GlaziusF

Tonight's arc: The Sinister Song (454892). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The Icari (458576), no earlier than October 30th.

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

@GlaziusF

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

---

“Hierachy” is misspelled in the contact’s description. Second sentence ends with “I didn’t you’d be the first to answer”, which I is missing a word.

So some hero’s gone off-radar tracking a personal monster and now they want help. And they seem a little unhinged.

This isn’t going to end well.

Snakes. Why did it have to be Snakes? They’re talking about some kind of sky world elder who was going to kill us all.

...okay, some weird things happen after I free Psyclipse. Not weird unusual, weird glitchy. I get a key objective to examine some equipment and find a creature, and I look at the equipment to see some cables filched from the PTS, which seem to be wired to another dimension. I then move on to free a supposed evil doctor from his metallic snake henchmen (who look pretty nice and alien), and then get an objective to lead him to his research. But it only stays in the objective bar for maybe half a second before he betrays, talking about how we’re going to steal his stuff, and then I get jumped by another wave of his minions.

Apparently I’m supposed to kill him and see the body teleport away? I dunno. It seems like you might be trying to do a little bit too much here.

He was talking about eliminating all evil. This generally also entails eliminating all free will so I’m not necessarily in his corner.

---

My contact calls Psymon Omega a Pychic. He may be Pyrrhic, but that’s beside the point.

Apparently the doc is running toward a secret stash of ancient psychic enhancers.

The box of crystals is just titled “crys”, probably a leftover from the draft. All the collectible objects seem to have tiny names; I can see doing that for things that don’t show up like ambushes and the like, but all the names of collectible objects are visible to the player.

The doc’s monsters are taking down some kind of mentally dominated creatures. At least I assume so, as I never see what the “Controlled” and “Dominated” that are biting it in the combat-results text are.

You should probably drag and drop the distraction glowies around a bit, as the clues for what they are come after the clues for the important thing that was taken, which is supposedly the focus of this mission.

Speaking of the doc’s monsters, you should be aware that Infrigidate in the hands of a boss does a really significant defense debuff. We’re talking near-double enemy hit rates, whether or not your armor is defense-based or not.

---

Next mission briefing, “Hans made hbig ruckus over it and Aeon had Aarachnos lock him up for a year.”. Couple typos there.

Basically from what I understand the doc is out for revenge, but vengeance so often does splash damage, and he’s going to be taking very dangerous measures.

Oof. Fortunatas mean lots and lots of psychic damage. The doc’s creatures don’t seem to be taking this any better than I am, though, and they get pretty well wiped out.

The psychic accumulator seems to have its default Rikti stasis pod description. Shame. I wanted to see what this really was.

---

Okay, uh, first, you’ve got some more “pychic” in the briefing.

Second, I’m not entirely sure why the WSPDR building needs to go up in flames. Can’t I just take my plasma axe to the main antenna?

Third... huh, Longbow shows up to try to stop me? Unfortunately as Cap au Diable is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, they don’t actually make it very far before being set upon and routed.

---

Anyway, the giant overdramatic explosion has left things looking rather terrible for my PR. So now I do the only thing I can - kill the doctor once and for all. He has AR/Elec and Bots/Devices lieutenants, and a lot of AR/SR security. You may want to fold in some mace (nightstick) there, to keep non-defense sets from being bursted into -100 defense.

Oh, ElecMelee/something cyborg boss guards too.

Anyway, the doc’s still just an ordinary boss, so he goes down in a few salvos. I didn’t really even need the ally along. Was he spouting off a run message at low health? He wasn’t labeled as a danger to escape so I just figured it was just multiple health warnings due to how drastically he was being shredded.

And... my contact decides the guilt is all my fault. Because unbeknownst to me, this entire time I was supposed to be keeping her sane.

---

Storyline - *. I’ll admit it, it seems a lot like I have a double standard here. On the one hand, when a contact congratulates me for seeing an arc through to the end and not turning away, I feel good. On the other, when a contact castigates me for seeing an arc through to the end and not turning away, I feel resentful. It’s just a plot railroad either way, right?

Well, not really. I’ve said this before -- there’s a separation between player and character that’s really kind of unavoidable. Even when playing a character who should be out to get the villain at any cost, I’ll still take a break to read descriptions if it seems like they might be interesting, or head down side passages to look for glowies so I won’t have to backtrack later. These might not be sensible character actions, but they make sense to me as a player. It’s the same with completing a storyarc -- as a player I want to see how the story ends, even if as a character I might not approve of what’s going on, or consider other options.

It’s particularly grating in this arc, where I’m the superheroic equivalent of a warm body, with my contact providing the expertise and myself providing the plasma axe. While this isn’t bad in and of itself -- certainly it would hardly make sense to expect me to be up-to-date on the latest in transdimensional psychic technology -- it does require a certain level of trust. The reality could lie somewhere between exactly what my contact’s told me and a far darker scenario, where the mad doctor was mad in the sense that he built a device that didn’t actually work, and we took the WSPDR building out specifically to scramble the Rogue Isles medicom and kill him. When it’s revealed at the end that my contact has reservations about this whole thing I’m more inclined to wonder exactly how truthful she’s been with me.

It’s particularly particularly grating when the justification and planning for the big mass-murder are conveyed in a cross between charades and shadow-puppets. I’m still not sure exactly why screaming pyrophoric doom was the order of the day. Somehow the doomsday device got into WSPDR and they went into full-on emergency lockdown after the fact? For something that’s probably supposed to be a big moral turning point it wasn’t very well developed.

I think I would feel a bit better about how this all ended if, in addition to my contact not getting postmortem cold feet, I had an independent view on what the mad doctor was planning. Maybe find some blueprints or something when we raid his lair.

As it is, well. I can buy my contact lashing out as kind of an innocent reaction, or rather an overreaction, out of regret. But it serves to accentuate that I haven’t exactly had a very good idea of what’s been going on this whole time, and have been relying on my contact to explain what’s happened.

Design - ****. The customs are pretty great, actually. Especially the mad doctor’s custom creations. They look very... well, alien without being incomprehensible.

But I have absolutely no idea what was supposed to go on at the end of the first mission. You should really take a look at that.

Gameplay - ****. Lots of people like to give custom security mobs assault rifle. The problem is that unlike the actual security-with-guns enemy groups, assault rifle doesn’t come with a rifle butt, so it turns into all cascading defense debuffs, all the time. I’d recommend cutting them with “nightstick”-model mace guards.

Finding the destructibles to commit mass murder is actually pretty smooth; they have vocal guards and are quite large and contrasting. The doc’s mad creations can be a bit punishing if a boss lands Infrigidate, which may be a bit more swingy than you want.

