GlaziusF

Tonight's random arc: Origin of the Mad Mummy (439265). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

Other random arcs I hit up trying to find one I hadn't played before:
Spanks for the Memories (21144). Verdict - **

My current queue:

• A review of The Blue Devils (468738)

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-20s Peacebringer, +0/x1 with bosses on.

---

So the Council and 5th are flashing some weird new tech in their streetfights, and Starsky wants a hero to look into things.

I meet a hero the Council have captured, though they’re just standing silent guard on him. I face down the Archon who is apparently negotiating with... intergalactic gun runners? Oh lord.

---

Back at the contact... apparently the alien I was working with in the last case is in the police station and showing me memories of his past.

I’m not sure how this helps track down these intergalactic arms dealers, exactly.

...this interstellar ship looks like an ordinary cargo ship.

I’m a little curious why I’m depowered here. It doesn’t seem like there’s anybody stock among these pirates. Is it to represent it being in the past?

You, uh, might want to check your clue order here. Jackson’s final scene when I activate the console comes before he promises to protect everyone in the clue window.

---

Not really sure why I needed to see that. Anyway, apparently the superior galactic freetraders decided to taunt us with the location of their base, or somesuch.

I enter the base and... I think I hear someone named “Miranda Kane” sounding off? My new alien buddy is just kind of sitting pretty in the entrance room with nothing to say.

Well, that’s interesting. She follows like an ally even during the pitched battle and then silently flips at the end. Jackson doesn’t say anything as his HP drops, and she doesn’t say anything when she flips. I only know something’s going on when I hear my ally’s mind powers.

While there’s kind of an interesting effect with leading my ally to the boss fight with a splotch on the map, you should be aware that Architect currently interprets every single “on arrival” directive as “stand there, do nothing”. Kind of not what the plot demands.

---

Ooooookay. So now I’m inside the melancholy of some alien empath and I’m going to have to somehow find a way out through... myself?

Oh. The Oranbega called “Oranbega”. This isn’t actually a very good map, it’s all made up of corridors with maybe two actual rooms in.

It may be what you’re looking for? But it’s not a lot of fun to maneuver in.

Anyway, the enemies in here are dark mirrors of the arms dealers, up until my doppleganger. Hey! They can replicate Kheldian powers now. Keen.

Anyway, he rants at me about someone being awake and crowns and windows opening.

---

Nobody else seems to have possessed the mental fortitude to get up and about. Peachy. Well, time to go play psychonaut.

More of these phantasms, and then my alien buddy feeling all despondent. When I free him it turns out I was blasting from right in the middle of his nightmare self, who’s largely borrowed Jackson’s powerset save for a psychic wail at low health. And some Shakespeare Manipulation.

With the officer out and everyone else away, the alien ports off. Peachy. And... no souvenir to be had, apparently?

---

Storyline - What is the role of outer space in the comics? It varies title to title but in the general sense, space is the frontier. Like, the Old West frontier. It’s got marshals in the form of, say, the Nova Corps or the Green Lantern Corps, but it’s largely untamed, generally unvisited by us Earthlings and generally not visiting us either. The “aliens” in-game are the Kheldians, who don’t have much in the way of a technology base or an empire, and the Rikti, who aren’t actually aliens. So going from that to an arc where I’m expected to empathize with a space-freighter captain is a bit of a shift.

For that matter, having my alien buddy be some kind of established hero who works with the PPD doesn’t really make a lot of sense either, given his blood oath of vengeance and his ability to pull half a city block into his nightmare. I mean, we’re already running around in a freaky mind dimension later in the arc anyway. Having a separate psychic adventure just seems kind of redundant.

What I think works better here is just introducing him as an unknown. Wearing some kind of uniform - maybe he’s a space cop? - and he just kind of shows up in the first two missions to fight the smugglers, and doesn’t talk much. But if he dies in the raid on the gunrunners’ base, or the raid succeeds and then the civilian goes down begging for her life, his despair zone activates and we get sucked into the flashback and fight through the cave of shadows before going back in to free everybody else.

I’m also not sure exactly why the alien lost his family in the first place, and why the smuggler leader kept up the ruse for so long. What was he really after? I mean, if he was selling organs on the black market or something it’d make sense, but not so much with actually raiding the freighter, given that the self-destruct is operational and the flashback seems to indicate it goes off.

Design - I would have expected something a little techier for the space trawler, Maybe one of the dilapidated tech bases. And the Oranbega map “Oranbega” is all the crampathon fun of the mine caves without any of the visual variety.

But the many new enemy groups that show up are pretty visually reasonable, not very distinct to look at but they don’t necessarily need to be since there aren’t many notable threats.

I’ll mention again the raid on the smuggler base and the bug in Architect that disables escorts when they reach their destination. Even if it is a known bug in Architect, that doesn’t mean it affects people’s gameplay any less. While I appreciate the idea, it may be that what you want to do is too complex for Architect to necessarily handle all the time.

Was something else supposed to happen after the self-destruct went off on the ship? Ally betrayal? The problem is that I don’t think I can get everybody out and trip the self-destruct without also leading the ally to the door.

Gameplay - No problems here. No complicated chains or incoming math hammers. Maybe consider subbing in, say, dark-colored weapons instead of actual darkness for the mind shadows, since in large numbers those sets can render you toothless but not necessarily in a lot of danger.

Detail - The clues in the flashback mission show up out of plot order, with the betrayal one showing up a bit early. You can drag and drop objectives to reorder how clues show up. The alien’s silence in the Council and smuggler missions is kind of a missed chance to introduce him, and the lack of any dialogue from the smuggler or his girlfriend (allies with no escort play their intro and rescue lines simultaneously at about the start of the map) doesn’t help matters there.

No souvenir, either, and for a head trip of an arc like this one having a souvenir is a big help in tying the various events together and establishing causality chains.

Overall - Enemy design in terms of looks and powers works pretty well. Storyline design, in terms of the players and how they’re presented and how the story flows? Not so much.

