GlaziusF

Tonight's arc: The Galactic Protectorate - 02 (117281). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arcs: 03 (174352), 04 (269714), 05 (304290), 06 (355068), starting no earlier than August 4th.
• A review of Evolve Or Die (411446).
• A review of Until the End of the World (431270).
• Reviews of the Tales of Cimerora, Of Feathers and Fur (12647) and From Tartarus with Love (292389).

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

Review of installment 02 as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

So, Manticore recaps the events of the previous arc and says he has a lead on some alien general inbound in... one of three seemingly random locations in Paragon City. Why do I get the feeling I'll be seeing the other two?

Anyway, he warns me to demolish the comm console before they call for help.

Huh. Looks like I've wandered into the SCA.

Icecon/fire, elec/emp, mace/something, axe/something on the minions; arch/TA, BS/shield, energy/DMias on the lieuts, BS/emp on the bosses.

I find history files indicating that these yahoos are part of an organization for fostering galactic peace. ...seems to be working out rather poorly so far.

I briefly wonder why I've hit the end of the area and not hit the mainframe, and then I remember the three branches on the first floor. Also the Paladin's dialogue seems to indicate he's got something like healing aura or regen aura, but I don't see either go off.

Ah, there it is. Last place I visit.

Kind of a shame that on these grody old maps the mainframes also have to be old and grody, but what can you do?

---

So Synapse has gone to scout the building in grand old cutscene fashion, huh? Alright, let's go see who's got a chokehold on him this time.

Well, he's down a side passage, and there are two EB versions of the archer and sorceror lieutenants, which is a pretty nice touch if it was deliberate.

They're practically right next to each other because of the vagaries of the map, which isn't so nice.

I do get a chance to see some more Paladins in combat conditions, and they do pop Recovergen Aura, so there’s that, at least.

And Synapse... well, between Thunderstrike, Thunderclap, and his custom Lightning Whirlwind, he just blows things all over the place. His "run to different targets to show off my speed" AI isn't much of a help either.

I find a report about... Sister Psyche. Man, is this whole arc series going to be rescuing the Surviving Eight?

---

Man, defeat all on an outdoor map?

Phew, thankfully no, though Manticore's briefing made it sound like it'd work that way.

Anyway. Thanks to the vagaries of outdoor spawning and the AI Architect's keen sense of irony, I find Sister Psyche right when I cut to the coast and General Gwen just a bit further down. I free Manti after everything's blown over to see if he's got some clues, but no, just more dialogue.

---

Storyline - ***. Well, there's actually a notional coordinated plan going on here, which is a step up from the previous arc, but the plan just seems to be to go after this general, and along the way we just run into Sister Psyche being held captive. Obviously, springing her is a good thing, but why did this general have custody? Heightened mental discipline?

I may be demanding too much here. I have no idea how much the human Resistance actually knows about the nature of their own opposition. ...which is kind of a problem in itself given that I’m two arcs into this storyline. The Resistance haven’t told me much about what’s going on here -- even hearing “we don’t know” would establish things I might want to keep an eye out for.

Design - **. The enemy group is much easier to come to grips with than last time, thanks to the much more reasonable variety among its members and the unifying central theme. The colors still kind of mute the differentiation between enemies -- yes, there’s a guy who passed his initiation and is well on his way to being a Galactic Knight, and there’s a guy who failed and turned to dark fury in his self-loathing, but they’re both just dudes in blue and white armor (and I think the ragemonkey is actually the guy whose armor is mostly white).

I can appreciate the leadership - bosses or EBs and above - dressing in official Protectorate colors, but because there’s so much diversity among the rank and file I really think they could do with some diversity of color too.

Going back to Longbow, they’re all basically just dudes in decent armor with normal weapons. The spec-ops is one exception and the Wardens are others, so they have unique flair to their costumes. What you’ve got here is a big apparent variety of power sources -- even if they all boil down to “swords, bows, and magic” -- which you try to express with different patterns in costume design, but as I’ve said before patterns really don’t resolve too well on most models so it just looks like blue-and-white static. If they were all the same costume design but with different “highlight colors” -- the minions were grey/white with highlights, the lieuts blue with highlights -- they’d be easier to tell apart.

And the third mission just feels a bit off. Synapse is supposed to be drawing people out to the far perimeter, leaving this central position exposed, but there’s not really much of a “fortified position” going on here. I realize I’m saying this about the “war wall generators” map, but it really isn’t very defensible. I can think of outdoor maps that might apply to -- the factory spire, the Fab, Thorn Isle (though that one doesn’t take hostages), Villa Requin (aka the Snaptooth map, though it’s not in yet). I realize there isn’t much you can do about it, but it still doesn’t feel right.

