell this plan isn’t going to work out well, because after all it’s the first mission… and after seeing both a photo and a wheelchair all more I need to hear is that her mom was going to retire tomorrow.

   So I stage a fight, following the plan that the doc has probably already heard, for lack of anything better to do, and then I start poking around for clues.

   Nothing here, nothing here, nothing he.. oh.

   …women in refrigerators. (If that phrase isn’t significant, you need to get over to http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/ NOW.)

   Seriously?

   I was going to wonder why local contract killaz the Knives of Artemis weren’t in on this operation, but I think I just got my answer.

   So in addition to his vast tapestry of personal failings the doc apparently never read any Darwin. Shorter Descent of Man: why do we care for “unfit” people when we’d shoot animals in a similar position? Because when you start shooting people empathy is the first casualty, and with that gone everyone just murders everyone else.

   In other words, you get people like the doc here.

   —

   So tell me, were you going for kind of a Fallout Pipboy vibe with my happy little handheld gadget that’s fun to use for justice in the middle of this WELCOME TO TRAGEDY YOU ARE CONSTRUCTED EVERYTHING YOU ARE IS A LIE arc? That’s really the only explanation I can come up with for it, but this thing lacks most of Vault Boy’s black humor.

   Man. All four terminals AND the boss cramped together in the last room? It’s this tiny T-shaped thing and–

   Correction. All four terminals and the boss and the REAL last boss, who destroys me while I have tabbed out to complain about all four terminals and the boss being in the same room.

   This reviewer thing can be a labor of love, at times.

   Can you spread this lab out on a larger map? Maybe no standard spawns and just some patrols or dudes wreckin’ standalone labs or something. It’d add to the feeling of emptiness and make it less likely for a giant pile of objectives to come together in a small pile of place.

   Anyway, the Prince of Persia’s solution to time travel was to stop himself ever getting it in the first place. Just throwin’ that out there.

   —

   You really like this whole “ambush inside a confined space” thing, don’t you? If I’m supposed to be reading these clues, can you not drop a horde of Malaise lunatics (I can tell because they have the confusion aura they gave ‘em now) on top of me while I’m trying to read?

   So this is twice now the doc has put up a token resistance and then exited laughing. Nothing makes you feel heroic like not being able to affect someone because the plot says so.

   Though hearing someone’s life get wrecked on the other side of an impenetrable barrier (in this case it’s made of time) comes pretty close!

   —

   You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone drowning in their own despair use the phrase “outlined in this document”. It just seems like an awfully detached and artificial thing to find in this mission briefing. Was her father Operative Vargas?

   Yes, right, the doctor’s just trying to eat people to reverse entropy and get his family back, whatever. Let’s get going to a place to do a thing.

   Oh boy, it’s the asylum!

   …yeah. That’s a sarcasm there, that is. So many times have I seen this map. So tired am I of hunting behind a thousand six-foot screens for a thousand wandering patrols.

   Ah well, let’s see what’s on the menu today.

   You know, trying to find where a glowie is coming from in a multilayered room with opaque partitions all over the multi-layers is enough to drive you mad all on its own.

   Also, the recent buffs to the Malaise Lunatics make ‘em a real terror to fight.

   Journal entry 5 ends with the observation (apparently made “by me” in orange text) that after the death of his family, Albright seems to have gone insane.

   My reactions are, in order, 1: YA THINK?!, and 2: actually I could make a decent case for it having happened before then as a coping mechanism. Insanity is just one point on a bell curve with the norm in the middle, after all.

   —

   So I’m just kinda staring at the briefing for mission 5 here. Let me see if I’ve got this straight.

   Past Albright retains a canister of facemeltinite. Arachnos takes him to a facility so he can watch as his family dies to his own gas.

   Future Albright, intending to be like raaaaaiiiiiiiiiiin on your wedding day, travels back to the day of the execution with a canister of facemeltinite to gas the Arachnos.

   Somehow one of these canisters accidentally triggers and gasses Past Albright’s family.