Tonight's arc: A scoreless review of Everything Falls Apart (491402). Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Hmm. Contact’s got no description. Then again this is a four-digit arc, so it probably wasn’t available at the time.

He’s got... a hero girlfriend, or at least a girlfriend with a codename, who works for Crey?

Hmm. Maybe a nickname, judging by the phonetics? The highlighting makes it seem like it’s more than just that, though.

Anyhow. Office building full of tank suits.

Did I say “hero”? At the top of this four-floor office building, I find a single computer with an apparent appointment with the CoT on it. Makes me wonder.

---

Apparently my contact’s a hero too? Or at least thinks he can take on some Circle.

Anyway, I search an entire graveyard for a random group of CoT with no distinguishing marks, whose boss is an archmage, a prototype elite boss who is basically a boss with maxed resistances. Not fun.

Anyway, he says that Andrea was looking to vanish for some reason. I’m sure the CoT would have been happy to oblige by hiding her inside a tiny crystal forever.

And apparently my contact’s been compromised, or mind controlled, or replaced with some manner of artificial duplicate, as he gives his girlfriend a formal title and asks me to give up.

---

Unsurprisingly, I don’t. I lift a little note from his employers and trace it back to source.

Well, who else would send telegrams? IT WAS ALL A NEMESIS PLOT!

...maybe. I’ll see.

Nemesis seem to have kidnapped Dean and replaced him for some reason. I can’t quite figure out why, as the clue I get from him ends abruptly at “ ‘Anyway, I'm grateful for the help, and I think I know where to go from’ “

It may just be ‘here’?

---

Yes, it seems so. Apparently Nemesis is going to pay a visit to some facility where she’s stored. ...well, maybe Nemesis. He comes in six-packs these days.

I rescue her, and... she’s a lieutenant with enhanced perception who I have to lead out. I do alright up until she gets a whiff of Nemesis Gas and bolts off somewhere. Wherever it is, it’s lethal. Maybe she gets caught up in the ambush that shows up?

Anyhow, mission failed, and the debrief acts like I let the timer expire. Apparently Andrea was a prototype intelligent automaton, and like any intelligent being, got fed up with Nemesis. Things went from there.

---

Storyline - ****. So there are about three rough spheres of heroic activity. Street-level heroics, which run about level 1-25; cosmic-level heroics, which run 40+; and global-level heroics, which occupy the space in between and overlap the ends a bit. This is basically a street-level story freaturing global-level villains, but set in the cosmic-level band.

And that presents a bit of a problem as far as finding a good guest villain, though. Well, guest enemy group. I can appreciate trying to find a rather dodgy enemy group who’s got some magical chops to them, but about all you’ve got at the cosmic level are the immortal mages from the beneathiverse, the mad servants of the cannibal gods from outside time, and the crazy clowns. And maybe the Mu mystics. None of them make all that much sense for an apparent civilian to just be walking up to.

This might be a hint that Andrea is more than she seems, but my contact certainly doesn’t sell it that way. I’d suggest kicking this down a bit in levels and using the Tsoo, or keeping it steady and using the Carnies, who are at least not opposed to the idea of human life as it currently exists.

Design - ***. The first three missions have one required objective, but only the third one is really the right length for exactly one objective. Four floors of office building and a single giant overworld map with no indication where the end boss is are just a lot of fighting without a lot of real feeling of progression.

I’ve got a problem with the objective spread in the last mission, too - I have no idea if it was even intended to be failed by the ally’s death, since the failure message doesn’t seem to mention it at all. But I’ll talk more about that later.

Gameplay - **. Circle of Thorns Archmages are an anomaly in enemy group design. I’ve called them prototype elite bosses before, but I’ve never really explained that tag. Back when the Shadow Shard was first released, in issue 2, they featured as the enemy leaders in the Augustine task force. They conned as bosses, but were more resilient to accommodate the reality that entire groups of heroes carve through bosses like so much chaff. I’m pretty sure this is the same conceit that would lead to the creation of the “elite boss” rank much later, around the time Faultline showed up if I’m not mistaken.

Anyway, CoT Archmages are basically the normal boss-types they represent except they have tremendous resistances. They show up in Architect as normal bosses, so a lot of people use them when they might not mean to. The problem is that while they were a neat idea for large numbers of heroes, you can’t assume anything about team size in the Mission Architect. A solo boss fight against an Archmage is rather like fighting an ordinary CoT boss except that the fight goes on much longer -- it’s a lot like an elite boss fight except the elite boss will probably take less damage (before resistances) and dish out more. So basically, more boring. I can’t think of a scenario where you’d want to use a CoT archmage, except perhaps as a very resilient ally.

And speaking of allies, let’s talk about that escort through the last mission. First, a lieutenant-rank ally isn’t very sturdy - an enemy group needs only a little uninterrupted time to chew through their hit points. Some boss-class enemies carry attacks powerful enough to one-shot lieutenants even through their resistances. Second, an ally with enhanced perception such as is provided by the willpower armor can run off on their own to engage enemy groups, as I found out to my detriment. They hadn’t attacked me, either, so I’m not sure if she was set to aggressive for some reason or what. Third, Nemesis is a bad choice for trying to keep an ally safe. Many of their powers do some form of splash damage, so even being the sole target isn’t enough to prevent the ally from being hit, and even worse is the Nemesis Gas. Allies will flee more or less blindly away from Nemesis Gas and similar “damage area” powers, which is basically the enhanced-perception woes except amped up even further.

If the challenge in the last mission is supposed to be the time limit, set the escort to be pacifist. If the challenge in the last mission is supposed to be keeping the ally safe in a room you may not have cleared out with an ambush on the way, rank her up to a boss at least? But honestly I’d rather just see the challenge be to get out in time.