Detail - ***. Even if all the collectibles had their proper names and the destructibles all had non-standard descriptions, I’d still be stuck with the same sort of minimalist detail about everything that’s going on.

Which on the one hand is fine as actually knowing would require me to have an advanced degree in psychoengineering. But on the other hand, if this is supposed to be an arc where I’m not intended to be comfortable with what’s going on, it would help a lot if I actually knew what was going on.

Overall - **. Not intended as an average.

So the thing about evil is that it’s nigh-on impossible to do accidental evil. Careless evil, sure, but not accidental. But the big dramatic explosion in this arc takes place without an actual clear explanation of why it’s necessary or even how big it’s going to be ahead of time. I understand that part of it is that my contact can’t explain what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it any clearer what’s happening.

Up until the last briefing, I could ignore that, as my contact was shaping up to be the sort of vigilante willing to kill a city to keep a country alive, which is a rare sort but one that still exists. But then the train switches tracks (killing ten children, one of whom would grow up to be Hitler) and my contact’s suddenly unsure of what’s just gone on and demanding answers from me, answers the events of the arc don’t exactly equip me to give. To the extent that I was resolved to do anything, apart from the metafictional determination to read to the end of the story, I trusted that my contact knew what was going on, because it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to find out for myself. With that gone, everything just collapsed.

If you're worried about a glowie being unreachable due to the pulsing, I haven't found a spot yet that actually happens in.

If you're worried about an ally coming down with scrapperlock, well, keep worrying.

If you're worried about them being unsuitable for some other setting, I think the Infernal temple doesn't actually have any crystals, but it's also a different palette.

I think if you save an arc locally (go to edit a published arc and select "save as locally") it'll bring over the custom enemies and groups that were in that arc.

I haven't really had cause to try that myself, though.

No, not obsolete. Defeat all message still sticks around for the entire arc.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Opening briefing sets the stage: Nemesis won, people are trying to create a resistance. Step 1: supply raid. Alright, seems straightforward.

Actually a bit quiet in here. No bosses, some slightly vocal patrols, but nobody really reacting to a hero. Then again they don’t have much of a chance to react at all.

--

Hmm. This is starting to seem familiar. Did you have this up in beta?

Anyway, pulling out a Resistance agent from a Nemesis office. Holliday finally acknowledges that I have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, for all the good it does him.

JASOND’s clue is the first one I’ve gotten that’s been more than just a restatement of something I’ve just done. Which I suppose is alright as far as it goes, but you’d think I’d be taking notes or something.

---

Hmm. Off to stop a bunch of Jaegers rolling off the production line.

...though the factory looks deserted.

Well, no wonder. Looks like I’ve been set up for an ambush. Another sniper down and it’s clear.

---

And now, we freein’ a cave base. I notice some patrols spouting out multiples of their dialogue - you don’t have to do that these days, NPC dialogue has a huge range, so make a talky patrol and multiple silents to make up the bulk.

It would seem that this was all Nemesis’ trial run for a new sort of automaton that can’t be detected by the Resistance’s existing means. Ominous.

---

Storyline - ****. Well, this arc would serve as an intro to another arc or series of arcs dealing with this Nemesis Empire Earth. If there were such arcs. But there aren’t.

Honestly the first mission feels a little superfluous. It’s kind of an intro to the intro. It would be a good place to introduce any novel aspects of the Nemesis Empire’s soldiery, except there don’t seem to be any.

Perhaps you could make some?

Design - ****. Everything feels a bit too short. I think the real culprit here is the last mission, which takes place in quite a tiny cave, though mission 3 is also pretty small. The only really substantial mission is the second one, and it doesn’t exactly fit the story that the panic bleeding off mission 3 gets resolved so speedily.

Gameplay - *****. Perhaps as an upside to everything feeling too short, everything gets resolved in pretty short order, though I wouldn’t have minded the occasional actual boss fight here and there.

Detail - ***. There really isn’t much in the way of clues to be found or revealing minion chatter. Maybe we could find some kind of prototype automaton design in the mission 3 factory just to twist the knife a little bit?

Overall - ****. An arc with some interesting ideas and a concise execution that ends up feeling just a bit insubstantial.

Tonight's arc: Blood, Sweat, Toil, and Tears (15447). Verdict - ****. Review lower in this thread.
(also from the randomizer: It Starts In Atlas (381565), previously reviewed as **.)

And from here on in, it's randoms all the way down.

My current queue:

• The Icari (458576), no earlier than October 30th.

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Tonight's arc: Galactic Protectorate - 06 (355068). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

And from here on in, it's randoms all the way down.

My current queue:

• The Icari (when it hits CoHMR, but no earlier than October 30th.)

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Oh! I actually get a chance to see some of the non-Vindicator resistance!

...shame it has to be under these circumstances.

Also I’m betting I’ll actually just be seeing body bags.

Ah, no. I’m seeing some combat... unfortunately it looks like they’re pretty overmatched. So, not even bodybags, then.

Looks like everybody’s theme this time is “darkness”. Because never hitting anything is so much fun. (Seriously, a boss-level mastermind with a lich can stack enough to give you a negative base to-hit.) It doesn’t bother me too much with the defense, but I’ve run on other characters who just basically gave up on hitting.

(and the minions get the name of important structural bones but the boss is some kind of vestigial bird thumb. Le what?)

Oh, Crimson is the spy. That’s a pretty good spy.

Ad after I get his information out of the base he brings it down around everybody’s heads.

---

Well, now it’s time to go after the leader of the pack.

...well, this is a fine state of affairs. Somehow I wind up standing near four customs who can all put Darkest Night on me.

Darkest Night in the hands of the Architect is a click power that does not miss. Four of them stacking give me a negative base to-hit.

Fortunately I can use a combination of Taunt and geometry to pull off part of them when I return.

Indigo is kind of a poor choice for this map, given that it features sheer drops and both knockback and the random scatter from Caltrops will cause people to jump down there. And Indigo to chase them. And there’s only one way back up.

According to the clues, Recluse was trying to use some artifact of darkness to ruin Paragon, but it somehow exploded and took out his own troops.

---

And now our main base is under attack. Well.

If the bombs didn’t take ten seconds each I might have a chance here, but as the end boss has a self-rez and I can’t actually deal with more than one spawn of enemies at a time, as the ones who drop the Darkest Nights are minions...

Still, four bombs with seconds left on the clock. Not bad. And judging by the arc souvenir, what ended up in that encrypted file was “I prepared Explosive Runes today”.

---

Storyline - ****. I’d be a bit more satisfied with the ending if there was another part to this up, but as an “end of season one” installment it’s pretty nice. Definitely sets up a cliffhanger for the season premiere, which I can’t help but imagine will focus on a different group of heroes or even villains entirely.

