Running this on a high-40s ice/axe tank, +0/x2 with bosses on.

—

Mender Tess (she could use a description now that you can do that) sends me off against a group with designs against Ouroboros. Apparently I don’t exist in their past, which will let me blindside them.

I begin engaging the soldiers. Let’s see here… AR/elec armor and elec melee/elec armor minions, mercs/mind control and AR/empathy lieutenants… and Vanguard Sergeants for some reason?

Yeah, stock description and everything. Are these guys supposed to be here? If so you might want to at least tweak their stock description to note how odd that is.

I meet a metahuman called “The Alpha”, a fire blast (with Aim)/fire manip (with Build Up). He shows up later in the mission as a normal boss, which seems a little odd. I also meet a timelost caveman, Mace (with build up)/Invuln, and a mad archer, bow (with aim)/pain dom.

The map boss is an energy melee (with build up) robot who seems to have used my existence to crack Ouroboros.

Problematic.

—

Tess decides to send me after them, surmising I won’t die just yet and offering to off me and dump the body down a blind time-hole if I don’t get on it.

Woman after my own heart, that one.

I enter the map to a bunch of greens. If you don’t want that to happen you should look at the mission pacing setting - this may have been made before it actually worked properly.

Yeah, I’m betting you didn’t want The Alpha to be a regular feature, but I fight him all through this place, including three times in one room.

Apparently someone’s been feeding this information to the robot…

—

…someone in the 5th Column. Trying to span across history before time travel is uninvented. Tess says she’ll come with? Now this will be interesting.

I pick her up in the first room. Pretty standard MA/SR, really. The base is a small 5th Column affair with the troops discussing the upcoming schism. I pick up the drive as a clue, but no idea what’s on it yet - I’m guessing Tess will read that after we get out.

—

Not even. But with the drive gone Time-Shift never cuts Ouro off from the time stream, so that’s a win of sorts. I go to get news of Ouro while Tess works on figuring out who tipped the robot off.

…well. Somehow things have gone even worse now.

…or… wait. The ambush that shows up when I drop the bot is casting things in a new light. I’m a traitor in this timeline? Are all the other Menders that way too?

—

Huh. Apparently this whole affair was Tess’s plan in the future to turn TimeShift into a traitor and seal off Ouroboros against those who would destroy it all. So now I’m going to make sure the robot finds out how to get that done.

Well, this should be an easy little coda.

This… uh… this isn’t the same base I was in last time The overall topology is similar, but the last room is markedly different. For a second I think things are going to go weird once I set the drive in place, but the mission ends normally.

—

Storyline - ***. But the future refused to change.

It’s not really easy to keep up tension in an arc where you’re fighting as hard as you can just to stay in the same place. I respect that, but even then mission 2 is pretty much the last time I got in a meaningful fight to learn something novel. Missions 3 and 5 are milk runs through a small 5th base. Mission 4 is ultimately completely misguided, and I’m still not sure how much of it really changed. Absent the other people who’ve been ill done by time travel… was the whole mission really against Ouroboros loyalists? The actual future threat never appeared on the map?

I was expecting something to try and stop me in the last mission at least, some little glimpse of how bad this alternate future is that Tess would rather turn down an entire army of dudes than face it. But it’s just a little stealth to click and then it’s over.

Design - ***. The maps are alright. The 5th bunkers are 5th bunkers, the lab’s a lab, and Eleusis does a decent job standing in for somewhere near Ouro. I don’t even think the kickoff for the Alpha unlock arc is available in Mission Architect, and I rather doubt you could put much on it even then.

The custom enemy group’s pretty thematically decent. Purple, occasionally sparkity, soldiers.

Mender Tess is some pretty nice design work. I can tell she looks a little bit different, but she doesn’t look wrong.

But there are places where the design feels a little unpolished. The Timeshift lab that kicks off with greens, though that might well be a symptom of pacing that’s only comparatively recently started working. The incongruous Vanguard soldier, who does kind of look the part in the customs but retains his original title and description, just seeming to have wandered in. The Alpha showing up as a regular boss among the customs, which I’m pretty sure is not intended. And the two 5th bunkers that are almost, but not quite, completely identical-looking.

Gameplay - ***. I occasionally have harsh words for Aim and Build Up in lower-level arcs or on elite bosses, but on bosses they actually make for some pretty notable fights at the higher levels.

Though if the Alpha’s really supposed to be a regular presence in the custom group, he’s got both Aim and Build up and is a regular fight, so that doesn’t work out quite as well.

But there’s only one proper melee unit in the custom group, maybe one and a half if the Vanguard lieut is supposed to be there as he sometimes will close to melee. The problem with ranged enemies that I often talk about is that, especially on open ground, there’s no real way to get them to group together. So every battle ends with a little bit of mop-up. This is a little bit irritating, but it doesn’t really get very bad unless the mission’s a defeat all.

Or a chained mission on an outdoor map, which often practically works out to “defeat all” so you have a prayer of finding the new objective when it warps in. And both the outdoor missions with the custom group involve some degree of chaining.

Detail - *****. Mission 4 is actually pretty well-written. The attack calls and such are flavorful enough that it seems to a casual observer like nothing’s changed, but the reveal at the end throws the whole thing into pretty sharp contrast. The effect only lasts for a little bit - ultimately it was a lot of running to stand still - but it’s a nice effect.