Detail - ****. The level of detail is pretty light but serviceable to move the plot along. The only issue I have is that as far as I could tell I wouldn’t find out that Andrea was an automaton until she was safely outside the final mission. I’d actually suggest that hint be dropped by the required glowie you find on the way up to her, just to build up the anticipation a little.

Overall - ***. The first two missions are long and mostly featureless. The last one pitches you an unexpected challenge that’s a little too easy to fail. Under it all the story’s worth following, but the mechanics could use some revision.

Tonight's arc: Forged by the Heart (1355). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• A scoreless review of Everything Falls Apart (491402)

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Actually, the last map worked out pretty well. I think all its objectives were there from the start? Or at least Sherman showed up in the first room. I'm talking more about the second one, which puts you and the "end room" on opposite sides of a closed loop, pretty much.

Tonight's arc: The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society (344596). Verdict - *****. Review in MA Forums thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Pff. Okay, so my contact doesn’t have any patience for these modern-day heroes who fly to stop bank jobs instead of going uphill in the snow both ways.

Modern courtesy, Gramps. I don’t know how they did it back in your day but these days us heroes like to know what you know about the opposition before we take the mission on. You’re not being charged by the word anymore.

But anyway, off to reclaim some ancient lost knowledge or something. Oh hey. The actual bunker map! Good opener.

Anyway, the 5th Column are here trying to wreck things. Including the lockbox. Which they’ve already done.

---

Oh boy, microfilm! Just like one of them double-naught spies! Anyway, we’re off looking for leads in a 5th base. Apparently my contact’s got a descendant in this generation of heroes, and I should keep things close to my chest.

Oh. Not descendent. Godson. That’s actually kind of nice.

Anyway, Sherman’s clue should probably come before the one from the boss he chains into (and this map is setup kinda free-roaming, you may want to look into a more linear one) but we have the data. ...well, one copy of it, anyway. Maybe.

---

Ah. Looks like the 5th have found an old lab of theirs in that information, and they’re restarting some terrible experiment that the old Paragon Society put to rest.

Ah. Cloning. Looks like Master D is coming back!

(Also wow, there’s a big hitbox on them cloning tubes. I popped Reveal next to one, and whoa.)

An EB is here, boasting about taking Sherman down. While I keep the energy absorption running off his minions he can’t really dent me.

Get some more evidence from the end room... including a grim memento of Sherman. Ouch.

---

Oh. Sherman was actually a prototype Aryan superman. ...I don’t remember him being blonde, though. Maybe I just lost his hair in all the invuln sparkles.

Anyhow, my contact apparently tried to break this to him gently, but he decided to forcefully repudiate his ancestry and got his face broken for it. I don’t feel too bad about not being let in on it, since it’s a family affair.

Sherman’s in 5th column duds and got himself a different tank name, and asks to be led back to some kind of mind machine. You can actually do that nowadays.

Though I suppose it’s just as well, as he gets himself stuck in a plasma emitter halfway up the lab. He does work free after a long while.

Ah. The boss is an actual Aryan with lightning powers, who gets Sherman to obey his programming. I let him pound on the ice plating for a while while I fish out the deactivator.

Looking over, it looks like the boss sent some info back to... the Wolves’ Den? Sounds like Striga, but that’s a Council stronghold.

---

Anyway, we’ve found the base, and it’s time to go shut down the cloning facility. Looks like they’ve already started up production.

Unfortunately, the new master race isn’t much match for their prototype, and a giant Arachnoid with a plasma axe.

The end boss is a credible clone of Sherman with about an order of magnitude less muscle mass and a serviceable Iron Cross-looking uniform. I did a double take when I caught a glimpse of the chest logo, have to admit. Looking through the admittedly meager selection, there’s Arachnos and Council but no 5th, though you might be able to get a good fake going with some of the skull options if you wanted to take a run at it. Not a major priority, of course.

He pulls in an ambush but they’re more fodder for the blue bar and the ice plates. (good thing, too, I was running low) And then he drops. As my contact says: another reminder that the people who change the world are made, not born.

---

Storyline - ****. About my only significant quibble with this story is how the Firecracker Kid fobs off responsibility for Sherman’s actions on me when he’s compromised the kid himself. Not just because it’s misplaced but because it sets up my contact as a deliberate liar rather than an absentminded and/or cantankerous old man.

I can understand his reasons and that mutes the blow a little bit, but it’s problematic when your only reliable source of information becomes unreliable. It’s perfectly in keeping with the character to fob off blame reflexively, but if he is having second thoughts maybe his lack of rancor could be a little foreshadowing.

Design - ****. It’s hard to get a 5th Column cave map that actually has a clear progression from front through middle to rear. Especially one without the DOOM SPA. I wouldn’t suggest being meticulous in the map choice so much? Just try not to use chained objectives on a 5th/Council cave map unless the plot strictly demands it.

Speaking of chained objectives, considering how the Panzer mission shakes out a point-to-point escort probably won’t be feasible, even though his rescue line leads me to expect one. I’m not sure if that’s anything that needs to be or could be handled necessarily. Maybe there’s a “lead to” objective to a machine that Blitzkrieg’s forces have removed the important components from?

The new group does kind of tend to all run together, visually, but there aren’t any particularly notable threats (debuffers/controllers) so it’s not such a bad thing. I mean, they are all clones, after all.

Speaking of clones, I’m still wondering why Sherman isn’t a blue-eyed blondie. I guess this fits his background as an early prototype - he certainly doesn’t have any reason to be using hair dye or contacts.

Gameplay - *****. Nothing too unreasonable here. Mostly stock mobs and some interesting custom fights. One custom EB with help. There are chains but they generally don’t require a lot of backtracking aside from the first 5th Column map.

Detail - ****. Something I haven’t seen before is that every mission’s clues are color-coded. It certainly helps segregate them. You can also drag-and-drop the mission objectives around to change the order clues show up in -- I find it helpful to structure the clues in the order they’re supposed to be encountered.