Design - **. Monolithic darkness is worse than monolithic sound, mostly because there’s a lot more variety among powersets, and therefore a lot more variety among animations, when you’re trying to work out what does what. And half the enemies are not only spitting out shadowy splodges but also covered in shadowy splodges to make it harder to see what they’re doing.

The naming conventions aren’t really much of a help here, since as far as I could tell they just took the form (cosmic phenomenon) (random bone). But even if I could build that convention, there’s still the problem as with many of the other custom groups where even if I know which enemy does what I’ve got pretty much no chance of picking them out of a crowd. Aside from the bosses who have obsidian-shield haloes and I believe wings, but there only seemed to be one boss type to begin with.

Gameplay - *. There’s a difference between being challenged and being bludgeoned with math. Let me see if I can explain the difference.

Superstrength boss: challenging. Fast-firing offensive set which may be commonly resisted but has boss numbers behind it. Superstrength boss with rage: bludgeoned with math. Rage just improves too many parameters to make it a good idea to stick around while it’s running.

Invulnerability EB: challenging. Generally good resists, a self-heal, status protection. Invulnerability EB with unstoppable: bludgeoned with math. For most common damage types there’s no way to deal damage to the boss faster than they regenerate.

Accident of spawns and patrols that result in fighting an aggro cap’s worth of Freakshow: challenging. Accident of spawns and patrols that result in getting quad-stacked with Darkest Night: bludgeoned with math.

It’s not that this much dark actually represents much of a threat. I think I may have died once when the unavoidable stun from Soul Transfer got me. But if enough of it gets through (and heck, darkest night can’t help BUT get through) and my base to-hit goes negative there’s no chance I can actually do damage to the crowd around me, and they win that stalemate on account of they can’t get bored.

Detail - ***. The standard entirely-too-much information bios on the enemy group make a triumphant return. The big background info about the MacGuffin Recluse was using, while intellectually interesting, would be a bit better with a little more relevance to the current scenario. Is this just this general’s big dark bag, or is it related to some phenomenon on Eden?

Overall - **. The vagaries of combat have the potential to put you in an immensely frustrating.situation, generally unharmed but unable to do any significant damage. On the big outdoor maps that isn’t so much a chance as an inevitability.

@GlaziusF

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

As an aside, as this arc was originally created before the great forums revampstravaganza, the arc link on the CoHMR page is out of date. You may want to contact the site admin and have it changed or, as I couldn't find an appropriate thread on the forums, removed.

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Lars the Immortal. Still rockin’ that default architect description. Might want to have that looked at.

Hmm. He’s talking like he has backup here. Here’s the thing about Striga Isle - it’s kinda like the Rogue Isles in that contacts are more looking out for themselves than acting as official arms of the FBSA. So his talking like he has somewhere to detain prisoners doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

I mean, he could be working closely with Longbow on this, but that’s something you’d want to call out.

And that brings up the idea of a Council front office in Striga Isle. Why? There’s a giant base with turrets and logos that dominates like a fourth of the island. This is not the act of someone who wants to keep a low profile.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of raiding a front office and fighting nonstandard examples of an enemy group. I like that a lot, but of all the groups to have a powered arm of normal-looking civilians I would not pick the Council. They’re like Cobra in that regard: you can take the grunt out of the uniform but you can’t take the uniform out of the grunt.

I mean, if you’re looking for something light-hearted to do here, giant supersoldiers in suits, vampyri office-workers, and warwolves in janitorial scrubs are great.

Anyway, I grab some raw data and scoot.

---

And now to liberate an agent and save some genuine civilians. Good deal. Mission goes off pretty cleanly, stock Council are stock, if you picked this map you should be aware that the top floor can be a dose of concentrated crossfire pain.

There’s a mission wrapup clue but also only a single clue to grab during the mission. That’s always seemed a little off to me in general, unless the wrapup clue also includes prior missions. Maybe look at consolidating them somehow?

---

And now to grab Liberty’s Edge.

I meet her about halfway through the cargo ship and decide to see if she’ll run. When she bolts away from me I don’t follow, but it seems like the mission’s continuing as normal.

I go to look.for her and she finally manages to navigate her way to the ship’s door, and through it, though the mission hasn’t failed yet. Hmm. She bolted pretty late in the fight and her dialogue didn’t make it seem like she was running away. Is she set to bolt at like 90%? If she’s truly intended to be optional, given the difficulty of a stock BS/Shield EB she should probably turn tail earlier.

Looks like the captain’s an independent operator, thugs/traps. Decent fight, but I wonder what the debrief’s going to be like.

Oh. When she ran off she turned herself in. I don’t suppose there’s really any way to cleanly convey that in the limits of the Mission Architect. Maybe she actually explicitly surrenders at low health and if you keep beating on her the “death” message reflects that?

---

Next mission we go find her main squeeze.

Or, hmm. I find his personal effects, but everyone’s all on about how there was a traitor in the base who’s been taken care of.

I go talk to the security chief. At first it seems like he doesn’t have Focus Chi anymore, which is pretty kind of you, buuuuuuut it turns out at low health or maybe non-melee range he pops it anyway. Bleah. I wasn’t at or near full health at the time so I get plenty wiped.

Once again Harkins dumps what seems like a boss defeat line into the system text when he goes down.

The end mission clue seems to be dipping into the interstitials just a bit (talking about what Liberty’s Edge is going to do in the next mission). I suppose it’s alright, or would be if this mission didn’t explicitly say I needed to take the vital information I found to somebody else to be decrypted. As it is this is information my contact could better provide.

Not sure why he’s talking about the Council planting a false trail. I took it for a legitimate trail that we were misinterpreting.

---

Anyway, time to do a thing to a guy and save somebody’s lover.

On the way there I destroy a mainframe which according to system text stored the plans of an advanced super soldier serum. That’s... uh... a good thing? I guess? I had no idea it was even here.

There’s some riffing on this terrible disaster recovery plan (1: gather tiny fragments of hard drive, 2: pray) but it kinda runs the idea into the ground. There’s a perfectly legitimate reason why you keep only one copy of your essential data, that being because you’re a paranoid genius in an army of backstabbers.

On the top floor I find some 5th trying to get their doctor back (poor doomed idiots) and the neo warwolf. I get an objective to remove the doctor’s assistants but can’t really find them anywhere... until I drop back down a floor and find a robots/ff mastermind in a forgotten corridor.

The doc drops in disconcertingly fast time - the only real challenge is countering his alpha of EM Pulse. My neo warwolf ally dishes out redonkulous amounts of damage.

Something about the motivations here feels a bit off, but that’s more a story for the credits. The villains are in the slammer and the young lovers are reunited (for there is something of young love in all lovers). Cue ending theme.