Tess is a sardonic, just barely not murderous joy to listen to, and when the enemy group showed up in the first mission their descriptions and dialogues made me want to see more of them, and explore their deeply-rooted personal animosity against time travel.

Overall - ***. But ultimately the people who hate time travel enough to drown it in the wrathtub play second fiddle to an ouroboros in the snake-eating-own-tail sense and an unspecified future enemy of Ouroboros who never really gets any screen time. That’s disappointing, and the little annoyances don’t do much to cushion the blow.

But unless I miss my guess, this is an arc that has a lot to gain from the capabilities now present in Architect and perhaps even the expanded file size.

Running this on a low-teens will/dark tank, on old Heroic - +0/x1 with bosses on.

—

Fusionette needs a description, now that you can do that.

One of the Nuclear 90 has mysteriously vanished! Task Force Superawesome is on the case!

The warehouse is oddly silent. Hellions are doing their usual stunts but nobody’s saying anything… until right at the end, when one of the 90 has apparently decided to take up a life of crime.

Fusionette, your thoughts? “Weeeeird”. Yes, thank you. I suppose blasting Rikti several blocks away does take up most of your time.

—

Another one of the vanished 90 is robbing a bank. Lady Grey has given Fusionette a rerouter so they can be captured by Vanguard when they beam out. That’d be nice as an opening clue, now that you can do that.

Nick has opted for the “like a sun” interpretation of fusion. A clue he drops on defeat reveals some kind of mind-control arifact. Nasty pieces of work, those.

Finding the stolen artifacts isn’t hard as they’re all in the vault. I think there are only a few bank maps that actually can put glowies outside the vault. If you want them to show up scattered throughout the bank, you might want to confirm glowie location on the map preview, now that we get one.

…apropos of nothing, I wonder if Up-n-Away burger actually has some kind of flying delivery service. It seems pretty natural given the branding. And the wide availability of jet packs.

—

Fusionette reading off a report. This is pretty great. And apparently Faultline’s got himself mixed up in this too?

There are Hellions here… IMPUGNING HIGHER LEARNING? This will not stand!

Anyway, two more heroes down and poor Jim Temblor is glad I don’t work for the tabloids.

This all seems to be the work of some kid who got booted out of MAGI for conduct unbecoming a decent human being.

—

And now we’re going to try some aversion therapy on the guy. I’m in.

A refight with Mandy, and… oh, hey. The end boss is actually an EB. So that’s why my health is going down so fast. Good punchup, though.

I’ve prevented a plan to mind-control the city’s heroes at the cost of… being on Fusionette’s speed dial. History will remember this sacrifice.

—

Storyline - ****. It’s a simple story told succinctly - my only problem is with Vanguard’s role in the whole thing. I’ve always thought of Vanguard as kind of a high-test organization more concerned with fighting back the Rikti. They wouldn’t really be interested in the Nuclear 90 going on a low-level crime spree. That’s really more GIFT’s department. I mean, unless there are alien mind-control devices we’re lookin’ at here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I mean, Lady Grey’s got a very wheels-within-wheels sort of persona, maybe there’s something for her in all this, but it’d be nice to get a hint of that. I mean, heck, maybe she’s passing us notes because Fusionette is not noted for being a good conductor of information.

Design - ****. Sensible maps overall, and customs tricked out in bright primary colors, with a very Duke Mordrogar final boss. I suppose for a low-level arc there’s not much variety to be had, but I would have liked to fight something besides Hellions, even if they are behind it all.

Gameplay - *****. Stock Hellions never hurt nobody. Really my only problem is with the recurring radiation-blast boss. At low levels you come to rely quite a bit on the native enemy 50% miss chance for mitigation. You might want to see what kind of XP she gets without Neutrino Bolt.

Detail - *****. The walkers are sparse, but they always have something interesting to say, and the Nuclear 90 have nice little bios.

I’m just disappointed nobody actually mentions Task Force Superawesome outside of Fusionette. Villains have a weird sense for those sorts of things.

Overall - ****. A nice low-level arc that takes the Nuclear 90 and runs with ‘em a bit. It could use some slightly varied opposition and Vanguard getting involved seems a bit out of scope, but the core is solid.

Running this on a high-40s ice/axe tank, +0/x2 with bosses on.

—

It’s really not necessary to put in the fiction about using AE to get heroes together for a punchup. That’s space you could use to talk about other things that actually matter to the plot.

Still, standard Saturday morning spiel here - whole bunch of archvillains coming together to bring Paragon City to its knees. My part in this begins foiling a prison break in the Zig. …in the bunker? That’s kind of dinky.

But yeah. Rescue Citadel, throw down with Black Scorpion in this teeny-tiny space.

(I still can’t believe you can’t call that particular spade a spade.)

—

And now someone’s unleashed Arachnoids on Peregrine Island.

Looks like someone fobbed mind-control duty for them off on the Carnies. Hoo boy. Fortuntately with Manticore and Miss Sis Psyche, there’s not a lot of danger in a single Master Illusionist boss.

(And just so you know, the list of random civilians includes some distinctly un-civilian entities, like the Tsoo tattoo artists.)

Apparently there’s some bad mojo brewing on Striga.