   Disregarding how the hell you find out about a flaw in an internally-developed Arachnos weapon system, how exactly was Future Albright planning to release the gas so as not to melt his past self’s face? And how does this plan backfiring result in ONLY Past Albright’s family getting the gas?

   And in regards to the comments in re insanity made in the previous mission, the idea that tweaking this event will change anything was proposed by Albright himself. There’s no guarantee he’s actually right. He created something to kill innocent people to keep his family alive and then snapped and killed someone in a blind rage. He was already starting to lose it at this point.

   Oh great, the base is on fire. And here I thought there’d at least be some semblance of order. (and reasonable framerates.)

   Also the Crab Spider Webmaster here doesn’t even seem to care that he’s standing in the middle of the flames. He’s just making plans for the execution like it’s all cool.

   …so I have a look at the conversation from Albright’s guards. Totally snapping and blowing the head off some dude when an experiment doesn’t turn out the way you want constitutes betraying Arachnos now? I guess now we know how Captain Mako got so elusive.

   Why, yes, Dr. Albright who is to all appearances just as much a pushover as the previous times I’ve fought you, why HAS your shield failed you now? Now, when the plot demands it most?

   I take a look at the clue that drops. It doesn’t exactly provide any answers. I have a poke around the now-empty base, in search of perhaps a letter from a Mender, commenting on how they intervened to stop the general terribleness of a giant temporal pileup of ever more insane men with ever more insane plans.

   Still nothing.

   So I come back, recoil in horror from the giant red text, and then go to read the souvy.

   You know what’s a perfectly good reason to lie back and let the timestream close over your head? The energy-draining device implanted in your gut has drained your energy to the point where you can maybe take on the extra burden of shielding an inanimate object. Then you can spend some of this alloted space wondering about what things are going to be like in the new world and other such contemplative musings, instead of explaining the many technological and personal reasons why you’re going to let yourself slip into oblivion anyway.

   —

   Storyline - *. Man, this is the hardest I’ve ever had to work to be an innocent bystander. My contact has a variety of emotional, biological, and physical problems that I’m completely powerless to affect, including a citywide manhunt that sticks around for one clue and the resulting mission success text, and which never returns despite her apparently not doing anything to move or hide. She also provides me with a plot device that I pretty much just wave in the general direction of clues, whereupon she analyzes the results — my role in the whole arrangement is to a) exist and b) stand still. I can’t actually affect the recurring villain until the last mission, where with no apparent changes in my circumstances or his, I suddenly can. And the last three missions I basically just get pulled behind the villain, not knowing where I’m going or what I’m doing and having no idea if I’ll actually be able to do anything in time for it to matter. It didn’t have to be this way - apparently one of the thefts involved an Ouroboros artifact judging by what the doc has built, and I can’t imagine that Ouroboros wouldn’t be interested in a man bent on creating a) a giant timeline snarl and b) a personal army of sociopathic time-travelers. At least working with the Menders I’d feel more in control over the time travel and less that I was just jumping around blind and happening to do the right thing.

   Design - ***. The doc’s mercs are certainly easy to tell apart, but I wonder why they were really necessary. I can understand a couple of distinct boss henchmen, but if he’s usin’ robots in the modern day, why not tweak the colors on some canonical robots? He seems to follow the Praetorian pattern of one minion type, one lieutenant type, one boss type, which is just kinda boring to fight after a while as there’s no variety. Nobody in the final mission seems to really notice much about the Arachnos base being on fire, and there’s a definite performance hit with all the effects in that map, so why not just use a stock Arachnos base? And the combination of long clues that need to be read and close-quarters maps with objectives crammed together is not a pleasant one, at least when getting a clue is likely to result in a boss gnawing on your skull.

   Gameplay - ****. The asylum is probably one of the worst maps to fight Malaise Lunatics on, given the cramped quarters made more cramped by extra geometry and the lovely contact confusion they’ve added to the Lunatics. You can’t have known this, of course. Glowie-hunting in the asylum is a bit of frustrating, and glowie-hunting in that T-shaped lab room in mission 2 where there are 5 computers but only one is active (to start) was also a bit of a pain.