---

Storyline - **. So you touch on it a little bit in the very end briefing, but the truth is that warwolves aren’t really created in the sense of being deliberately produced. This is dealt with in the Moonfire task force among other places. They’re accidents in the process of creating Galaxy troops - instead of a humanoid shell being puppeted by a Nictus, they’re a bestial shell being puppeted by a Nictus.

The important part is the “puppeted by a Nictus” part. The Nictus are kind of like a glowy purple Zerg, with a few important intelligent directors and a whole bunch of cannon fodder. They don’t really seem to care what shape the end shell is, only that there’s more Nictus. Making the implantation process more expensive and bringing the warwolves under the conscious control of their former human personalities (or of human handlers in the Council as the Mads seem to be planning) really isn’t something the Nictus or Arakhn really seem to be pushing for.

So who’s pushing?

I mean, on the one hand, this is a story of transformants after the pattern of the Leon Natale mini-arc, except bigger and splashier. On the other hand, this is a story of a serious power grab within the Council, someone trying to take the warwolves away from the Nictus -- but that story doesn’t seem to be in evidence anywhere.

Like Lars in the first mission implying he’s somehow got stable mainland connections, I don’t remember if these are new details or not. But they do contradict elements of the setting I kind of like. Especially Lars. He’s not a representative of Paragon City who wants to see the Council routed in an official aspect - he’s someone with a personal connection and a personal grudge, which serve to make him more relatable.

Design - ***. So for the longest time the “mission pacing” setting in the Architect didn’t actually do anything. Missions were the same all the way through no matter how it was set. And then it did, and Architect missions had greens in the front that people may not have been expecting. I don’t particularly mind greens except as they go flying from attacks that’d knock down even-level enemies, but something to consider is that allies guarded by greens will themselves be green, and Liberty’s Edge in the last mission spent a lot of her time doing what I can only explain as running from stuff that was purple to her.

The civilian Council members... well, they have reasonable powersets, but they don’t really make sense for reasons I’ve talked about earlier. They seem to be in there for some light humor, to which I only respond: which is funnier, a civilian working for the Council, or a Council supersoldier in civilian dress? The second one does it for me, no question. When you’re dealing with a group who tries to define themselves with a consistent visual styling, keeping elements of that style even when they wouldn’t be appropriate is a great way to indicate you’re not being serious.

Gameplay - ***. The balance of powers and how they play out doesn’t seem to have changed since the first run. Something you might want to consider about chaining objectives: there’s a whole lot of middle, and whenever you have middle objectives chaining off each other you run the risk of backtracking. This is referring to the end mission in particular: if you have a front objective, it can trigger multiple middle objectives, and one of those can trigger the end objective, and someone who searches carefully won’t have to backtrack.

Detail - **. There were a lot of new wrinkles added on this front, and while they’re consistent within the storyline they conflict with the world at large. What I’d really suggest here is to drop Lars Hansen and use one of the many Paragon City contacts who deals with the Council, as what’s happening here is more of a struggle writ large than a personal vendetta. One of the things about most heroside contacts is that they all tend to have some quirk that makes them unique but they never, ever show it except in their initial greetings, because they have to share their mission sets with like five other people. If you find someone who you think you can run with (I’d suggest looking at the Natural contacts on Paragon Wiki) then this is your chance to let them shine.

Overall - ***. I either discounted or ignored the terrible rating I gave to this arc’s design the last time I played it, as it was entirely related to odd circumstances that made the final mission surprise-failable. That’s gone now, and the other changes are kind of a mixed bag, so the overall rating remains the same.

Tonight's arc: Blood for Roses (161399). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

Only one arc left in the queue. After it's gone I go back to random stuff from the site.

Or I could do yours!

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068).

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

If anybody's tried to play this recently, it seems like a patch drastically scaled back the available locations in the mission 3 map and as a result the arc doesn't work anymore. So I've picked a new map. I think the new location works well, though it's not as tightly thematically tied as the old one.

Tonight's arc: Papers and Paychecks (298290). Verdict - *****. Review in MA Forums thread.

And so ends the Dr. Aeon special. Back to arcs without alignment trickery. Tomorrow's a night off but I should pick back up by Wed/Thu.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068), starting no earlier than October 18th.
• A rereview of Blood for Roses (161399). The only review on that page is mine, and I wouldn't trust it until the rereview is completed.

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a low-40s merc/TA mastermind, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

Ah, the life of a minor functionary. Huddling in the background while gravity controllers repeatedly toss forklifts at you because you’re what the Tab key gave them.

I enter the warehouse to find chaos: longbow running around and the occasional doomed Crey security squad trying to contain them. Under the circumstances nobody’s going to notice if I have seven pairs of hands doing the work, then. I smell promotion!

Looks like Fusionette’s been huffing the fourth wall a little bit hard today. (protip: Summon Entirely Too Much Longbow Backup is a temp power, so get used to doing the task force without it.)

I spring a mail clerk, a shipping clerk, and Hopkins, who knows me by reputation and seems to think I should be setting my sights higher.

Welp, Longbow perforated, heroes routed, boss duly impressed, but the day’s not over until the labels are in place.

Ahh. Nothing like the lingering aroma of marker fumes after a job well done. It’s the little things, really.

---

And now, document shredding. I suppose the incident with the self-replicating office paper is long in the past?

It would seem so. Time to eliminate all the evidence of our old horrifically hazardous consumer product just in time, if these posters are any indication, for the rollout of the new line of horrifically hazardous consumer products.

Good lord. Simmons seems to be running the Inadvertent Hero Leads division (a product of the Truth in Labeling initiative, spearheaded by Kelly Uqua, official Crey Industries Alien Spy). But there’s no amount of information that a withering hail of bullets can’t return to the primal chaos.

Oh man. R&D. I don’t know what I could have done to deserve this.

---

Welp, time to get researching.

First experiment: the effects of kinesthetic memory stimulation on Friedkin-induced human replicants. Subject responded normally to the full range of ballistic and chemical stimuli.

Second experiment: the response of hybrid Devouring Earth in hostile situations. Despite annihilation of two of the six auxiliary experimenters, subject evidenced full control of all faculties.

Third experiment: mental development of Hydra/human test splice. Unfortunately instinctive reactions dominate the subject mentality.

Now to battle to the death for access to the sole lab computer! Hey, I don’t make the policies, I just follow them.

Unfortunately the scientist in charge is a little displeased about the destruction of valuable experimental specimens.

---

And now the glamorous life of a middle manager! Promoted into a job requiring an entirely different skill set!

Well, a withering hail of bullets tends to solve the main problem with people going off-schedule, that being the people complaining about them.

Man, now I wish I hadn’t checked NEMESIS PLOT on that form.

Mr. Kellerman! You’re... still rocking your stock description. Might want to have that looked at. Wouldn’t want people doubting your loyalty to the company.