—

Synapse and Babs? Hoo boy. The Knockback Brothers. And Synapse’s AI makes him rapidly switch targets to show off his speed. If I was worried about getting dogpiled I’d be extra-worried now.

In attendance at the Center’s control room are Nosferatu and…. some random scrub elite protector. It seems that the Circle are going to summon Baphomet and then Crey and the Council are going to pump him up with mad science.

The alteration chamber is… up on the catwalks in the Center’s danger room? I didn’t even know there WERE catwalks in the Center’s danger room. Learn something new every day.

And then Baphomet is out. With a little help from my allies I take him out before the ambush waves even show up, which is kind of sad.

—

Now, it’s onto the location in Faultline that these transmissions have been coming from.

It quickly turns into an all-out brawl. Lord Recluse’s remaining lieutenants and a token Nemesis presence are here, and along with Positron and Numina, Infernal and Valkyrie have come out to play.

But apparently some superweapon “End Game” is being built here. Let’s see…

Ah. It’s been whisked away. To the core of the Rogue Isles. And we need to follow it.

—

Hey. An MA map that starts in Lord Recluse’s war room and actually uses the rest of the map. This should be fun.

Well, if Synapse weren’t pulling the entire Fist of Fear down on our heads. He gets Psyche and almost himself creamed by Gyrfalcon the Unheralded.

Looks like there are actually a whole bunch of dudes kicking around. Dreck, Requiem…

“End Game” is apparently code for “the part where all the heroes get it”. Recluse just wanted one last throw down - all of us versus all of them.

Shame we take on all of them one at a time.

Generally.

SYNAPSE.

Recluse thinks he has us trapped here, but the way we got in still works to come out.

And in the debriefing, we iris out as everyone laughs.

—

Storyline - ***. This arc is built to lead up to the final battle, with little teaser installments of the all of us vs. all of them. As such it doesn’t really need a story so much as an excuse that isn’t patently ridiculous, and manages that pretty well.

I will say a couple things. First, the “our way out still works, guys!” strikes me as a little cheap. I mean, maybe Dr. Aeon was miffed at being left out or something and we’d get a little note from him saying so as a clue in the final mission. Second, don’t play up the Architect. It really doesn’t have anything to do with how the plot progresses — it’s generally assumed that the contact hologram and the architect pillar are just stand-ins for the contact and the mission door in the “real world”. Mentioning the Architect leads to the expectation that it’ll be important somewhere down the line, and that just doesn’t happen.

Design - ****. No customs to speak of here, it’s all stock. The special maps are all used pretty well to set the stage, with one exception: the villain tutorial mission in the Zig bunker. That map has just enough space for a hostage and a boss fight and absolutely nothing else. As a start to an arc about saving the world with the Freedom Phalanx, it seems just a little bit insignificant.

Gameplay - ****. I’ll spell it out again: Synapse’s AI is different from pretty much every other ally or enemy. Because a speedster who just stands there is kind of silly, Synapse’s AI is programmed to race around finding new things to beat on and showing off his ridiculous speed.

In a fight that’s already a giant scrum, Synapse goes out and gets even more fighters. On one hand it wasn’t really all that bad; on the other it might work better if Synapse was either captured in the back room because he always gets at least that far, or was just a rescue who dashed off to give a report or secure an escape or whatever.

Detail - *****. This whole affair was a very Marvel Adventures sort of take on the game, and it’s not easy to pull that off without getting too facile or too cynical, so points for that.

Overall - ****. A good punchup with a workable story.

Running this on a max-level fire/energy tanker, +1/x2 with bosses on.

—

So, flashing back to WW1, under the sardonic guidance of Mender Tesseract. Okay, let’s see what’s messing things up.

Hmm. Blue tunnels. I would have gone with tan tunnels.

Anyway, grunt soldiers with melee picks and shovels, higher ranks with guns. Very fitting the story. I find some temporal anomalies (all of them in the same room) that seem to denote something notable has been pulled out of time.

Huh. For some reason the Germans are all speaking, well, German, but the officer in charge is spouting English? Anyway, his notes (which I can also read) indicate that he dug too greedily and too deep, and stumbled on weird things which he sealed up behind him.

Any bets where we’re going next?

—

Oh lord, Oranbega? That’s not supposed to go there!

I hear Germans as I enter. So some of them were stranded back here? …well, I don’t blame them, really. The Circle are pretty freaky.

There are explosive charges leftover from previous tunnel activities, distracting from the real objective, which is to find clues as to what’s going on here.

A genuine Circle entry about being displaced in time. A rack of seemingly medieval weapons made by modern recreators. …which I guess the modern Circle might grab onto?

Everything else seems to point to some mage messing with an obelisk that catapulted them all back into the past.

—

Ah, I see. The Circle didn’t do this, but they’re investigating, and unlocking the secrets of time travel is a bad thing.

So we have to destroy… however they got pulled here. I wonder what did it?

There are stasis tubes marked as “temporal warp generators” but with their default description, a boss with the default boss description, and a couple of captured soldiers who die horribly to Behemoth fireballs and firebreath. Not much for answering the wonderment there, other than a comment they’re made of the same strange metal that wound up in Oranbega.

Apparently Tesseract doesn’t know what they are either, and she’s passing them up the chain.