Gameplay - ****. The only real downside was finding the mainframe in the three-branched abandoned lab map, and that only because I was lucky enough to find the relevant boss first. Well, and Synapse, but I’m not counting him because I had no idea what a pain his ally AI would be when I grabbed him.

Detail - ***. Once again, there’s a modest amount of backstory provided via clues, but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt as history is written by the victors. You technically miss out on a chance to give General Gwen a little character by making the clues to her operation be general-purpose “here’s what you find” bits rather than actual notes from her, but honestly as soon as I saw the SCA I knew what was going down.

The rank and file enemy descriptions are still their ungainly wall of text selves, though.

Overall - ***. This arc doesn’t try to cram as much into three missions as its predecessor, and so isn’t quite as strained. I can actually come to grips with the enemy group before the arc is over and, presumably, I never see them again.

But some of the problems from the first arc still remain. I still have no idea what the big picture is -- not even the invasion's big picture, the Resistance’s. Why go after this general? What are they hoping to accomplish? The enemy design still kind of blends together, and now that the pattern’s been established that each enemy group is unique to its own arc, the walls of text are even more puzzling. They won’t inform on this group’s future actions because there aren’t any, and they don’t seem to inform on their present actions either.

I mean, we’ve got a group of basically space knights. But they still use computers, they still use Earth-relative futuristic technology, there’s nothing in their bases to suggest they operate any differently from Division 0 in the last arc, there’s no particular stated reason for them to have custody of Sister Psyche, and Synapse performs a conventional distraction maneuver instead of say, Manticore challenging the Gweneral to open combat on the field of honor, army against army (except that his army has two dudes but this is a trivial detail).

Overall, while the enemy group and presentation has improved, the worries I had about the structure of these arcs-within-the-series seem to be borne out in practice.

Tonight's arc: Unveiled Shadows (422173). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arcs: 02 (117281), 03 (174352), 04 (269714), 05 (304290), 06 (355068), starting no earlier than July 14th.

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.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, +1/x2 with bosses on.

---

Hmm. No name or description on this contact. The model is Foreshadow, so I guess that's who it's supposed to be, but I have no idea why the 5th Column would contact WISDOM.

Eh, there's that to work out later.

I find some Council attacking the 5th. ...because that's not something Council usually do.

Apparently these are rogues who left with someone who I guess is sounding like a warshade. He's been captured and they called for help. Silver Soldier's bio calls him a Silver Surfer, which is probably not accurate, and in this warehouse (it's not even a 5th Column warehouse) they have a tendency to go chasing runners and get killed by my boosted difficulty.

...the blue Vortex soldier says [FILLER TEXT] in his clue. If that's supposed to be a joke, you haven't really set a very humorous tone thus far.

---

Hmm. If there's supposed to be like an EB in this next mission you should probably warn about it.

There don't seem to be any so far, having rescued Shadow Quark, who is a custom dark/dark which I suppose is reasonable given the limits of the enemy creator.

In exploring the place for this computer we're supposed to hack I head up the catwalk in the end room, but shockingly there's nothing there. I'm surprised.

On the way down Shadow Quark lets off his "got damaged" taunt. Take THAT, gravity!

I find the computer after backtracking to one of the earlier side rooms I cleared out. I suppose that's reasonable.

The 5th are going to invade some Council bases! Which is unusual how? I suppose there must be some other wrinkle I don't know about.

---

So in the middle of all the fighting in the first base I find a note about a Nemesis plot. Sigh. It’s not that I’ve played a lot of Nemesis plot arcs per se, it’s that Nemesis can be used to excuse a lot of apparent plot holes as actually being part of the plot all along. Except that doesn’t actually make them any less plot holes.

It wasn't a required objective and there's no more talk of it from the contact. I wonder if it's just a red herring. That’d be something new.

---

Again in this mission there's infighting, so I'll leave you this tip - battles start (and play their dialogue) when heroes aren't there, so it's a bad assumption for battle dialogue to make that heroes are around.

I rescue Shadow Quark, who tells me about some machine I'm supposed to deactivate. And then I deactivate the machine, after which he decides that he can't let me do that and tries to kill me.

Uh... whatever floats your boat, dude? I'm aware this was all a Nemesis plot, but even so that seems a little random.

Afterwards I have an objective to take out the base leader, and after doing a lap of the entire base I finally find Arakhn down the entrance tunnel. She says she's going to get revenge on me for shutting down her machine that I don't know what it did, and then reveals she's been working with Nemesis.

Whose pawn wanted me to shut down the machine?

I don't even know anymore, but she does respond to the universal language of spine to the face and I go off to fight Nemesis, who's in another entrance tunnel, and who because of the difficulty settings of this map I fight (as I did Arakhn) at -1, or -2 to my effective level. You may want to look into that.