Oh dear. 19th-century powered automatons are no match for the confusion of modern technology, it would seem. The laser printer is an amusing touch, but it’s got a couple problems as a defendable.

First, defendables always spawn ambushes. Not too bad if you’re expecting it. Second, as an ally it can give the surprise Nemesis boss a target right when he spawns in, and you may not want to give advance warning.

---

And now it’s time to be the VP of executions! ...that’s the right word, right?

Anyway, the entire office is all “what about severance pay” this and “not in the face” that, and along the way I find the supplies for our wonderful new consumer product. ...waste from the cloning facility? Well, move over Boris!

So on the one hand, this is a profitable new product line, the direct result of thousands of man-hours of hard work. On the other hand, my conscience is probably going to haunt me forever about this.

And by “my conscience”, I mean “a ten-story humanoid glob of glue possessed by the spirits of the vengeful dead”. Seriously, you thought Equalizers were bad? You right-click the debuff icon and all it says is “Recharge: NO”.

Really it’s no contest.

(Also I was a good little corporate citizen last time I played this arc, so I want to see the other ending.)

Oh, interesting mission exit screen. While it’s not the light show that accompanies the Praetorian choices, it does its job well enough.

---

Storyline - *****. Just when I thought I’d got out, they dragged me et cetera et cetera. Does a decent job of building you up to have the responsibility (and therefore, the power) for yet another corporate crime, and presenting a decent binary choice right at the end. It’s a track we don’t really get to explore in CoV, given that ethical business practices are more or less “whatever you can get away with”.

Design - ****. More than anything, what dragged this down was the four Nemesis automaton bosses in the fourth map, prior to fighting Barbie. If her deal was supposed to be anything more than the same custom boss in a pink dress, I didn’t really get an appreciation for it. Maybe she can be some kind of mace-wielding or cuisinarting or poison-spitting Jaeger automaton, just to set her apart.

The defendable printer is a fun idea but has its own problems. Maybe it could be a destructible, using CreyComp drivers and keeping the automatons “trapped” trying to handle the error? Just tossing ideas out there.

Gameplay - ****. Yeah, it’s the four custom blast set bosses. Unlike the experiments and doc in the last map they all function just as well at range, and one thing office maps surprise you with is a boss around a blind corner. Stealthing past is really not an option for a mastermind, either. Maybe it was just a bad AT/arc mismatch? I’m pretty sure, though, that they weren’t in the last time I played.

Turning some of them into custom lieuts, maybe with bigger escorts, would work just as well from an immersion perspective.

Detail - *****. Just a couple minor things that slip out of true here. Ken Kellerman still has his stock description, and the descriptions on the Crey files in the second mission might be a little too in-the-know about what’s really going on. If we’re still supposed to be looking for gainful employment on the straight and narrow at that point, they should probably be a little vaguer.

Overall - *****. This one’s got a decent heft to it, with missions that are busy and varied without feeling overwhelming (most of the time, anyway). The story mixes in humor with dark humor pretty well, without getting too saccharine or too dissonant.

Aeon Challenge Special Comment - This one doesn’t ride as hard on the arc of moral development as some of the other ones I’ve played. It uses a structure that you see now and again in the villain arcs, with a final choice coming when you have the power to make it. And well, some of those worked, in themselves. And so does this.

Tonight's arc: Who Dares Wins (454805). Verdict - *****. Review in MA Forums thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068), starting no earlier than October 18th.
• A rereview of Blood for Roses (161399). The only review on that page is mine, and I wouldn't trust it until the rereview is completed.
• A rereview of Papers and Paychecks (298290)

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 doesn't even have 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 an early-40s merc/TA mastermind, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

Hmm. Okay, apparently I’m living through somebody’s memories of Terra Volta. He’s recolored interestingly but his portrait is still normal. Wonder if all enemies are like that when you use ‘em for contacts.

Anyway, looks like I get some snatches of audiobook when I pick up my clues. ...and my inside man likes rattling off random philosophy when he gets tagged. That’s worth a chuckle.

Hoo boy. Last piece wound up in a lab room. Hate lab rooms. So easy to get crossfire.

Oh! Oh, no. It was in the same room as another glowie downstairs so I overlooked it and moved on. Color me silly.

So it looks like this is playing the villain side of the Terra Volta trial. I recognize this gear from the stuff we raid the Raiders for.

The pre-mission biographical info seems pretty interesting too.

---

Ah. Freakshow deterrence, best achieved by pointing and going LOL.

I pick up a wing raider officer, who obligingly parks himself in a four-way intersection and then flees every direction at once, bringing down a giant swarm of freaks and a Council boss, first on his head, then on mine.

As a result I miss some of the dialogue, but I get a good clean fight with the big boss. I’m a little disappointed that we don’t drop the hallucinogen right away so he rants entertainingly about bees, but the job gets done.

---

Huh. Looks like something is rotten in the state of Denmark. A stealth op, my narrator? I’ll see what I can do.

Well, there aren’t any enemies in this office complex. Just some bodies, and a few clues. It looks like the new blood sold us out to... the RIKTI?

I don’t know who else writes their name like that.

Apparently I have to defeat a boss to escape, somehow? Honestly this seems like a better “manual exit required” scenario, but that would mean no tickets. ...not that there are a lot on offer to begin with. This is definitely more of an atmosphere mission.

The hero is actually a lieut? I’m betting there’s a Yamahnri recolor or something.

Oh. Nope, just an original lieut-class hero, as is the second one who comes in to try and stop me.

Man, in addition to the execution, the traitors printed some cards to lure in the PPD to clean up the stragglers? That’s surprisingly thorough.

---

So, going into a giant factory tower to clean up the traitors. They all seem to have sky skiffs, which I counter with my own ally ambush.

So among the traitors are a pirate guy, arsenal guy, and the philosophy guy is quoting a dude from just before he got beheaded. Way to be stupid and foreshadowing at the same time!

There’s space at the top of the factory tower. I wonder if there’s a mystery fourth factor?

Ah, no. Looks like the Rikti are in another reactor.

---

Huh. I thought the reactor map was actually in Architect. Sifting over the maps, looks like it wasn’t.

Time to make my way up this tech lab, then. I find Byers in a much sturdier Jump Bot chassis and we start clearing out soldiers and mentalists on our way to the top. The end boss and his considerable escort rant about a bomb, which shows up in the same tiny room, and kind of in a bad position since I was standing back a ways to fight him.

Bomb casing off, but the core’s still going. Looks like it’s time to be a hero.

---

Storyline - *****. Good execution and fleshing-out of a story I’ve seen the basic form of many times before, usually dealing with organized crime. It ties in very nicely with the existing storylines on Terra Volta, too.