—

And now we have a couple other things to do to preserve the timeline. Peachy. Well, nobody ever said this would be easy.

The German officer here has an escort of Circle. That seems like an oversight.

There are also a couple of warding obelisks to break down for… some reason.

I have to spring someone and… actually lead him out of Oranbega. Over the rickety bridges, through the portals, and past the crystals which automatically occupy an escort’s attention when they get close to one.

You can’t exactly help that last one, but given that this guy’s just hangin’ out in the end room, and the walk back is completely uneventful, could it not be an escort?

Also the clue I get on mission complete seems to be a dummy — “Lieutenant: ddd”.

The strange temporal devices that caused this all… are still a mystery. Silos maintains they’re from the future, and from space, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is — I have to believe in myself.

—

Storyline - *****. Now that I think about it, for an organization that’s supposed to be dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the timeline, there really aren’t a lot of missions like this arc in Ouroboros. I guess the weird temporal artifacts are supposed to be foreshadowing of the Coming Storm?

Regardless, this is a well-contained little story about correcting a timeline through more than just play-acting through history. The only problem I have is that the temporal distortions are set up as a puzzle to solve - I suppose part of that is the limited model selection in the game so you can’t actually have genuinely mysterious objects. Everything looks like something I’ve seen before. But for at least half the arc I’m figuring that I’ll find the people responsible and maybe biff them in the face.

I don’t know if this is something fixable. I mean, I’m operating at the Ouroboros level but I could stand some reminder at some point that this is yeoman’s work, basic investigation.

Design - ****. Oranbega is Oranbega, the tunnels are tunnels. It’s nice to see the blue caves when appropriate - though again, this seems kinda like a job for brown caves, mostly to improve visibility of the enemy forces.

Speaking of the enemy forces, there’s generally a good job done with them here, too. The minions are melee sappers using mining tools, the higher ranks have guns. Now that you can select the powers an enemy has you might want to take period-inappropriate devices away from the boss rank.

The end mission feels kinda like an early version of itself - there are some obelisks to break that don’t do anything and there’s dummy text in the mission complete clue.

Gameplay - ***. Mostly for the last mission. I had the entire thing cleared out with an hour to go, but I ran into so many crystals trying to get the escort out that I nearly ran out of time. If I hadn’t wanted to see how the story ended for the review, I seriously would have written the arc off there. I know it’s not your fault that escorts bug out on crystals, and they actually show up pretty randomly in Oranbega maps, but this needs to be addressed. Maybe if you’re going to have an escort, put him up front?

Detail - ***. Circle bosses and destructible objects have their stock descriptions. I forget if that was variable at the time this arc was released, but it certainly is now. Those are nice little ways to drop some hints to people who are paying attention.

On one hand I understand why you have the soldiers, mostly patrols, shouting in German or French. On the other it’s kind of weird that occasionally when I should understand someone, like a boss, they speak pretty good English.

Also, look at that German boss in the last map. Pretty sure he’s not supposed to have a Circle escort.

Overall - ****. The last mission needs a little patching-up, but most of the problems with the arc aren’t necessarily of its own making. And the story - actually doing something to fix time for Ouroboros! - is something worth telling that I haven’t seen before.

Running this on a max-level stone/ice tanker, +1/x2 with bosses on.

—

So a flashback in MA to the Rikti War. The first mission is pitched as some kind of escort, but my target pops free immediately on entering the map and there’s no escort target - you can actually do escort targets now, and they’re really helpful, especially on outdoor maps.

Regardless, this escort seems to be kind of a moot point, since the heroes have all been shepherded away by the Rikti. Though there are still wounded to heal.

—

Wounded Rikti, which doesn’t go over well with the Vanguard, but they grudgingly accept the idea.

And then the Rikti storm the base to rescue their prisoner.

He’s feeling helpful, though. This seems like another sensible place for an escort, but I’m loath to recommend those as they’re still a bit bugged.

—

Vanguard base round two! There’s a boss just inside the door who’s been picked from an enemy with a maximum level of 39, so he’s very very gray.

Freeing Dr. Langstrom on the first floor… completes the mission? How strange. I’ll head upstairs to see what goes on.

No, there doesn’t seem to be a Rikti upstairs. I have no idea if this is intended or not.

Apparently it is! But he was in the navbar and there wasn’t so much as a clue that indicated the mission should have completed early.

—

And now the doc decides to sneak onto Omega Team. …because the Rikti she rescued was taken back to the Rikti home world?

Or is coincidentally in the staging area?

Anyway, I rescue the doc and the Rikti, but even with it following after me the objective’s still in the nav bar. Curious.

Oh. It’s Ajax. Completely unheralded. Freeing him does complete the mission though.

Also he’s called Ajax in the mission but Apex in the debrief. (Apex is a completely different dude, helped out War Witch and such.)

—

And now for the payoff that kicked off this arc in the first place.

Apparently my contact’s sister is actually a mind-controller working for the Council. But there’s something wrong with her MA definition, as she shows up as a level 39 Wolfpack robot, though the clue that drops on her defeat seems to indicate more of a pistolero.

…for some reason this last mission was supposed to be real? That’s kind of a weird direction to take, as it doesn’t really add much of anything. Ah well.