   Detail - *. I’ll be honest here: as soon as I found a chopped-up woman in a refrigerator I lost any engagement I had with the story and there was no way I was going to get it back. The canonical woman in a refrigerator was an example of sacrificing a developed character “offscreen” for the purposes of generating a little cheap heat and getting a rise out of the main character. It’s worse, in a way, with a character who might have had some interesting development but just gets filleted in order for another character to have a reaction. The arc is full of things I’m supposed to react to, but because of that one clue in the first mission I just don’t. And for some things, like the ridiculous “causality loop” in mission 5 that’s supposed to fall into place if I don’t do something, if I don’t immediately bounce off it crying “ah, cruel fate!” there’s nothing that makes sense when I think it through.

   Overall - *. Not an average. Seeing “mature” in the description filled me with an ill foreboding. “Maturity” in comics often equates to helplessness in the face of atrocity. (Alan Moore is very, very sorry about this.) Now, every arc’s a railroad that works under its own logic. I see only what the author presents. When I investigate glowies I only learn what the author wants me to. When I knock somebody down that only counts as a victory if the author says so. I can’t do, see, or eat anything that the author hasn’t explicitly allowed for. The trick is to draw somebody into the story so they’re so busy looking at the scenery and wondering about the road ahead they don’t notice the rails, but finding an honest-to-goodness woman in a refrigerator played to my worst suspicions in what may have been the biggest way possible. I can tell you were trying for emotional or even visceral reactions here, so here are two important tips. 1) As much as possible, the story needs to work even if it doesn’t evoke the reactions you’re trying for. 2) When a story element fails to evoke the desired reaction, repeating it multiple times, whether in close succession, in increasing magnitude, or God forbid BOTH, is less likely to ultimately evoke the reaction and more likely to compound the failure.

   Posted on October 7th, 2009 at 6:32 pm

2. @Unregistered Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   I have very specific “love-its” about this arc. I also have some very specific “yucks” about this arc.

   I like the plot. Specifically, I like the concept of time loop causing the doctor to be responsible for his own degeneration, which unfortunately drags many people along with it. Also, I like the paradoxical question of whether someone should end the cause of their suffering, if their suffering is the cause of their existence. Amusing things to think about.

   I like the chained objectives, even though they made me run around a bit. I like them because I don’t like linear missions where the person runs in one direction to the end of the map, to hit the final boss or glowy, and get a mission over. Why should a real building, or sewer, have a “beginning” door and an “end” point?

   I like the mercenaries, with a division between pushover herd-bait (minions), ranged lieutenants (which stand at at distance and annoyingly plink at you), and the bosses which do serious damage and need to be watched out for.

   Now, what I don’t like about this arc, I really really don’t like.

   First of all, I don’t like gratituous elite bosses, just because they are a named character in the story and therefore need to be powerful. It’s not because I can’t fight them so I need to dial them down as bosses; I just got on my brute and wiped them all. But I still don’t like all the elite bosses running around.

   Secondly, I don’t like the constant, intrusive notifications that my contact is dying, suffering intensely from grief, being attacked by heroes, etc. in the send-off text… and all the while giving me instructions on what to do and providing a cheerful running commentary during the missions.

   I keep thinking “ok, I guess this is mechanism of which should cause me to feel “.

   And I think many people who play will be outraged, horrified, sympathetic, filled with protective emotions. But I read was a lot of intrusive writing devices trying to force emotional reactions onto me, and failing completely.

   Lastly, as someone who has spent a disproportionate amount of his time trying to explain evolution to people, I found the doctor’s refrain of “survival of the fittest” just completely off the mark. Fine, he’s insane, but I presume he has some training in Biology? But nevermind…just a personal gripe on abused science concepts in pop culture…

   Posted on October 7th, 2009 at 9:28 pm