Only thing that bugs me a little - our narrator has the time to leave his last will and testament, but not time to teleport twice? I could understand his harness being drained by the emergency teleport, but the porters can snap off multiples in a combat pretty readily. Maybe make it a little more clear he’s just got a one-shot?

Design - ****. The third mission is the real culprit here. It’s pitched as a stealth mission, but there’s actually not a single thing in it to dodge, up until the end... and somehow it’s mandatory to tangle with the PPD and their affiliated heroes to leave. It actually works pretty well as an exposition dump, because in the empty space there’s generally some new detail to think about.

Honestly I’d rather have it be a real “stealth run”, with the cops and notable heroes already there on account of the business cards. I don’t think that fighting them would really detract from the moral of the story, as it were, since you fight them already.

Gameplay - ****. Byers pulling enemies left right and center in mission 2 was a bit of a pain, but I don’t know if it’s something you can help. That factory tower in mission 4 is the real drain here. The bosses can show up anywhere, and as anybody who’s played it can tell you, the map’s full of places where you can just get jumped from a floor up or around the corner. Especially with high-mobility enemies like the Sky Raiders, there’s just an awful lot of chaff to clear.

I don’t think, if you want to use a factory map, there’s really a better one for it. The catwalk-heavy map, with a warehouse surrounded by multiple rings of catwalks, might work as nothing tends to show up on the catwalks, but not many people would know that going in blind.

Detail - *****. Pretty much every description and clue keeps to the convention of the narrator, and the extra personalities who show up are great fun to interact with. There’s good reason to inspect everything you can just to find out what the narrator has to say.

Overall - *****. Ultimately the pull of the story is good enough to draw me through some of the deader spots in the missions.

Aeon Challenge Special Comment - Well, this is a great example of a character being a rogue “by allegiance”. Maybe in the very strictest sense it falls apart, in that conventional heroes and conventional villains both team up under the Vanguard banner to fight the Rikti back. But there’s definitely a moral choice made here, and it does a good job of dodging around most of the problems that might arise in character motivation by putting that motivation in the hands of a narrator.

@GlaziusF

Running this one on a high-40s DB/Fire brute, +1/x2 with bosses on.

---

Getting gene splicing done, no matter the cost. What, he sends squads into the miniaturizer to pull the strands together?

The doctor’s terrible accent darts between “dat” and “zat”. Maybe pick one?

Anyway, it’s off to get the Hamidon from the tank brigade. I hope Crey higher levels get a little more exciting in the future.

Some glowies to click, some computers to detonate, and some dirt to make visible.

Oh, Longbow shell casings. That’d make a good opening clue.

The Hamidon sample is trying to tell me something. What’s that, boy? All other life must be devoured? Oh, that’s so precious.

The doctor says “Thank you” in not so much cordiality.

---

And now to abduct the three cutest puppies in the world. Let’s see what this office looks like...

Oh. ‘nother tech lab.

Well, these may very well be the cutest puppies in the world, there’s no way to tell. But wow, nothin’ but AR customs can still wreck a man. ...were these AR customs? I saw a maneuvers-type aua so they may just be regular private security, but they stayed at range and did some terrible cascading defense debuffs.

Oh. The techs’ description says they’re going to be human subjects. The impression I got from the briefing was that they were going to be “recruited” to take care of the animals until my contact needed them.

The hero-type who tries to stop me warns me I’m working for an insane madman. ...well duh? I wonder how he knew my contact would be aiming for a zoo next. Is this just the sort of thing he does all the time?

---

And predictably things have gone awry and I’m rounding up the escaped test subjects.

So whadda we got down here? We got clawfighter cheetahs, superstrength wolves, and electro eels. S’awright. Maybe there’ll be an EB gator or somewhat.

Doesn’t seem so.

High Hope warns me again that he’s not going to stop. What kind of mad doctor stops just because of a little thing like the experiments escaping?

---

...well, High Hope didn’t shoot me last time, but it doesn’t seem like I have any real objections to getting him out of the way? Apparently heinous genetic experimentation is one thing, but framing a dude is where I draw the line.

So, off I go.

...wait, wait. I take the charges from a recycling bin, where apparently someone has misfiled them? That doesn’t say “misfiled” to me, more like “someone realized they were garbage and threw them away”.

And I’m keeping the list to use for blackmail. Because framing is only an intolerable moral offense when somebody else does it.

---

So my contact’s running off to turn babies into super soldiers. Well, it’s a more sensible breakpoint than framing some random dude, at least.

Oh, the asylum again? I’ll offer the same commentary I have for everybody: there are some early Vahzilok missions where they’re trying to take doctors from a hospital, and it’s just the blue-carpeted office. The blue-carpeted office is fine to use for a hospital - the asylum map is just a version with way, way more geometry for you to get hung up on.

For some reason he immediately laments his failure as I start breaking him down. I understand it’s union rules at this point to reveal your entire plan but I could pretty much guess.

Kinda weird he’s not planning to kill the kids, though, just breed one big happy master animaloid race family.

And that’s it. Poor little baby is sad that he got his evil plan one-upped and runs off to cry to Reichsman.

---

Storyline - **. Kidnapping innocent people, putting them through the genetic wringer, and killing the results when they get uppity is apparently perfectly fine. But a frame job? That’s beyond the pale? I have a weird moral compass.

There are a couple ways to go with this: murdering the escaped experiments is the turning point, so we decide to screw up the frame job. Or kidnapping babies is the turning point and the doc fills us in on the plan, sending us to frame High Hope while he gets into position.

For his part, High Hope shows up in the second mission with nigh-on precognitive knowledge of who ordered the raid and what their ultimate plans are. There isn’t really any explanation provided for how he came by this information; he just has it.

Design - ***. The asylum, while a questionable choice for a last map, doesn’t have any objectives that are particularly irritating to be accomplished in an asylum. The police station is a bit of a bad choice for the fourth map - it’s supposed to be the big moral tipping point, but apart from the question of worthiness as a tipping point, it also takes just about no time to actually complete, which doesn’t mesh well with what we do being all that important.

But the animal-people have reasonable powers and distinctive designs, making use of some of the new patterns to very good effect.

Gameplay - ****. Some of the enhanced perception armors on the animal-people lead to giant pileups in the sewer maps. But they’re using pretty standard damage types so that’s not too bad. The private security seem to be largely composed of AR customs, which means they never voluntarily clump up, and they cascade defense debuffs (I was sitting at -100% base defense at several points) so you may want to fold in some mace-nightstick types.

Detail - ****. Clues, descriptions, and dialogue paint a pretty clear picture of what’s going on here. My contact is a bit tight-lipped about what he’s doing up until the end, but that’s to be expected. My issue is more that what’s going on doesn’t make much sense than that it isn’t presented sensibly..