—

Storyline - ***. It all made a decent amount of sense up until the reveal that the final mission was something I did five years ago but somehow didn’t remember. Up until then there’s been a decent flow to the story with the final mission set up as a coda, and actually writing me into the story doesn’t seem to have much purpose.

There isn’t really a lot that can top the last days of Omega Team as a draw, so writing me into the story doesn’t help a lot on that front.

Design - *. For all that I talk up how appropriate escorts would be, they’re still plagued by bugs. An escort will always stay at the location you dropped them off - you can’t create, like, waypoints or anything with them. So for point-to-point escorts with noncombatants, they work fine, but anything else needs consideration. Wanted to get that up front because it’s important.

The opposition is stock here, with apparently three customs - my contact with and without lab coat, and the end boss, who as I noted has something wrong somewhere and shows up as a giant robot. I don’t take points off for that, since the system has shifted under existing arcs so radically.

But the mission objectives don’t match up very well with what I’m actually asked to do in the mission. Mission one asks me to pick up an escort and find a hero. The “hero” is actually a boss fight with Rikti. They’re mentioning a hero, but there’s nothing to connect them and no reason not to look elsewhere for something that seems relevant to completing the mission. Mission three puts the rescued Rikti in the navbar but the mission completes after freeing the doctor - deliberately, as the Rikti isn’t there, but in the absence of some clue or indication to the contrary it seems wrong, especially when the doctor shows up on the first floor. Perhaps some glowie later on might indicate where the rescued Rikti was subsequently taken? Mission four has a completely unheralded hostage rescue objective - the Rikti ally mentions hostages but his name is still in the navbar when he does this.

Overall, especially given how flaky the Architect can be at the best of times, it’s better to err on the side of overly explicitly conveying what the player should be doing.

Gameplay - ***. The first mission is a blind hunt on an outdoor map, and the two missions that have inconsistent objectives seem a little more interminable than they might otherwise be.

The opposition is stock and entirely reasonable, but wondering what exactly will complete the mission makes the whole exercise a lot more tense than it needs to be.

Detail - ***. There isn’t much custom description needed. What description exists is serviceable and concise. The problem is that clues don’t show up very consistently as the missions progress. If the mission isn’t proceeding as the original briefing might have indicated, a clue is a sensible place to deliver that sort of course correction.

Overall - **. What drags this arc down is the persistent mismatch between what the briefings and navbar indicate needs to be done and the actions that I have to actually take to complete the mission. Fortunately this is easy to fix, but it really torpedoes my enjoyment of the arc.

Running this on a max-level spine/regen scrapper, +1/x2 with bosses on.

—

Alright. So Mynx is sending me to scout out Praetoria by… beating the snot out of everybody in sight. She’s not that good at stealth, is she?

(Quick note about the funny accept text you’ve got there - only the mission accepter can possibly see this. If this is an arc that likes teams, you may want to break it out into a briefing, which at least teammates can see.)

The enemies are “Crossbow”, a worthy construction from a time before the IDF, but I was actually kinda looking forward to wrangling with them in architect.

Oh, this is disquieting. Jonin dropping blinding powder. Does that have a to-hit or is it automatic? Either way it’s a long-duration stacked confuse. And dominators with plant control, with cascading defense debuffs, and radiation defenders. Radiation toggle debuffs don’t actually wear off in the hands of the Architect.

You’ve got some kind of messed-up power selection or something in the files, as I’m seeing some proteans stomping around.

But the “Crossbow” are pretty nice visually, all having junior versions of Tyrant’s armor on.

…oh, this is interesting. Apparently with confuse on me, Mynx (unconfused) thinks I’m an enemy and preferentially targets me. Would explain why I’m melting so quickly.

After plowing through Going Rogue a couple times it seems odd to be getting “introduced” to the IDF-equivalent and the resistance. I mean, I could understand needing an introduction, but it’s not exactly the level of vital intelligence to be parceled out in clues.

—

Nice repurposing of a neighborhood as leveled.

Not-so-nice: needing to find a random thing in it, and then needing to find a random thing in it again.

Just plain weird: even though her name is Dominatrix, I guess automatic updates to the enemy model mean that she shows up in the description and kill text as Praetor Duncan.

—

And now I punch Siege to serve as a distraction.

Huh. The opening text scroll suggests someone came through a portal, but the operative I rescue is from not-Arachnos. Are we letting them stage their operations out of Portal Corp or the Vindicator base or something?

Here is a terrible secret about the Skyway City overpasses: there are about four functional Z-levels to this map, and you will never, ever see more than one of them unless you use the map in Mission Architect.

…and unheralded by anything but an ambush, Siege’s defeat chains into finding Neuron.

My ally is a bit flaky in this map. Sometimes she’ll space out and need to be re-acquired.

Finally I work my way through the multiple levels and find Neuron.

—

Oh. So the not-Arachnos are staging in this dimension. That… sets an interesting precedent, though I suppose it’s only fair given the Praetorians try and get themselves beachheads over here. Anyway. Planting bombs now.

You should know that if you have multiple copies of a single objective, the very first one gives the objective-complete text and any associated clues. Doesn’t play well with setting up a surprise.

—

And a final showdown. There are quite a few optional bosses called out in the navbar, but any bosses in the way of Recluse and his half-dozen summoned dudes aren’t really optional.

