2 Responses

1. @Unregistered Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   A promising story but ultimately bogged down by the lack of polish.

   Idealistic scientists accept money from Crey to develop a brain-machine interface. Somewhere along their research they brought in psychic clockwork from another dimension. Nevermind that (psychic) clockwork are all telekinetically animated by the Clockwork King. The poor lonely sod wants one of the scientists for his Queen! Nemesis also wants the technology. Enter a four-way fight for the scientist in question.

   That is what I pieced together, at least. The storyarc is presented as a mystery, and your contact is very reluctant to tell you anything at all. Unfortunately, he still doesn’t tell you anything by the end of the arc. Neither does the scientist you rescue. She claims to have told you everything, but the clue doesn’t say much except how wrong she was.

   Alas! For the lack of exposition, a tale was lost. Why does the Clockwork King want to marry that scientist, of all the people who has visited his dimension and got attacked? Why does Nemesis want that interface (something to do with the Fake Nemesis, Nemesis’ brain transplant, probably)? Why did Crey want to develop this? Why did the scientists agree to work with Crey? Who were they so afraid to let HeroName know?

   Some weird stuff going on with the Crey map. I thought being the nice guy I was, I’d informed Crey about the Clockwork and they were expecting me to help them out. The nav bar even said to “help Crey”. Then why were the Crey on the map all hostile with me? (Ganging up on me with the clockwork, pfff!)

   The same map gave me two identical clues, which was supposed to be the scientist telling me about what had happened, but…no information forthcoming.

   All these nitty gritty details detract from the story arc, spelling mistakes and misplaced punctuations. Kind of unfortunate, really.

   Posted on October 29th, 2009 at 6:26 am

2. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Hittin’ this one up on my ice/axe tanker, low 40s, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

   —

   Man, dude, stop leaning on your period and give some love to the enter key here. Wall of text is kinda non-parseable.

   Weird. Judging from the doc’s unhinged rant this place was a robotics lab, but it bears a certain relationship to an office.

   If you want to “camouflage” the research files in with the other clickies, give them all the same plural.

   Ah, it’s an office/cave/sewer. For… some reason. I guess it’s supposed to represent the Freakshow attack?

   Huh. Okay, looking over the clues, I don’t get what she could learn about robotic AI by studying the Clockwork King. He doesn’t have a robot army, he has psychically controlled piles of scrap.

   —

   Dude does not stop with the run-on sentences. …also he’s about the worst liar ever.

   But okay, let’s go fight Nemesis. …somewhere. Oh! Actually in the streets!

   But this is Kings Row, not Founder’s Falls. There are more upscale-looking neighborhood maps, but it’s best just to make up a name the way the devs do when they send you to one of these. There are plenty of places generally under solid protection from the War Walls that villains nevertheless manage to find.

   You need another “fake plural” here, and the box of possibly Clockwork parts needs a much shorter name. It’s too tiny to see when it autowraps to the target window.

   …wait, what? Nemesis is trying to take control of the Clockwork?

   Why? For use as spies or something? Because they’re really not that much of a power upgrade on anything Nemesis has.

   And again with the talk about the Clockwork King having some kind of brain-to-robot interface. His robots should not work at all. There is no motive force aside from his own formidable psychic powers. The “Clockwork Captive” and “Mind of a King” arcs spell that out pretty explicitly.

   —

   I get to a certain point in the ensuing warehouse and my NPC dialogue window gets bombarded with Nemesis patrols, Clockwork patrols, and what may be a fight in progress?

   Most of the dialogue’s copies, too. If you’re going to have multiple patrols, create one talky edition and fill the rest up with silence. NPC dialog is basically broadcast-range now inside missions, so you don’t need to worry about people missing something.

   For some reason, the mission complete clue I get here is the same thing that minion says when I spring it from Nemesis.

   …and apparently the Clockwork pulled a fast one on Nemesis? Man, getting punk’d by Clockwork is not the kind of thing you want on your resume.

   But as far as I could work out their plan goes like this:

   1) Get researcher to investigate them.
   2) Wait for Nemesis to be interested in researcher.
   3) Wait for Freakshow to kidnap researcher and make handoff to Nemesis.
   4) Wait for Nemesis to bring researcher to the place where she usually goes to get Clockwork parts.
   5) Kidnap researcher.

   …I’m not sure exactly why parts 2-4 are necessary, here.

   The debrief ends with “Why do you get the feeling the good Doctor is not telling you everything ?” run into the same paragraph as everything else.

   …is that supposed to be my own commentary, there? It would help to set it off with a different color or text style, and maybe a different paragraph too.

   —

   Wait, what? Those are clockwork from the Psychic Clockwork dimension? But.. but…

   The Psychic Clockwork aren’t independent robots, any more than the Clockwork Clockwork are! They’re scrap animated by their dimension’s Clockwork King too! It’s just that he’s got over his fixation on being a roboticist and instead rains screaming psionic doom down on the landscape with his giant collection of brass Fin Funnels!

   When our dimension’s Clockwork King gets serious (springing Penny in the LGTF, for example) his entourage throws around psionics too.

   …and it’s a defeat all in a sprawling, 5-floor tech lab.

   With tons of patrols and battles around, all saying exactly the same thing.

   And it seems like the apparent three important objectives (defeat Nemesis, help Crey, rescue the doctor) are ALL in the last room.

