1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Playing this on a high 20s necro/dark mastermind, +0/x2 with bosses on.

   —

   War. War never changes.

   Nah, just funnin’ ya.

   Ah, TV’s kept itself alive in the interim. Hey, TV! Let’s resume your regularly scheduled programming!

   When in doubt, hit the first console you see!

   Ah, alright, got some more stuff to click. The prison room kinda makes this map a pain, though, any chance you could come up with one with less height?

   Anyway, automated defenses spring up with various amusing malfunctions as I move through the place.

   —

   Ah, TV. Father, mother. Secret lover. Time to get the eyes in the sky back online.

   So I encountered some of Arbiter Daos’s troops trying to get power back to the rest of Arachnos, and took them down, then took a look at the spy satellites. Bloody Bay’s got some weird kinda force field around it, which makes it seem a bit like this was the coming storm. One satellite tells me the Rogue Isles are doing just fine, but others say that a rising tide has put Cap Au Diable underwater.

   Well.

   There aren’t exactly many bits of the Rogue Isles that are really that high up. You’d think rampant flooding would qualify under “devastation”.

   Also this map has a flier hanger, which is basically a prison room but without the force fields that ruin your tab-targeting.

   —

   Hmm. TV seems to be pointing me to somewhere in Grandville, suggesting that whatever affected Bloody Bay might have originated from there. Well, let’s have a look.

   And play in a band. Just to be safe.

   Hmm. Okay, I’ve got a librarian from the Legacy Chain tracing the trail of a spell that summoned a world-ravager. Judging from this bulletin board, it would seem an Arachnos researcher left a trail behind him when he was exploring the astral depths.

   Oh! Interesting. Some ancient artifact from the revival of the CoT contained a magician who was employed to contact the Shivan ur-conscious. …and then things went predictably south.

   —

   And now it’s time to end… uh… a gestalt capable of exploding the sun.

   Dearie me.

   Well, I rescue the ghost, an illusion/flintlock pistolero. I hear grave news from topside (through the comms of some fighters) as most of the attacking forces seem to be getting wrecked, but after breaking off a stalagmite Armageddon is summoned.

   Hmm.

   Is he a custom? Might be worth putting some bone bits on him to better get the look of the Shivans.

   Anyway, with the help of some ally Void Stalkers (as this is THEIR planet to ruin, damn it!) he goes down hard.

   And… somehow Arachnos pops back out of its many fortified bunkers, like nothing ever happened? When the guy in the radio tower spouted off his death message about “well, there goes half the force”, I thought that “half the force” actually meant that half the surviving Arachnos were there in that building.

   So in the final desperate push to stop the Earth from being sunnihilated, Arachnos held back enough forces to rule the Rogue Isles again?

   Or did Dr. Aeon bring them in from some alternate dimension, as the closing sendoff may or may not indicate?

   —

   Storyline - ***. You had me going right up until the end. This was a world full of mysterious destruction and burgeoning opportunity, and I was facing down with the ongoing cause of it all, ready to strap a TV to my arm and head out into the wasteland to build my own empiARACHNOS STATUS QUO.

   Seriously, that comes out of nowhere, and I can’t really think of why. I mean, part of the fun of the post-apocalypse is that everything from the pre-apocalypse is somehow gone or changed, and just having Arachnos reassert itself at the end there was just ridiculously jarring.

   Design - *****. Missions packed with interesting stuff to do and see, with very reasonable standard enemy groups (or subsets thereof) and various customs mostly for ally details and flavor. Aside from maybe boning up the end boss I wouldn’t suggest much else.

   Gameplay - ****. Really the only irritating thing here is poking around the Arachnos base prison/flier rooms looking for stuff to click. So many little alcoves on multiple layers.

   Detail - *****. Some really great work here with both TV and the custom descriptions.

   Overall - ****. Call this 6 - 2. It’s a great ride, but right at the end it crashes hard. There’s evidence that something may have changed during this arc’s writing - I find alternating clues in one mission describing the Rogue Isles as mostly underwater and largely unscathed. Really, bringing Arachnos back like nothing went wrong doesn’t fit with the post-apocalyptic timbre or most of the details as presented.

   Posted on November 6th, 2010 at 6:29 pm