Judging by the lack of mementos though, the fights are really just for the thrill of the combat, which isn’t a bad reason overall.

I like the justification for the time limit, but I come in under it with pretty much no trouble, thanks largely to Recluse and his six summoned dudes.

—

Storyline - ****. This may be a little personally biased, but I like what’s going on here. There’s the couple of Praetorian arcs, and then there’s the giant Incarnate trials, and there’s not much in between the two. A story about the Vindicators hooking up with the Resistance is a pretty good bridge between these events.

Well, the actual Resistance. Not Arightnos. Praetoria starts with Marcus Cole killin’ his old war buddy and goes from there, though some Arachnos luminaries do show up in the underground. But it’s hardly fair to take points off for something you didn’t know about at the time of writing.

If you’re revisiting this, of course, I’d like to see the Resistance in the rewrite, but Praetoria-as-mirror-Earth was a common enough guess back when that was all we saw.

Design - ***. Chained objectives can be very tempting if you want to present events in a certain order. The problem is that it’s not always possible to ensure the player encounters those spawns (or spawn locations for unspawned encounters) in the proper order, especially on outdoor maps.

So when you’ve got a story in a mission that depends on certain things happening, especially when the mission map doesn’t lend itself to a linear narrative, consider if they really have to happen in the provided order. Do we really need, for example in mission three, to pop the agent from Arightnos, then defeat Siege, then drop Neuron?

I have to drop a good word for the enemy costume design. It does some nice borrowing from Tyrant’s major elements to create a much more credible personal guard than the Destroyers used to be. Now, of course, there’s the IDF, but that’s beside the point.

Gameplay - *. I will give the customs this: nobody’s got crazy burst offense or impregnable defense. Those are just pains to go up against. Unfortunately there are some other pains laying around. Radiation defenders with persistent debuffs. The plant/thorn dominators whose every power debuffs your defense, making it more likely that a followup is going to hit and debuff your defense, making it more likely that a followup is going to hit… it’s just a bad scene. Smoke flash from the ninja mastermind’s minions is a new one, though. That’s a decent-duration confuse that may well turn your intended-to-be-balancing-factor ally against you as well. The oni is enough of a challenge, with the rain of fire scattering your ally and fire control powers that charge fast enough to stack status effects even through Integration.

The chained objectives on outdoor maps aren’t much fun either. They can show up literally anywhere and the only way to find out where is to scour every corner of the map or kill enough of the map’s population that you may as well have scoured every corner. And the Skyway map undergoes a startling transformation under the architect’s spawner, turning from a simple corridor of highway into a corner-snooping nightmare on four z-levels.

I should drop a good word for the concept of the last mission is good in spirit - one big brawl with some side fights if you feel like it - and fortunately Recluse spawned near enough to the back that I only had one side fight to worry about before I made it all the way.

Detail - ***. Detail was serviceable. Crossbow could have used some kind of individual detail, more than just the archetype and history, kind of along the lines of the power descriptions that Longbow Wardens get.

I don’t want to talk too much about detail because given how much of the plot has changed since this arc was released, a giant amount of it may need to change.

Overall - ***. In short, a good concept for an arc that seems to be more about fights than about really exploring plot space, and that’s fine. Even lip service to a non-Trial interaction with Praetoria and the Resistance is novel enough to hook me. But some of the powerset choices have possibly unintended difficulty consequences, and the outdoor missions frustrate as outdoor missions so often do.

Using the same plot in the current game storyline would mean a completely different NPC selection, both for enemies and for some allies. Most of the customs would have to go, unless you wanted to pass them off as some kind of new Imperial development, like their own Paragon Protector program.

Playing this on a mid-40s ice/axe tanker, +0/x2 with bosses on.

—

Using Architect as a simple interactive historical sim? Yeah, good luck with that, professor. Most of the good historical figures are copyrighted already.

Well, let’s mow down some soldiers and figure out why their AI is stuck on MURDER MODE.

Oh hey. Imperius’s boys! I can’t recall if you ever go up against them. Maybe once for Ghosticus Widowcles? They’re spouting suitable infotainmenty dialogue.

Oh, here’s someone who got mislocated. Look, Lord Byron, I realize that Zeus probably illegitimately fathered half of antiquity but you shouldn’t take that as a personal challenge.

Anyhow! He drops a rather anemic clue on rescue, but it’s just the first mission.

—

In fine holodeck fashion, now Napoleon has gotten loose and is waging a war of conquest.

Oh hey, the Aztec pantheon got banished? Yeah, I can see it.

Anyway, Napoleon is here going all dual cavalry sabers, and his escort looks distinctly Prussian, with a sprinkling of Gilbert and/or Sullivan.

Huh. He spawned in the very first room, taking him out completed the mission, but I had three anachronisms yet to find. Let’s go looking.

Oh. Just a few more out-of-place historical figures. Nothing clue-worthy.

—

And now for the scientific method! Nothing like a live trial.

I guess these mobsters are native to the sim? The translocated programs show up later, and then there’s the fun of finding randomly-appearing targets on an outdoor map. One of them is Dr. Lovelace, who does a spot analysis of what’s going wrong.

The AIs are trying to learn, and that’s overwriting various parts of their programs.