Overall - ***. An arc with some decently-designed genetic monstrosities to wrangle and a decent concept: science going too far. But the “moral choice” that takes place in a mission much shorter than the rest of the arc, making it seem unimportant, and the initial antagonist has an inexplicable knowledge of what’s really going on here.

Aeon Challenge Special Comment - Well, the concept is certainly sound - doing villainy-for-hire but then the stakes get too high. I don’t agree with the particular action that serves as the breaking point, as it seems much less morally repugnant than the mission just prior, but the structure’s fine.

Tonight's arc: When Madness Reigns Over Reason (452196). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068), starting no earlier than October 18th.
• A rereview of Blood for Roses (161399). The only review on that page is mine, and I wouldn't trust it until the rereview is completed.
• A review of Who Dares Wins (454805)
• A rereview of Papers and Paychecks (298290)

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Tonight's arc: A Clone Of Your Own? (453091). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

The next few reviews are going to be an Aeon Challenge special -- once I take care of the arcs submitted for Aeon's challenge I'll get back to the others.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068), starting no earlier than October 18th.
• A rereview of Blood for Roses (161399). The only review on that page is mine, and I wouldn't trust it until the rereview is completed.
• A review of Who Dares Wins (454805)
• A review of When Madness Reigns Over Reason (452196)
• A rereview of Papers and Paychecks (298290)

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 doesn't even have 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 high-40s DBlade/Fire brute, +1 x2 with bosses on.

---

Haven’t run the official clone stuff for a while but it doesn’t seem like this is referencing it. Good enough.

Not sure if my contact should be saying he stole from me as one of the first things.

Also the mission seems to be to retrieve Dr. Vazhilok’s research, rather than my contact’s, as the briefing indicates. At least I think that’s what it’s indicating. It’s a bit unclear. Have you considered colors?

The Freaks have been experimenting with cloning technology, and turned out three clones with random powers and slightly off appearances, though I’d focus more on how they’re made of some weird substances.

They’re supposed to be the product of Freakshow beerslam experimentation, right? Somehow they’ve gotten a hold of Dr. Vahzilok’s notes, and...

Hang on. Is my contact unstuck in time or something? It seems like in his briefing the mission he described me as doing long ago is the one he just sent me on.

---

So now I’m going to go enforce the copyright on myself.

I find some master Freak doctor, apparently the man behind everything. He has a self-rez so he says his death line twice, but he doesn’t seem like a stock mob. You should probably peel off the rez.

The lab station and maybe the clone pod (couldn’t check before my friendly clones blew it away) have a standard description, which could stand to be customized for the situation at hand.

Apparently I’m not interested in keeping any of this research for myself...

---

Or suffering it to exist, as the next mission is going off-script to backstab my contact.

Hmm. The variant naming of the Banished Pantheon seems a bit off. Are you already using the lowercase-l for uppercase-I trick? You might want to use variant adjectives: decrepit, rotting, decayed, ossified, etc.

Also checking Dr. Mephit’s description, it seems like character-specific variables such as $name don’t actually get replaced when they’re in names.

I am apparently holding his notes for ransom from himself. Little worried about how this map looks pretty much empty. I expect shenanigans.

Oh! The Freaks are making another play at this place. The boss’s description should probably reflect this, rather than being a replay of his earlier one.

Ah. That’s why this place looks so different from a normal sewer level, it’s the Vahz lab. The last room doesn’t show up on the automap.

For kicks I decide not to wreck the doc’s notes and see what happens. I loop around to a perfect clone, though unlike me he’s vulnerable to my knockaround. Also the Crey show up and try to wreck both of us. (there’s a linebreak in the middle of their $hisher line, just for reference)

Welp, looks like this mission’s not over until I destroy the file cabinet and see what happens next.

What happens is that Freaks run in for an ambush when it’s halfway down... but the doc just stands there. Mission completes and he doesn’t even go ballistic. Aw.

And then it ends... talking like this is the end of clones, somehow.

---

Storyline - ***. There are a couple things dragging this down. First is the introduction of my contact as someone I’ve worked with before, even though he doesn’t appear in-game anywhere. I can appreciate wanting to create an excuse for the clones, but honestly, the Rogue Isles is lousy with crazy mad scientists pursuing their own inventions. It’d probably make more sense to leave the doc alive at the end if he was just some random dude instead of someone I worked with in the past and who betrayed whatever little trust I had in him.

Second, though I don’t want to make too strict of a comparison with the official clone arc (as it uses tools we don’t have access to), my character’s immediate EXTERMINATUS stance on the clones seems a little too extreme. Clones have uses, including being distractions or perhaps test subjects. It’s never really explained well why we’re so bent on wiping them out, other than perhaps extreme paranoia or vindictiveness.

Design - ***. Sewers, sewers, sewers. Actually I’m only mentioning this to note it, I don’t believe it registered let alone bothered me while I was playing the arc. I can’t think of many other times I’ve actually seen a sewer map in the Mission Architect, and they may be a little annoying, but they’ve just got chokepoints rather than the crampathons of the blue/crystal caves. If you wanted you could probably have the master Freak hole up in an abandoned warehouse, or move him to the Vahz lab and put my contact in a more conventional one.

But the last mission disappoints for a couple of reasons. First, though you can’t help it, is that I was running this on a character with no build up and an armor set, which made my clone less of a challenge than the random-power types earlier, which popped Aim, Build Up, or both, and often had two damage sets aimed at me. Second, it’s mostly empty. There don’t seem to have been any actual random spawns. Usually I take this as a hint that something crazy’s going to happen down the line, but nope. The arc just came to an end on a large, empty map with plenty of dead space. I didn’t even get to throw down with my contact, which I was sure would somehow happen.

Not that I’d necessarily want it to happen? But he cons as elite boss, so I was expecting something to happen that would get him into combat. I forget if civilians just work that way automatically.

Gameplay - ****. One thing about the sewers: they’re pretty straightforward. No way to miss very much. The single custom boss was a decent rumble, and some of the random doppelgangs were a little challenging but that’s what you get with randoms.

Detail - ***. The destructibles I remembered to check had generic descriptions - no big deal, but look into it - and the custom Freak should probably have a different description the second time around since I’ve seen him once already.

You definitely need to retool the initial briefing. My contact talks about the work we did in the long past, and then describes what the Freaks just did to him in the immediate past. There’s no linebreak or anything between the two, and since English doesn’t really have different past tenses they melt and run together into a single event, which probably isn’t what you wanted.

Overall - ***. A story that forces my hand a bit much, introduces a pretty superfluous connection, and ends on a special but largely empty map.

Aeon Challenge Special Comment - Judging by the alignment I’m guessing this arc was supposed to be about a villain turning rogue. It doesn’t really work in that sense.

