1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Playing this on a single-digit FF/energy defender, +0 x1 with bosses off, for the genuine lowbie experience.

   —

   I have to say, I really appreciate this nod to the canon. It’s a wonderful way to work in the contest theme.

   Let’s see how it plays out.

   Mission 1: museum robbery. The detective warns me I may be batting above my level.

   Well, well. Nods to the canon heroes and some cops at the entrance providing backup and cheering me on.

   I jib the like of this arc’s cut already. Or words to that effect.

   Man. The problem with these higher-level enemies brought down to a lower level is that they really do bat above their weight. I’ve been taken down three times already, the last time taking No Mind down with me. (It was the room that’s a clone of the entrance. Two captives and two normal spawns all within shooting distance of each other.)

   Worse yet, No Mind is telling me that his partner seems to have been held up at the hospital.

   Man, if I actually have to protect any of these exhibits I am going to fail this arc SO HARD.

   Ah, good. They’re all glowies. And after a couple deaths to three +1 minions (including a parasite. For some reason Gloom is like my kryptonite) the end room is clear and the artifacts are… safe, I hope. Let’s see.

   Priceless art: secure.
   Ancient dagger: MIA.
   Portal device: cannibalized.

   Prognosis: oh god we’re all gonna die.

   —

   Oh man. Everything is going wrong that can go wrong, and I’m gonna go fight… Crey. Oh man I hope there aren’t any volt tanks, the damn things could oneshot me.

   And the experiments are loose! This just keeps getting better!

   The Stricken work pretty well, but they could use custom descriptions. I mean, unless these guys were all flown in from Mercy Island. The boss’s rant is wonderfully megalomaniacal.

   The previously unmentioned hero is… a horrid punster. Much as could be expected.

   Whoa. An emp/psi protector? Custom work, or actual relic of some Crey experiment? Colors looked alright, at least.

   Ah. This place was a lab for testing Infected and they needed supers for control subjects.

   —

   And now the Banished Pantheon are summoning a demon. I get a little dossier which seems to be similar to Akarist’s collected notes on the process.

   Anyway, the captives go free, and I find the dagger… but the demon is already here.

   Hoo boy. What am I gonna find down in the cave?

   Oh! A herald of Bat’zul! That’s a good prize. Goes down pretty easily and he never even sees the dagger coming.

   —

   For some reason, the natterlings in this group of scaled-down Rularuu aren’t giving XP.

   The soldiers are pretty nice, though. Both the mastermind summons who help me out and the recolored Malta who are already fighting.

   Well, time to pit this code into this console and save the friggin’ world.

   Aw. I know it’s the key to the city, but the souvenir’s pretty short. I wanna luxuriate in my accomplishments!

   —

   Storyline - *****. Little hero, you’ve had a busy day. The contact briefings keep up the sense of external pressure, and many of the missions seem to get worse after you’ve entered them. There’s definitely a frantic feeling, working to put out brushfires, but because of the first mission’s framing it doesn’t feel arbitrary.

   Design - *****. Great use of recoloring and downward enemy scaling. (How does that really work, anyway? It only shows up at the player level if all of the mission boundary levels are out of range?) It helps to get the sense that I’m batting above my weight when in a sense I really am.

   Gameplay - ****. Maybe it was just my bad luck, but I died about half a dozen times to groups of +1 Council minions in the first mission. Maybe it’s the extra power of their original range? Probably just bad luck to lose No Mind to a room with two hostages and two close-together enemy spawns, too. Still a little frustrating, though. And the actual portal room in the final mission is very tiny - the boss and a destructible spawned right on top of each other, though by then I had a large entourage.

   Detail - *****. Pretty much worth my while to check everything. The only thing I’d suggest is to customize the description of the Stricken slightly, but that wasn’t a real immersion-killer or anything.

   Overall - *****. Even with that rating, it’s not a typical lowbie arc, and because of the slightly higher damage scales on the downranged enemies, it might might not be appropriate for certain builds that really don’t get a lot of stuff between 5 and 10. Still, if you’ve got a decent lowbie build, this one is definitely worth your while to play.

   Posted on March 29th, 2010 at 11:12 pm