—

So now we’re probably going to investigate this phenomenon and–

Oh. There was a “who’s Jack the Ripper” simulation, and it turns out that everyone is! At least Killerman is still only Killerman.

Some nice work doing blood-soaked period costumes here. Not really much more to say than that — feels like a bit of a sidestory to the whole thing.

—

Anyway, it’s time to shut this whole mess down.

From the Dean’s master console.

While she’s studying Oranbega.

…it wouldn’t be so bad but I’m pretty sure the navbar is telling me to kill everything in here, which is terrible to do in Oranbega.

The Vlad I was warned about is a very credible nobleman who wants to introduce my face to his mace.

And oh dang Genghis Khan. Good thing I can give him the chilblains.

And then it’s over. Good bits of the souvenir: apparently two semesters’ credit is the most generous accolade the university can bestow. Life-threatening scenarios come and go but bureaucracy is forever. Bad bits: it mentions the Third Reich, and I didn’t really see any Column on my little jaunt through time.

—

Storyline - ***. Mission 4 kind of jumps the rails here. Immediately after getting a lead on what exactly might be causing the AIs to go kill-crazy, we have to “put out a fire” by neutralizing a berserk simulation. Just like we did in the first mission. Except there aren’t any actual anachronisms on offer and nothing in the mission plays into the overarching plot of finding out what’s causing these berserks and stopping it.

It would actually work out much better as an intial mission to the arc, as its plotline is the least complicated of any of the missions.

Other than this strange lull in pacing, the story is a serviceable excuse for a bunch of cross-temporal punchups, and that’s really all you need.

Design - ***. Map choice was generally sound. Enemy group choice was well-done, both in terms of highlighting obscure canon enemies and designing distinctive and appropriate customs.

But mission 2 parks Napoleon right in the front door, pretty much ensuring none of the other interesting anachronisms ever need be seen. Mission 4, while the customs are very well done visually, replaces most of its standard spawns with patrols, which have a much less variable mix and don’t seem responsive to hero multipliers — the upshot of which is that instead of interesting mixes of minions, lieutenants, and the occasional boss, the only thing I see in mission 4 are the same three minions, over and over again.

And the justification for the cumbersome defeat alls in the first and last missions are flimsy at best. All the AIs need to be disabled for the simulation to be shut down? Heck, for something that purports to be a computer simulation there’s very little in the way of actual computery bits. A console here and there that needed to be interacted with, rather than just wiping everything out, would have been a good completion condition. Call it enabling administrative mode or whatever.

Gameplay - **. Defeat all in the Cimeroran caves is a bit of a pain due to how labyrinthine they are. Defeat all in Oranbega is a bit of a pain because enemies can spawn or get stuck behind geometry. Not untargetable, but they’re too far out of the way to engage with the normal spawn and generally you can’t catch them with a casual tab around. The hands room is particularly bad for parking a single minion in one of the side pools. The outdoor mission in the construction yard may as well be defeat all for how randomly things are scattered — with no distinctive animation to pick them out, the only way to find them is to sweep around and pound tab to look for stragglers.

None of the enemies are keyboard-snappingly difficult to defeat, but there’s potentially a whole lot of boring dead air.

Detail - *****. Great attention to detail, well worth poking around and checking descriptions to see what you can find.

Overall - ***. This arc has a lot of good individual pieces, particularly in the costume design and description of the historical enemies. Where it unfortunately falls short is in the way the pieces are put together into missions and the missions tell a story.

Unregistered: Looking back on the arc’s storyline, I have to agree that it is kind of terrible but I’ll see what I can do about that while I’m writing the followup.

Glazius: I’ll revisit the easy arc enemies, when I ran it I had little trouble but I was testing this as a SS/Will brute. As for the Exterminator, there’s a bit of a story behind that. I’d originally planned for this arc to have a sequel arc that explains the source of the ants and the “Exterminator”, but I sort of lost interest in CoH and took a break before finishing it. The story is pretty awful regardless, but there is a reason for the lack of explanation.

Running this on a low-20s BS/Shield scrapper, +0/x2 with bosses on.

—

Man, not even out of the initial briefing and already the alerts are going off.

Snowmen in Skyway. Spring an ally, mow down a destructo… hoo boy.

I ran this mission twice and fortunately both objectives appeared on the top layer of elevated highway. I know they’ve been going through outdoor maps and removing problem objectives, though I can’t say that this one had that same treatment. Run it a few times and make sure that that artifact always shows up on top, if you haven’t done so already.

Getting vertical in this map is a nightmare. Getting vertical and trying to hold onto an ally is nearly impossible.

—

Another emergency requires my urgent attention! It’s a snake pit.

You should be aware that, natively, the Snakes aren’t actually smooth from 1-54. They’re listed that way rather than breaking them down into younger snakes and Elder Snakes. As far as I can recall there’s a gulf between about 34 and 46. Checking behavior it looks like the old pattern is gone, so level 40 characters don’t fight level 46 Elder Snakes — but what does spawn are level 34 simple snakes, which are grey and boring.

Anyway, a couple of chained rescues, and another stone object that seemed to be summoning these things.

—

And now there’s a bunch of creatures crawling out of the ocean.

Slime creatures! On this… giant sprawling oil platform.