Rogues are kind of an oddball alignment, I admit. Your big comic-book example of the alignment is, say, Catwoman, but she doesn’t really fit the in-game idea of someone “dreaming of riches and fame” who does good things for bad reasons. Comic-book rogues are villains who aren’t twisted enough they they won’t work with the heroes, or vice-versa, on occasion. That “dreaming of riches and fame” type of fictional character is more along the lines of Han Solo, who is what you’d call a rogue by affiliation: he was hired by the Rebellion but in the end came back to save Luke less because he wanted to fight the Empire than because he’d befriended Luke during the journey.

Rogue alignment choices on the tip missions aren’t really clear most of the time. But the commonality between Catwoman (when she acted like a rogue) and Han Solo isn’t just that they occasionally did good things, but they they did them in public, or at least in front of heroes.

The supposed good action in this arc is executing all the clones, but for reasons I’ve explained it doesn’t exactly come off as anything more than a practical consideration: this is somebody who’s going to have the power to mess with my plans, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. But even if this was actually a good thing to do, it’s done pretty much in secret.

The story of a villain getting redeemed is, at least in game terms, the story of someone who decided to do good things for a payoff in cash or acclaim, and then kept doing them without getting paid. This arc doesn’t seem to have a payoff, and it doesn’t even work as an internal transformation because wiping out the clones isn’t presented as a moral choice.

Weekends continue to not work well for me. But!

Tonight's arc: Galactic Protectorate - 05 (304290). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arc: 06 (355068), starting no earlier than October 18th.
• A rereview of Blood for Roses (161399). The only review on that page is mine, and I wouldn't trust it until the rereview is completed.
• A review of Who Dares Wins (454805)
• A review of When Madness Reigns Over Reason (452196)
• A review of A Clone Of Your Own? (453091)
• A rereview of Papers and Paychecks (298290)

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 doesn't even have to be as long as the critical monstrosities I find myself putting out now and again.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project

@GlaziusF

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

---

Hmm. That’s odd. Swan isn’t calling these people by their proper name. Is it out of a desire not to bow to propaganda?

Inside this building... it’s a wall of sound, man. Everybody in here has sonic blasts or sonic attack. I’m seeing some pain dom, empathy, thermal, and thugs flying around.

Higher up there’s some cold dom, but it looks like the main progression is just pure sonic/sonic. I don’t believe that the boss had Dreadful Wail. We’ll see.

Poking around the main computer, it seems as though they’ve hit Talos Island with their Instant Stage Beam.

All seven computers about Planetary Judgment seem to be in the boss room. I think this is a case of middle/back confusion. Interestingly, it seems as though they’re only here because Lord Cosmic has an axe to grind with Earth.

Perhaps this is a stable timeloop. Perhaps the GP is the Taiidan to our Kharak. No real answers there, yet.

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Find four bosses on Flooded Boomtown. Wow. That’s a pretty tall order, especially since some lieutenants and the bosses also pop sonic auras. Looks like fire assault/elec assault/earth assault on the elites I found on the south island. ...it’d be nice if they were all here.

Nope. Ice assault on the north island. Man, it’s a real pain to find anything.

The bosses have some amusing bits as they fall down, especially the earth guy cracking a hammer upside my head and going on about how his music is... subtle.

---

Dang. I’m not really sure what’s with this running trend of only saying “invaders”. Apparently it’s something Manticore is trying to browbeat into Swan? Maybe? It’s never really explained exactly why she has this little tick.

Anyway. Now it is time to pleasantly dance in the club.

I stealth past the General and pop Mynx free, then go back to deal. She does have Dreadful Wail at the very end, but that’s the sort of thing an end boss is supposed to pull out.

So it seems like the entire time they’ve been letting us live to gather information, and now the attack dog gets to slip his chain. The outgoing briefing doesn’t make things sound very pleasant in the near future.

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Storyline - ***. So every now and then a hero show does a filler episode. It follows the show’s pattern but doesn’t really reach with the characters or plot very much. Something exciting might happen in the end but it’ll show up in the next episode in the pre-credits sequence so you really don’t need to bother with it.

The pattern of these protectorate arcs has been enemy group intro -- find lead, fight sub-commanders -- rescue hero, fight commander. And this is the filler episode. It occurs to me that it might be deliberate, given the closing comments about the counterintelligence the GP have been doing, but that doesn’t work for a couple of reasons. For one, something that’s deliberately boring is still boring. For two, nobody has ever seriously said “this is typical. TOO typical” -- if nothing weird is happening there’s no real reason to question what’s going on.

Part of the reason this feels like filler is that giving a concert seems to be just something the commander likes to do, rather than a means to accomplishing any definite goal. If it were at least some kind of propaganda-through-omni-cosmo-pop thing I’d have a reason to worry about it.

Design - **. Okay, so I’ll admit to creating one myself. A singer who uses sonic powers. But here’s something important to consider: you can be a conventional musician without sonic powers. The net effect of absolutely every mob having some sort of sonic power is a constant omnidirectional chorus that goes a little something like this:

VVVVEEEEE-DWAWAWA-AWOOOOOO-WOPWOPWOP-PTYEEEEOOOOW

When everybody’s making the same sound it really adds to the sense of just being inside a giant homogeneous mass.

There are plenty of other roles these enemies could fill - backup dancer, pyrotechnician, lighting technician, mosher -- heck, even more drummers like the one sub-commander would help. And let’s not forget that most vital of all band personnel: the roadie.

Gameplay - **. So here’s the thing about sonic powersets: there aren’t any melee ones. Meaning combat is the same boring smack-one-enemy-at-a-time routine, over and over again. To say nothing of what sonics do to resistance; unlike the wailers and goldbrickers, even the simplest sonic blast powerset has two attacks cycles indefinitely that do -16% res each, or one long-lasting debuff that does -24%. Non-defense sets rapidly become non-resistance sets as well, under that kind of fire.

And then there’s mission 2, which is trying to find four enemies scattered randomly around flooded Boomtown. Sure they’ve all got sonic domes up, but so do half of the random spawns, easy.

Detail - ****. The subcommanders are kind of a bright spot here, having both interesting personal dialogue and powers that are in large part non-sonic. The giant infodump about planetary judgment is also a nice bit of backstory.

Individual minion backstories, however, still contain giant blocks of text that are way too much to get a handle on.

Overall - **. Ultimately the nice bits of detail don’t matter much to the story, which adheres to form without really providing much motivation outside of the “hero captured, you go save” that’s been a partial driver since the series started. The second mission is a long scavenger hunt on a sprawling outdoor map, which is bad enough on its own, but the enemy group is a homogeneous mass of sonic wopwop audio that never repositions voluntarily and can rapidly cascade and destroy you if you’re not strong on defense.

There’s such a thing as taking a theme too far, and putting sonic powers on absolutely everything qualifies.