One thing I didn’t like, though, is that for all the effort that’s done to give the contact a distinct voice and personality the elite boss warnings still show up in jarring red at the end of the briefing. Kind of ruins the feel you had going. I’d keep the warning color but work out a way to have the contact give the warning. Maybe rant about how the heroes these days are all running around looking for teams when back in the day you could fight off Nazis with one hero and one kid with a dream.

Overall - *****. While I may have some bones to pick with individual aspects of this arc, as a whole the impression’s quite favorable. It’s the sort of cross-generational plot all these Johnny-come-lately villain groups can’t sell very well at all, and the secret is more more elaborate and involving than the simple MacGuffin I expected going in.

@GlaziusF

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

(Yeah, I know the real title was longer. Not going to type it out though.)

---

I’d appreciate a little more intel on what’s happening than just an alarm. I mean, I get more intel than that from a scanner mission.

I mean, not even intel about what’s going on, intel about what this factory makes.

Humanoid robots, apparently. Also a suit of armor and a stompass axe for my ally, who can solo this entire map by himself and because of his phenomenal perception often does.

Little note on the 5th - individuals may adopt German names but what their name means and how they function is a group of Nazi sympathizers recruited from Americans. They don’t have to speak German or take on German titles.

The raid has captured several robot models, most of which evacuate but one of which is malfunctioning and tries to electrocute me. It’s headed up by a mercs/storm mastermind who says jack, and also squat.

The navbar mentions something about a security computer but I don’t see one on my way up. I guess it’s optional as the mission completes when the last soldier goes down.

Oh. It was an optional click in the first room. Those are easy to miss because for some reason the tech door sounds like a glowie. It just dumps a bit of system text, not even a clue, or interaction bit.

I don’t really learn anything, aside from maybe getting a preview of an upcoming enemy group? Basically this is a radio mission that I’m racing to complete with an NPC.

---

Hmm. These mission open clues seem to be... briefing summaries?

Anyway, there’s apparently an Outcast riot in north Steel Canyon that I’m helping with because... of a reason? Ah, due to it possibly being related two Tekbots that are still missing. That were mentioned away from the briefings. And the actual “relation” is more of a hunch on my contact’s part that he never elaborates on.

Anyway, this place is full of Outcast patrols who are all saying the same thing over and over. I drop down to find a thugstermind with all his pets and posse in the little bit of this map by the science store where nobody ever thinks to look.

...and he chains into something else.

The Outcast mentions “Zeus”, and I think that Zeus is some kind of Warrior with a thunder dealybob. But no. Zeus Titan. At level 20. Destroys your regeneration, spits out hold gas.

At level 20.

Apparently this whole affair was an illusion and a trap devist by one of the escaped robots.

---

And now it’s warehouse time. Another defeat all with a wrecking machine of an ally. The escaped robot has bent all other forms of robotic villainy to her whims, including the dream reflections of robots conjured by Rularuu’s wandering psyche.

You, uh, might want to take those out. You can’t take the tendrils off.

Anyway, these robots are doing the same nasty thing that about 90% of the villains in door missions are doing, which is standing around waiting to get punched. I get some briefing summaries but not really an explanation of what ultimate purpose this aggregation is going to serve.

“Kill all humans” is just so overdone at this point, you know?

---

So there’s a robot and some cataphracts just standing around in Skyway City and possibly being a threat? My contact seems to think they’ll come in peaceably for whatever reason.

Something you should be aware of is that the system thinks it’s okay to break lines when you change colors, so the first letter of one of the words in that acronym is on a seperate line from the rest of the word.

...aw no. This Skyway City map. You should know that this Skyway City map likes to hide its objectives down under the freeway in the slums.

Wow. Actual elite boss cataphracts. Guess I’ll need the wolf after all.

...ha! They’re not even worth any XP. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth.

So after I run all over this map hunting down Cataphracts, it chains into the supposed real boss with no rationale.

He’s back pretty much exactly where one of the Cataphracts was. AR/dev custom, so it doesn’t really matter that the wolf has fallen down into the slums and gotten lost.

---

So, end boss time. I hear my ally sound off but perhaps in keeping with his line about stealth powers I can’t find him anywhere.

Oh! There he is, on... the top floor inside the building?

Wow, NPC dialog really has a huge radius these days.

This mission is a bit easy because despite what you may have learned in the early days of Architect, mission pacing actually works but only in a downward direction, putting you against what in my case are blues and greens.

Anyway, reunited just in time for a boss fight with a... robotstermind/elec armor EB. Less of a threat than the Cataphracts, all told.

---

Storyline - So an experimental robot is flushed from a test facility during a raid, after which point it assembles a hodgepodge army of robots to threaten humanity.

But I’m a little fuzzy on the details. I mean... this was a research facility owned by a legitimate businessman. How does a robot run that far out of control? Did it go into emergency self-defense mode and now can’t come out of it? Did the lab techs initialize its learning algorithm but forget to properly set the thisAlgorithmKillingAllHumansCost? (That’ll get you every time.) And now that the robot has snapped, what exactly is this ad hoc robot army planning? If it’s the emergency self-defense mode going nuts there is no plan, but otherwise I’ve got no lead as to her motivation.

I don’t have leads to a lot of things, because this arc likes to hide information fairly pointlessly. I’ve got no idea what piece of information tipped my cop contact off to these escaped robots behind a riot in Steel Canyon. I don’t know until the mission where one shows up what robots have even gone missing from this research facility or what their capabilities are, which would seem to be kind of important.

Design - There’s a pretty huge missed opportunity here. We rescue a wide selection of robots in the first mission, and then they never appear again. I was figuring they’d at least show up in the last mission with the earlier robotic hodgepodge as kind of an intro group, but nope, stock robot enemies all the way down.