   …who’s supposed to be guarding the doctor? There’s a Jaeger speaking up about defeating organics, but that may just be coincidence on his part.

   Hmm. So maybe “Help Crey” wasn’t in the last room. I’ve cleared it out but the mission hasn’t completed yet.

   Time to go back and search through all the floors again! Oh boy!

   Ah. Okay, “help crey, defeat all clockwork” was the name for the defeat all objective, as I find out when I clear the last couple pixels of health off an Oscillator stuck on the underside of a platform.

   So it doesn’t get confused for two objectives you should probably call it “clear Crey lab of all clockwork” or something without a comma in it.

   But I’d be more in favor of dropping it entirely and putting glowies or something in if you want people to explore the whole map.

   I get a mission complete clue which is pretty much the same as the clue I got for freeing Dr. Trask, with some quote marks around it.

   That mission was 400 tickets big! That’s a lot of all to defeat.

   …wait, what? They actually picked up the entire Clockwork King from his home dimension and brought him here?

   Didn’t they get the crib notes from Portal Corp that the dude was so psychically ripped he singlehandedly destroyed all human life on the planet?

   I mean, I know Crey’s pretty insane, but picking up some dude like that just to make better prosthetics?

   —

   Hmm. Y’know, all that stuff in the navbar name of the mission, that looks like a list of objectives, should probably be a list of objectives once you get in the mission. The navbar name is just too long.

   So I go poking around the standard Kingly lair, drop Babbage at the door, and take out a couple of dimensional stabilizers, which are supposed to be keeping the Clockwork King in this dimension… somehow.

   What, did they use these to kidnap him?

   Doc Trask has already been subjected to the fate I was supposed to prevent when I walk in the door.

   On the one hand, that rankles. On the other hand, you can’t very well have an arc about a Clockwork Queen and not get a Clockwork Queen.

   The machine that did it is sitting around for me to bust up, but I don’t know what good it’ll do and its guards don’t vomit ellipses into the chat box like everything else around here, so I leave it be for now.

   This is some pretty sweet visual work on the Queen and her guards, but I feel obliged to say that the Clockwork King already has robots that create other robots - they’re the Assembler Duke/Prince.

   Well, the King shows up, lording over the pile of bones, but with a new ally I drop him fairly quickly.

   Ah, that’s what the machine does. Completes the mission. …and summons a horde of the new-type clockwork.

   I’m not sure why it particularly needs to be destroyed, though. Its grisly work here is done.

   And I get another odd comment when I tag back to the contact that is… supposed to be my inner monologue? Maybe?

   —

   Storyline - *. So a doctor wants to make better prosthetics (that’s cool) and thinks the Clockwork King’s robots are the key to it (um, no, unless we got psychic veterans) so researchers kidnap the fully ascendant Clockwork King who scrubbed his world clean of life, to study him. (WHAT.)

   My first problem is that there’s no “there” there. The Clockwork King doesn’t have an army of functional robots, but psychically animated scrap metal. DATA has known this since I was a wee Security Level 20 scamp running errands for Colleen Saramago.

   My second problem is that bringing something that destroyed its world into this one without any apparent precautions is a cataclysmic level of dumb.

   My third problem is with the Clockwork’s plan to retake the researcher — as outlined above, it goes through the completely unnecessary steps of a handoff through Freakshow to Nemesis and subsequent baiting of Nemesis to a particular location.

   You know what makes sense here? The Clockwork King always wanted to be a brilliant roboticist. Maybe there’s a universe where he actually was one — and this is the logic the doctor follows in hopping a portal to Epsilon Tau 27-2. Sure enough, Kingy seems to be rather eager to make progress on her designs - but Nemesis catches wind of things and et cetera et cetera, and the entire time the King just wanted another robot intelligence because it gets lonely talking to yourself all the time. Maybe the jammers in the final mission are designed to lock his dimension off, and they get finished just as you show up.

   Design - ****. Extra points for the Clockwork Queen and the little builders - her design is very striking, and while the little guys don’t make narrative sense they at least look the part. Minus points for putting the little builders in a group with no bosses or minions, making them worth about as much as half a sprocket apiece.

   Gameplay - **. Some of the enemy choices are a bit frustrating. Psychic Clockwork are very small, like to keep at range, and scatter easily from knockback. Nemesis snipers have a giant perception range, which means they can hit you from about a city block away with a clear line of sight, and the outdoor city maps definitely provide clear lines of sight. Those are fairly minor problems - the big one is clearing an entire 5-floor tech lab of Clockwork, when at any given time one could just dart off and get lost behind the scenery.

   Detail - *. The contact briefing is just a wall of text, which is very hard to read at standard resolution. Break it up some with double line breaks to create paragraphs and offset some ideas from others. This is especially vital if some of “my hero’s thoughts” are supposed to be mixed in there somewhere, and they need to be different from the other text, in color or style or both, so I can figure out when “I” am supposed to be speaking. Also break up some of the in-mission dialogue with spaces so it fragments more cleanly across lines instead of just overrunning the edge.

   Overall - **. Something needs to be done about the defeat all on the giant lab map. I’m in favor of cutting it out entirely. And while the Clockwork Queen is some nice visual work, and the outcome of the last mission interesting in isolation, the plot that led there was pretty unbelievable. And I wonder how much “internal monologue” I missed because it was just lumped in with the rest of the contact text.

   Posted on November 15th, 2009 at 12:03 pm