At least the turrets are off, meaning there’s way less of a pain to navigate around. In fact the mission’s pretty blank aside from the required objectives and a couple of patrols, which is much less busy than I remember this map or its derivatives being.

What is with stones being monster magnets today?

—

And now the doom deer have struck.

…but this is the wrong sort of cave. Their caverns are actually the giant troll-tunnel sort. I realize that’s not very exciting, but this Sharkhead coral cave has a lot of dead space and some rather specific set-pieces.

One branch has only my ally, and nothing else. The other one has the person I’m trying to rescue some distance before the end room. She wants me to lead her out through these twisting caves, which is a wonderful exercise. But fortunately it’s over.

…The 5th Column were behind this for some reason? Working with the doom deer, for some reason?

—

Oh, so apparently the 5th are making monster magnets. …SEVEN allies in this next map? The hell am I up against?

Well, it’s the big map with the giant open briefing room. Certainly a good place to be up against something big.

And the end boss is right on top the catwalks, in the claustrophobic overlook. Not where you expect them to go when you choose this map, is it? …and apparently he’s got a rivalry going with Sir Supergroup Member Not Appearing In This Mission.

—

Storyline - ***. So the 5th Column has monster magnets now. They can whip up a distraction for any operation they’d care to run at a minor cost in supplies and manpower.

…oh, wait, no, it was just something a supervillain whipped up to use as a trap. He didn’t even manage to draw in his big nemesis with it.

I realize that the sorts of stories you’re calling back to often have plot devices so disposable they barely hold up the whole way through, and copying it is a point for faithfulness. But a disposable plot device isn’t really a good thing (and copying it isn’t a good thing either) because stories aren’t hermetically sealed off from the world where they happen.

A monster magnet is a useful thing for a villain group to have, but it isn’t hard to come up with a rationale why the 5th can’t keep it. It’s a special creation of the supervillain, which he traded for the use of a base, or perhaps it’s far too expensive for anything but the personal satisfaction of revenge. Making it an actual thing instead of a throwaway plot point makes the first four missions feel like they actually meant something more than a bunch of monster fights that took up the first twenty minutes of the episode before the writers realized they had to wrap it all in three.

Design - ***. Mission Architect is full of non-obvious heartbreakers and you managed to hit one pretty much every mission.

The Skyway highway map. In its canon incarnation it’s basically the road as dungeon, kind of like what Valor Bridge was once upon a time. In MA it turns out that there are a lot of spots on the road below or on the ground below where important things can happen, and while that wasn’t my experience in the couple of times I attempted that mission it’s definitely happened on that map.

Snakes. The map is absolutely fine but the Snakes aren’t actually as full-ranged as their level ranges seem to indicate, which can lead to problems. More on this later.

The oil platform. It’s not bristling with turrets, and the skies aren’t full of Longbow, and it seems rather empty. Chained objectives have the usual problem with chains on an outdoor map in that there’s no guarantee the chain won’t show up somewhere you’ve been already, and on outdoor maps where the chains show up in enclosed places, like the hangar halfway up the oil platform, a casual drift around pounding tab may not pay off.

The sea caves. Canon puts a lot of fancy bits in them, from Calystix to sentient waterspouts to a giant eye, but early on the tunnel branches into two, and down one of these branches there are absolutely no random spawns, but objectives can still be placed there, making for a lot of mandatory dead air.

The 5th Column base with the giant hangar and glassed-off balcony. In its Ouroboros appearance, Requiem’s in the latter with a giant pile of troops and reinforcements in the former, but again in MA there are no random spawns or even placed spawns, leaving a final fight in either the antechamber or the tiny command center up several flights of catwalks that’s barely even visible from the entrance.

This isn’t to say you should necessarily change out any of these maps, aside from the sea caves which are more trouble than they’re worth even for enemies that might belong there. But what you should do is put a more narrow level range on this arc, to make sure the Snake encounters are appropriate at least.

A level range can also tacitly set the scale of the arc: street, cosmic, or global. I’d put this into 25-30, both to present a good range for the Snakes and to reflect the idea of this as a global-level story, which is about what you’re tangling with at that range: a story with wide-ranging implications but not far beyond the scope of mortals to understand.

Gameplay - ****. Stock enemies, nothing too difficult, and I believe a single custom who gets pretty well swarmed by guests in a finale more about SFX than grueling challenge. The downside is that the design and occasional use of chaining creates a decent interval where you’re covering dead space looking for whatever just spawned, and that’s never fun.

Detail - ****. This isn’t a story that puts a lot of special attention into the details, but it isn’t a story that needs a lot of special attention in the details. Everything’s fleshed out well enough to stand up to a casual examination.

Overall - ***. It’s a faithful recreation of the storytelling style of the early JLA books and the JSA stories before them: compartmentalized stories with a very loose thread between them, where each story and the ensuing pile-on may well have been authored by different people, and had wildly different settings because many times the authors couldn’t come up with ways for heroes to play to their strengths while working together.

But these missions were all written by the same person, and the issue of variant power levels or spheres of activity doesn’t really exist in CoH, or at least it’s a lot easier to handwave away. So there really isn’t a good reason for them to feel so disconnected from each other and the world. And a lot of the maps you chose, while distinct and visually impressive, have issues when they’re being used for Mission Architect.