The level range issue, though explicitly called out, is nonetheless jarring in terms of lost powers, unless you’re going into this arc with a level 25 character. The high levels are admittedly without a group that would really fit as a rampaging gang. Well, unless you want to go with the Freakshow. I think they’re still valid from their initial appearance to max level. But having an arc’s maximum level range jog up and down so drastically is forcing people to remember how they played their character without X powers, and then just when they’ve got the hang of it, giving them the powers back anyway. It’s just not a lot of fun. Pick a level range. If necessary, pick a new but still appropriate stock enemy group.

Also, NPC dialogue radius is huge now. You don’t need to have a bunch of patrols and battles with the same dialogue - it just makes me less likely to pay attention to dialogue that shows up since I’m likely to have seen it before. One patrol/battle per unique pair. The rest can be silent.

Also also, the group of assorted enemy robots could probably stand to be without the Reflections versions of robots, and I’d advise using the Rogue Arachnos robots instead of the main Arachnos ones, not because they’re statistically different but because the names fit better. The Malta Titans are a bit of an odd choice, however, in that they’re not actually autonomous robots but cyborgs run by a brain in a jar.

Gameplay - There isn’t anywhere that the cruel tyranny of matthematics raises its ugly head. Well, if you’re not a strong low-level soloing archetype trying to solo a Zeus Titan at level 20 is a recipe for frustration, since they can put out so many badstats that high-level characters can deal with but low-level characters may not have the tools for. if you’re trying to solo mission 4, the cataphracts are pretty much designed to be a daunting challenge for any given hero or villain operating alone. This is mitigated someone by the wrecking machine of an ally you get, though the lack of any reward for dropping the cataphracts is a kick in the teeth either way.

But the ally’s made quite a lot worse by the terrible geometry of mission 4. You may remember it from canon missions where it was effectively just a big corridor of highway, but in the hands of the architect objectives can show up on the slightly lower stretch of highway, on the southern stretch of road and into where the train station is now, and on the many and varied slum streets and warehouses under the highway proper. Trying to lead an ally through all that in search of fights is a bit trying. Trying to find whatever strange corner a chained objective spawned in is even worse.

It’s bad to a lesser extent in the Steel Canyon mission, since objectives can hide themselves under the construction scaffolding or, as was my experience, down in that little corner by the science store. I’ve played that map a lot and seen the weird places things can end up. Somebody else could be depowered and searching for ages.

While my ally in mission 4 is a good help against the cataphracts, all other missions with allies in them feel like the allies are a bit of overkill. They have such high damage output and in the case of the first mission such high perception that every battle is a race to tag everything so I don’t get entirely kill-stolen.

Detail - Most of the clues read like summaries of briefings and debriefings, which I suppose is a good thing to have when you’re in a team running an arc, as individual team members can miss out pretty easily. But since a problem I had with the story was that I wasn’t really getting enough information to adequately paint a picture of what was going on, having the clues largely reiterate what I already knew just reinforces that.

Overall - Pick a level range ad stick with it. Tone down the allies a little. Consider getting rid of the cataphracts and replacing them with enemies who actually award XP.

And it’d be nice to have some idea of what Tekna was actually planning. She was a prototype being developed by a lab, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a prototype for a metal boot stamping on a human face forever. What was she intended for? How did that go so wrong after a routine evacuation?

You probably have some idea of what the answers to those questions, but the answers don’t really seem to inform the actions I get to see in the storyarc, let alone come out in the actual clues or dialogue.

Tonight's arc: a scoreless review of Tekna Logik (402506). Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Ah, Malta doesn’t look like they’re up to anything, which by process of elimination means they could be up to EVERYTHING.

To find out whether or not that’s the case, I go hit a new base in the hopes of finding something lightly secured.

Got a black Knight and a black Bishop in here. Looks like we got a mini-chess scheme for names, maybe? Cool enough.

I get a single clue for dropping Bishop, which assumes that I know I have to get some kind of cipher off of him from investigating the computer that he’s 20 feet away from. I’m pretty sure those things will probably happen in the opposite order. Otherwise it’s the usual paranoid ranting.

---

Royal blue and purple autocolors don’t show up well, because they have a low contrast with their black borders. Just keep that in mind.

Anyway, on the way to raid what was apparently the general supply base for the hastily-abandoned outpost from mission 1.

Rogue Arachnos! With toxic kaboominite!

More paranoid ranting and a message from Marshall Blitz about a hero his forces have captured. Hmm. Wonder if they’re going to do the old Doom Patrol scenario.

---

Ah, no. Looks like Siren’s Call, round 2: Even More Populated Area Edition - a showdown between the hero Fallout and the villain Isotope that unbeknownst to either of them is going to spiral out of control. Time to try and forestall it, but I have a feeling I won’t quite be on time.

Nope. Isotope’s already clear of the Zig. There’s still an ice guy and a fire swordsguy, with a Knives boss. All outside, which is just fine by me. Just a note, ice/storm can stack a redonkulous amount of slows on a body. You might want to pare his powers down a little if you’re going to leave him with a Jack Frost.

---

So now we’re infiltrating the Warburg base to try and spring the hero they’re using as a patsy. Crimson’s given us a target of opportunity too, just in case.

Not much of a just in case here; she’s right in the way when I get inside. EM/Inv archvillain, scaled down. Hard-hitting, but not much else.

And the hero is rad/rad, with his fair share of slows and debuffs. Malta have his family, which is a pretty standard kind of thing for them.

---

So now we’re going to invade the center base, headbutt the villain, take out the hostages, and rage on the guy in charge of this whole thing. Indigo’s coming with.

Malta just waved a wad of cash in front of Isotope (rad/energy), apparently. Never play an ace when a two will do.

The leader is a grav/psiblast custom, pretty nicely trenchcoated, Psychic Wail at low health but that’s pretty reasonable considering.

Apparently this mysterious substance would overheat a nuclear reaction, letting all the destructive power out at once without leaving any fallout. The Black King says that he’s trying to provoke a public reaction before heroes and villains start beating each other in the face with ICBMs. Well, that’s a bit sensible. But the horrendous atomic kablooie is less so.

