1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running this one on a mid-40s ice/axe tanker, no AVs all bosses 2 heroes at +0.

   —

   Seems to be an extraneous > before “As I was saying” in the opening briefing.

   I… seem to be dealing with perhaps a Shadow Shard exile here. Someone who doesn’t know what grass is. Ah well, if you can’t be kind to aliens or perhaps people from the future, who can you be kind to?

   Also at about level 40, anything you might describe as “hoodlums” stop being a concern.

   Oh. Nemesis. Yeah, they might actually be self-described hoodlums.

   Ah dear. Yes, alright, “Mender Silos” does anagram to “Lord Nemesis”, but I’d suggest recoloring or renaming the troops, or at the very least making them from a different enemy group. Nemesis doesn’t have a reputation for being quite this obvious.

   But there’s a time traveler out there, and we’ve just helped her.

   As for the closing briefing, you probably want to put actions in bold or italics or a different color from the rest of the contact text.

   —

   More of those extraneous > characters in the second accept text. But alright, she’s somebody else concerned with the integrity of the timestream. Let’s go save some lives. That’s always good, right?

   …ah man. A cargo ship. I can see the sole navbar objective right when I enter, but I doubt it’ll be so easy.

   If this Stephan is who I think he is, his name’s spelled with an F. Stefan.

   He and Marcus are in the first two rooms of this cargo ship, and the mission completes.

   Which I guess is alright (and the dudes who jump us are pretty spiffy-looking) but I have a look at the rest of it to see if I’m missing anything.

   Nope, it’s all empty.

   —

   Okay, so now somebody’s going to cut the Rikti War off at the knees. I really don’t feel like this is something that needs to be stopped, but okay, let’s give this a go.

   So there’s some temporal weirdness still going on. Statesman isn’t viewed very favorably, and I see a boss group of wraiths after I pull down some of the data on the Rikti War.

   They seem to recognize me, for some reason. Defeating them wasn’t required to complete the mission, even though they showed up in the navbar.

   The end room for this mission is actually completely tiny, and it’s got two glowies and a destructo in it, in addition to the Rikti… ambush? Patrol?

   It’s very busy, is my point.

   Lady Starburst’s signoff mentions… bane spiders? In Paragon City, yet. Hmm.

   It’s called a “Pyrrhic” victory, exit text.

   —

   The header for this mission calls it “act three”, even though it’s the fourth mission. I guess the first mission was a prologue?

   Anyway, looks like I’m going to piggyback on an invasion and look for information.

   Interesting custom troops guarding the place. Nice mix. I maneuver through a lot of fights and hit a bunch of glowies, finding a personnel file on my contact and the greater wraith who apparently started this whole thing…

   To get my contact’s old ID tag.

   I… I wonder if it’s actually her trying to stop this whole thing from going down.

   —

   Anyway. My contact falls down the temporal rabbit hole, and I’m going off to a crazy mixed-up world where up is clown and black is right.

   Or the DE office. That’s a pretty nice bit of chaos, yeah.

   I find a young version of my contact, and a slightly older version a bit deeper in - she tells me to go back toward the entrance, but I met her just after I got off the elevator and the first floor is clear.

   In fact it’s not until the last floor that I meet the Professor. She tells me I must head for the deepest parts… but I thought I was there already. Hoo boy. Time to backtrack.

   Back on the third floor I meet a meditating Starburst, who tells me that she hasn’t just been fighting the Timewraiths, she IS the Timewraiths.

   In fact, she’s the end boss. Well well.

   Unfortunately for her, I only get stronger with swarms of minions. Go Energy Absorption! The Timewraiths are a bit more of a bump, but nothing I can’t handle, and she goes down.

   The mission doesn’t complete until the two little temporal shadow friends in her boss group are down, which seems a bit off.

   Ah. Apparently I wasn’t just making a John vs. the zombies joke up there, and she really was the timewraiths. Caused by repeated time-traveling until she became supremely powerful and supremely insane.

   The end blurb is something about facing the consequences of my actions… this text really needs to be formatted specially. Especially since the bit about facing the consequences of my actions is really needs to be set up better, perhaps with some bolding on “your”, to make it clear that it’s talking about my actions as a whole rather than just my part in this storyarc.

   —

   Storyline - ***. I don’t think the overall story is bad, but I think it’s a bit wrongly paced. The first three missions are basically putting out fires and learning nothing about the big threat, with the first one rather superfluous overall. And the time interventions are a bit inexplicable. Are those her attempts to get rid of the TimeWraiths by preventing the Well of the Furies from being uncapped and turning back the Rikti War? We don’t really find out. For that matter, how does the information from TimeGuard point to that odd little Nexus?

   I mean, as far as I can tell I spend the first four missions just moving a pile of dirt back and forth before my contact remembers that it all ends in the Nexus and points my time-watch there. Which isn’t a very satisfying way to spend the first four missions. They really need more of a connection to the overall story as revealed in the last mission, though the boss in mission 4 is a nice piece of foreshadowing.

   Design - ***. The cargo ship ends a bit early, the portal lab and Time Guard HQ seem to be very heavy toward their end rooms, and the temporal duplicates of my contact misdirect me in the final mission, which is a bit worse than saying nothing at all.

   The custom group is largely featureless, but that’s fine considering what they are, and the photonegative clones are a nice touch.

   Gameplay - ****. As a tank I was a bit frustrated that none of the customs wanted to have a punch-up. They were all ranged. And if I was playing anything but an ice tank I probably get a bit ticked off if enough minions connected with infrigidate. That’s a bit of a bear to face as volley fire.

   If you can put a melee minion in the group I think that’d help, assuming you’ve got the room.

   Also, the running back and forth uselessly in the last mission as was noted.

   Detail - ***. My contact has a lot of things to say, but most of them are either restated in the last mission or irrelevant to the overall story. That applies to many of the other clues I find, too. They’re not out-of-place or even inauthentic, but they just don’t help paint a picture of what’s really going on here.

   Of special interest is one largely throwaway line about bane spiders protecting things and “Statesman’s thugs” messing them up. That’s something I would have liked to see happening, perhaps instead of that first largely tangential mission.

   Overall - ***. A generally good last mission if you can drop the misdirection by captives, but it seems to stand apart from the other four, rendering them make-work to one degree or another. If you can do more to tie the earlier missions in with the overall story, and if possible space objectives out a little more reasonably, the arc would do a better job of living up to the last mission.

   Posted on February 28th, 2010 at 11:15 pm