Job done. Fallout’s dropped out now that he’s been compromised, but I figure incaps are about ten-to-one in favor of the heroes and them’s pretty good odds.

---

Storyline - *****. Yeah, I can definitely buy this as a Malta plot, right down to the acceptable casualties. I dunno how much development Warburg and the Malta/Rogue Arachnos alliance gets villainside but it certainly doesn’t get enough heroside, and this is a decent integration of new world developments into an existing contact’s interests.

About the only thing that doesn’t necessarily sit well is Fallout’s withdrawal from heroics at the end. There has to be some sort of Hero Protection Program given how many villain groups may be trying to discover a hero’s identity.

Design - *****. Some good variety in the mission maps. Feature customs are notable for their power auras on the overworld map and their unique visual effects when mixed in with Malta in tight quarters.

Gameplay - ***. A couple of things more down to bad luck than any choice of yours necessarily, but even so I thought I should bring them up. The AV in the Warburg mission spawned in a narrow corridor up on a high shelf, so rather than being something I see and avoid she drops out of the blue with really nowhere to run. I suppose placement turns out pretty random on that map regardless so she’d just have been outside otherwise.

The last map, the tech lab, is prone to mingling spawns together at the best of times. Throwing in patrols and larger-than-usual hostage spawns makes it possible to encounter huge knots of Malta at a time, potentially with multiple sappers.

Lastly, the ice/storm boss on the Zig map does some crazy slowdown, to the point that I ran out of powers to hit. He doesn’t necessarily have a good damage output, so the fight is more of a bore than a challenge.

Detail - *****. Some good use of clues to tell the story without spelling everything out. Crimson isn’t the sort to go over his notes with you, after all. The Malta codenames are a good example of a “nonstandard” scheme that still seems sensible and unified.

Overall - *****. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this arc show up shortly after CoV launched. It’s a shame they never did anything with the PvP zones in the game at large, even to talk about them, so it’s nice to see something done with them in the Architect.

Tonight's arc: Blitzkrieg (3416). Verdict - *****. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Ah, high adventure in space.

...hmm. Generally if there’s a time limit it’s good to have it called out or highlighted in the opening text. Even if you’re at the text limit, you can still highlight text and give it some preset colors with the right-click menu.

Hmm. Clawfighter lieutenants and ranged-exclusive archer minions. No descriptions on either.

Axe bosses with buildup. Still no descriptions. ...no description on my ally either.

---

Apparently there’s a flaw in our portal technology that these lizardmen can come through. Alright. At least this one’s not on a stealth timer.

Something in last mission and this one - there are like dozens of patrols all saying the same thing. That’s really just annoying in the long run, and not necessary as NPC dialogue has a big broadcast radius these days. You need one talking patrol per unique line, and some number of silent ones.

Wow, these upload timers are long. No real reason for that, it’s not like we’re on a timer or there are patrols wandering around.

The various clues seem to be hinting that Thanagar is about to destroy the world to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

---

Hyperspace bypass, weapon of mass destruction, same thing.

Ah. These archers have Rain of Arrows. As minions.

Also a katana lieut with Build Up.

Apparently my supposed warden was not aware of the plan to destroy Earth, and is instead planning to...

Well, shutting down the drive failed, so she’s going to...

Pilot the ship into Portal Corps? ...I guess since there’s no other way to shut down the energy cascade. Well, let’s see about that.

---

Apparently now my briefings are wiretapping communication? Might want to kick in some static or put it in italics or something.

And this is another timed mission that should be highlighted.

The scientist starts rooting as he freaks out about the starship crash. I think you may want to look into a different animation.

..hmm. These scientists I’m rescuing act run off and then act like they’re expecting to be led around, but I don’t have any objectives to that effect.

I also see some... axe/shield bosses, I think? No buildup on them, though.

The boss here is a DB/Inv archvillain. No unstoppable, which is a small mercy. I’ve got enough lucks stocked up that I can just nosell him long enough to chew through his hit points.

And now that Portal Corp is evacuated...

Down comes the hammer.

---

Apparently I’m fighting my contact in... a cavern under Portal Corp? Because there totally is one?

I appreciate wanting to put something nice in the navbar to go with the countdown timer, and honestly I can’t think of something off the top of my head, but this is an actual tiny aboveground bit of Portal Corp that’s somehow still standing, right?

He’s a broadsworder with buildup who summons “death sentinels” that drop tar patches and I think Petrifying Gaze on me Either that or Fearsome Stare, can’t really tell from the SFX alone. Three waves. Then he’s down. Improvement on the SSer with Rage I was expecting from the first mission, anyway!

---

Storyline - **. A warrior race of birdpeople from space are looking to strike a fatal blow against their old adversaries, a race of slaver lizardpeople. There’s just one problem - Earth won’t survive the attack.

So did I just describe this arc, or the second-season finale of the Justice League cartoon?

Don’t read too much into this. If they purged everything from CoH that had ever been done with superheroes there wouldn’t be a lot left. But one of the things that made that finale work is that Hawkgirl had spent two seasons working with the Justice League so we had a stake in her character, kind of a hook and a contrast to the warrior birdpeople. Here it’s just one batch of space jerks butting heads with another bunch of space jerks, with no investment at all on my part. There’s really no reason to trust him, and no real attachment to the Hawkgirl analogue who acts as my jailer and decides to sacrifice herself.

Design - **. Surprise timed missions are almost as bad as surprise mission failures. It helps to have an idea before you click accept that you’ll be subject to a timer, so you can make plans to do things like go out and get a Shivan Shard or whatever before you press the button. And it doesn’t seem like any of these timers should actually exist in that they’ll still present a reasonable course of action if they run out, other than the one on the final mission which is your countdown to give your traitor contact a more violent sendoff.

The enemy designs are visually evocative, but until they pulled out their weapons I couldn’t tell the diffference between the various ranks -- if there were differences in costuming they were subsumed under the theme. Telling the difference out of combat isn’t quite as crucial as telling the difference within combat, but it does help to have a quick way to distinguish between a single group of three minions and a lieutenant and two groups of one boss and one minion who have gotten close to one another. I’d suggest different primary colors - scales for the lizardmen and armor for the birdmen. The common design elements are enough to unify them that you don’t need a common color scheme.

The mission settings are all generally reasonable, and I like the idea of turning the last mission into a pure final boss fight and the little wrinkle of the custom ambush.

Gameplay - **. Standard caution: be careful with Build Up and all powers that work like it. Initial burst damage is bad enough, as enemies have recharged all their powers when you first engage. The addition just makes it swingier.

Having ranged minions and melee higher ranks frustrates, especially when the minions can fly. Higher ranks tend to be priority targets because of their damage output and broader powerset, which if you use mostly ranged minions means that every fight ends with a bunch of weak targets who aren’t bunched up and won’t bunch up on their own - instead of the alternative with melee minions, which is a giant scrum that may go down to splash damage before the higher ranks and can easily be blown away at the end in any case. This isn’t to say never use ranged minions, but minions should close to melee at least as often than not.

Also, the ludicrous interact times in the second mission don’t really do anything but frustrate, and because of the chaining there’s a decent amount of backtracking between levels to find these long-delay glowies as well.

Detail - **. Empty descriptions on everybody, dense briefings with no highlighting to pick out the more important things, like time limits, and clues that are a combination of killboard and narration. Aside from maybe the handful I pick up on the space cruiser, they don’t really tell me anything that would fill out the plot, such as it is.

Overall - **. There’s no particular destructive feedback at work here, aside from maybe the bit where a bunch of descriptionless mooks don’t have much character to latch onto. The easiest thing to fix would be either explicitly warning about the time limits or eliminating the ones where it doesn’t make sense for the timer to expire but the plot to move on.

Tonight's arc: Valkyrian Task Force: Talon’s Grasp (315541). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• Randoms!

If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Tonight's arc: Return of the Threefold King (163274). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums thread.

Other random arcs I hit up trying to find one I hadn't played before:
Galactic Protectorate 06 (355068). Verdict - **
Assault on Aru Prime (174586). Verdict - ***

My current queue:

• Randoms! (previously queued arc is under revision)

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a low-20s Peacebringer, +0/x1 with bosses on.

---

Hmm. No contact description. Might want to update that just a bit.

Hmmmm again. I have a feeling I know how this is going to end, but alright, let’s go stop the CoT from taking over the world.

The boss is invisible (or at least less visible, as Steamy Mist doesn’t seem to completely overwrite the standard perception radius) and responds to one of the many battles that starts up, so his voice seems to be coming out of nowhere. ...his description claims he’s after a mace, but I came here looking for a runestone.

The minions represent the well-known trio of fire, death, and stabs, but the boss is some kind of ice/stormer and that means he has all the slows. All of them. Can’t really go non-dwarf as he spams iceblock pretty well, and he doesn’t really have any kind of damage output to speak of, so the fight is a protracted affair of staring at powder-blue pixels until they become slightly larger.

Huh. Okay, seems my contact wasn’t being straight, but not in the way I thought. I’m talking to the secret idea of a guy whose powers are pretty much ineffective against these guys.

---

Next stone. ...the opening popup mentions the sea, but the relevant parts of Salamanca are kinda landlocked and behind a war wall.

Man. Hate trying to find things on this map, but fortunately they’re all on the long curve by the large lake near Salamanca.

Hmm. Maybe my earlier premonition still holds. My contact seems to think we’re turning back the king, but I found a journal that indicates he’s already been summoned.

---

Anyway, time to rescue some hostages.

The captive Legacy mention how lucky it is that I knew what to do. ...because apparently they didn’t think to blast these underlizards in the face.

For some reason I also pick up a map from the Lemurians in addition to a stone from the safe? My contact doesn’t really mention it.

---

So we’ve been doing stuff that might be set in Croatoa, and now it’s time for Arachnos in a Rikti bunker. Kind of weird to have something so out of place.

Anyway, it looks like you were trying to go for multiple crates with some distractions and some real elements. You can do this by naming all the plural entries for the glowie the same thing. (You may also want to name any notable single elements the same general thing, as in “search the last crate” as they can be unreliable when going to plurals.)

---

And now it’s time for the showdown. Teeny little map, not much to do other than head for the end room and fight the end boss. He seems to be a powerful melee combatant wielding a notable hammer -- is this the “mace” that description in the initial mission was referencing?

Anyway, I pop a Shivan and distract him with a large glowing lobster until he goes back to the grave.

---

Storyline - ***. Pretty standard - obtain power crunches, break evil’s face. It seems to hint at an eventual contact betrayal that never really materializes, mostly because my contact is keeping a couple things secret from me - first his hero identity, second the source of his power. And I can kind of understand the first, but not really the second.

I guess a bit of the problem is that Lemuria is kind of stepping on the Circle’s toes as the ancient underground civilization that’s rising up. So I’m looking at a complete blank slate and there really isn’t anything in-world that my contact could use to vouch for himself. I’d suggest finding some kind of hook so that I don’t just have to trust a complete unknown.

Design - **. The customs are generally easy enough to tell apart. About the only odd wrinkle is that the low-level fire guys look a lot like the low-level stab guys.

But mission 4 is just drastically, drastically off-tone with what has so far been a mystical mission arc set in Croatoa. Arachnos in a Rikti bunker?

And the arc as a whole has kind of a ridiculous level range. At the very least, you can now set the lower bound for the arc to offer a more automatic indication of the minimum level.

Gameplay - ***. The boss fight in the first mission was a giant waitathon. I had no powers, he had no damage. That’s never fun. The stock opposition turned out fine, but be careful with Build Up and similar boosting powers on the bosses, especially the final boss, who’s a pretty heavy bruiser even without the giant damage spike to open the fight.

Detail - **. The boss in the first mission has a description referencing some kind of mace he’s looking for. That never materializes, though the Threefold King does fight with warmace style. We pick up a journal in the second mission indicating that the Threefold King is alive again and my contact never really notices. There’s a map as an exit clue for the third mission that doesn’t seem to come into play at all. And I think all we get out of mission 4 is a statue, not the fourth runestone. It feels a lot like the story was rewritten at some point, but some of the map details and such were missed in the process.

Overall - ***. I’m inclined to round up because some of these issues are related to things done after this arc was published, but even absent those, this arc needs a light pass for balance and a deeper pass for consistency.

Were you running missions you had run before, or new ones? Some missions in the system are bugged, and they'll go through the spiel but no contact will appear.

It used to be that those missions got flagged when someone tried to run them, but they don't anymore.

So far there isn't anything in the Mission Architect to replicate the sort of "in-mission contact" that shows up in a lot of the notable new content. Including the conversation with Hero 1.

The best you could hope for is to chain an ally off of a glowie, but if allies don't have any enemy escorts they complete immediately.

Okay. Good to know it works about as intended.

Also that's a nice collection of arcs you got in your signature there. Shame if someone was to... comment on them. HINT HINT.

It does kind of rankle, doesn't it? Especially since that's a pretty neat wrinkle that's showing up in several tip missions.

But no, there's no model for that. The best you can hope for is to choose a map with a small back room, put both spawns in there, and cross your fingers that it will work as you intend.

(It helps if you can give the AV a +perception power.)

I would argue that the reason we're capped at 9999 tickets is so that there is a reasonable ticket-to-reward-merit ratio (1 reward merit ~= 200 tickets, based on the gold roll -> merit recipe roll ratio) but that tickets alone can't make certain powerful purchases.

Did you know that with alignment merits you can get a guaranteed LOTG global for a few missions' work over four days, all on your own?

@GlaziusF

Running this one on a level 20 Peacebringer, +0/x1 with bosses on.

---

Hmm. Looking at this level range it’s pretty uneven. I realize it’s intended from 1-20, but you can actually hard-lock the levels now so you can present a fixed level range.

While every briefing with a contact is in some senses a conversation, briefings also serve a notable game function -- they set the stage for the mission. Ideally the first part of the briefing, before I accept the mission, should leave me with some idea of what the mission is about.

In a very tiny mission map, I take out a single Gardvord and a small troll spawn guarding Verminator. He bolts for the exit as more Trolls ambush me.

Apparently the proportionate strength of a cockroach isn’t much match for the proportional strength of a troll.

---

Oh. The strength bit was just a guess of his. Other people might have tried actually lifting heavy things first.

But anyway, he’s got a plan - break up the storage crates of Superadine and his bugs will make off with the rest.

...that can’t possibly end badly, but alright, let’s give it a go.

A boss shows up behind us as the last crate gets broken, and Verminator and his baseball bat and his enhanced perception are off to get pulped.

Seriously, enhanced perception and a melee powerset are kind of a bad combination for a dude who’s supposed to be a bit of a coward.

---

Well, that didn’t take much. Dude has decided to curse the darkness rather than keep his single candle going.

Hmm. Well, the meter maid costuming’s good, and I guess you’ve got a nice custom combo of devices and truncheon with AR backup.

---

Apparently I’m cool with taking money from corrupt cops. Might want to tag this Vigilante.

Anyway, a small -time crime family has decided to hold his furniture hostage. I take it back and... don’t actually look in any bit of it. (The destructibles still have their default description.)

Aw, I thought he was going to be setting himself up as a drug lord in his new digs and I’d have to stop him and I’d get some foreshadowing.

...or, like, a clue, at least.

---

Ah! Well, he was planning something underhanded. Let’s see, let’s see.

Ah. The old standby. Chug a bunch of Superadine, go mad insane with rage and power, beat uselessly on a white dwarf carapace, get relocated to the Zig.

---

Storyline - ****. In operation the arc is small and poignant: the tale a wannabe hero who’s critically deficient in moral fiber and ends up taking the easy way out. The tone smoothly downshifts from optimism to exasperation to desperation. The overall blow is somewhat softened because, let’s be frank, the guy’s a bit of a putz, but there’s still the right touch of melancholy hanging around at the end.

Design - **. Breathe, arc! Breathe! I swear, I fought about as many enemies total in this arc as I did in a single, slightly less weeny, warehouse map with a single corridor and a loading dock. While it is useful for stepping the arc speedily from one plot moment to another, it’s absolutely terrible at lending any sense of time to the intervals between the plot moments. As a result it seems less like Verminator is suffering a gradual breakdown and more like he’s just huffing bug spray. The meter maids look pretty reasonable, but they don’t occur in the kind of numbers to get any sense of them at all.

Also again I mention the completely uneven level range. Now that you can actually lock it to some intended levels you should get your lock on.

Gameplay - ***. The enemies are easy enough, but I hardly have time to build up a head of steam before the mission’s over. And as a result, rack up hardly any inspirations to chug for the final boss, though Dwarf Form compensates for a lot.

Detail - **. Teeny little descriptions when there are non-stock descriptions at all, a snippet of a souvenir, and no clues to speak of. It doesn’t help the impression that this arc went by too fast when it doesn’t leave a trace.

Overall - **. Good plot ideas, but they really need space to work themselves out.

Tonight's arc: Verminator's Fancy Plans (379787). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

Other random arcs I hit up trying to find one I hadn't played before:
To Dream of Nothing (374644). Verdict - ***

My current queue:

• A scoreless review of Nothing Else Remains (486856)

If anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post. A part of these instructions, perhaps pertinent to this post: I always vote 5 in-game, as it seems a bit uncouth to ask people to jump through hoops and then bomb their rating.

Something that isn't in the instructions but could stand to be said: CoH Mission Review isn't my private site. It's not even my site. Anybody's welcome to leave a review on anything, and it hardly has to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.