Nemesis goes all MWA HA HA I AM NEMESIS AND YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND MY PLAN as his hit points go down, but you know what? I really don't understand this plan. I don't know what the cover story was that Shadow Quark and his group were trying to accomplish, as it seems like more ordinary 5th/Council infighting. I don't know what Arakhn thought she was getting out of an alliance with Nemesis. Backstabbing Requiem's always a good motive. I don't know what the machine did or why Nemesis wanted me to shut it down or why Arakhn didn't, and was Shadow Quark acting out of loyalty to Arakhn when he turned on me or just fed up with acting like a hero?

This mission doesn't cough up any clues and the arc doesn't seem to have a souvenir, either. So I'm just in the dark here.

---

Storyline - **. It started out at least modestly promising. Council trying to go straight was an interesting idea, but fighting the 5th Column isn’t exactly anything different from what the Council usually do. And similarly, trying to raid Council bases isn’t exactly anything different from what the 5th Column usually does. I only say this because the story treats these like rare occurrences for some reason.

And I’ve already documented my complete inability to understand what the heck was really going down in the last mission, and what motivated anybody in it, up to and including myself.

Design - ***. So not a lot of people like Citadel’s task force, on account of it having a lot of Council/Column bases in quick succession, some of them absolutely identical. This arc avoids the identical problem, but the last three missions are all in Council/Column bases, including the Requiem’s Last Stand and a Megamech base with apparently no information on the contact’s part or in the mission itself about the special nature of these maps, and I was expecting a base for the first mission as well, only to find a regular old abandoned warehouse.

I do appreciate a little variety in the maps types from mission to mission, and my issue here is not so much with the warehouse and the variations on the standard cave base in and of themselves. The mission briefing or perhaps the entry popup should do something to establish the nature of the place where you’re going.

Gameplay - ***. Stock enemy groups, generally reasonable fights, workable missions. Aside from running all over the place tracking down chained objectives in the last map, anyway. That one was a real downer, drained all the anticipation right out of me by the time I finally found the boss.

Detail - *. In addition to some of the odd little mistakes in the first mission and the missing contact name and description, there aren't any persistent reminders, no clues or souvenirs, talking about the last mission, which is just where things start getting really confusing.

As an added note, if you don't put any objective text in for an ally or boss, their name appears unalloyed in the navbar, which doesn't work too well as a description of what you're supposed to be doing. Kill? Find? Rescue?

Overall - **. This feels more unfinished than anything. The [FILLER TEXT] in the first mission and the lack of clues in the last, and the lack of any contact description or even souvenir all come together to give that impression.

The detail drops out just as the plot is twisting, leaving me sailing off into oblivion with no idea what's really going on. If the lack of clues and souvenir is deliberate, then it's a decision that really needs to be reconsidered.

Tonight's arc (post-hiatus again): Galactic Protectorate - 01 (47143). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The remaining Galactic Protectorate arcs: 02 (117281), 03 (174352), 04 (269714), 05 (304290), 06 (355068), starting no earlier than July 14th.
• Unveiled Shadows (421412).

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.

@GlaziusF

Running this on an ice/axe tanker, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

I can see why you probably wouldn't want to kick things off with a timer, though the setup kinda demands it.

Anyway, off to Atlas Park to fight... something. I guess an actual briefing is something else Synapse doesn't have time to provide?

It's alright, I get an arbitrarily long briefing from the collective bios of everything I meet in here. I mean... what is this, like nine minions (none of which seem much disposed to close to melee) and five lieutenants? The only real bad apple in the barrel seems to be Energy Dancers, as Energy Aura's self-heal is an auto-hit for half the blue bar, but I might be singing a different tune if I wasn't defense-based.

Despite (perhaps because of) the giant bios I really can't get much of a unifying theme, except that this is the grade A number one division of whatever organization this is.

...Synapse calls the guys I just rescued prisoners. Just great, he's turned traitor.

---

Oddly enough there only seems to be one boss in this collection, and a rather large number of healers as they're sometimes showing up 4 per spawn. Heal Other, Cauterize, O2 Boost, and... is it Soothe? Anyway they're all just firing off.

So... it looks from the initial reports of things that there's a cease-fire between these people and Earth while Statesman does the negotiating. A cease-fire that I am quite probably violating.

The bosses are more than a bit irritating as they have a huge perception range, and I'm finding a secondary annoyance in the Drain Psyche on the Cometeers, which may as well be autohit as I don't have any notable psy defense.

I find some generic information about another base, but to be honest now I'm a bit worried I may be part of an extracurricular fighting force destroying the hope for galactic peace.

---

Well, if it's extracurricular both sides are getting into it, at least. Time to go save Sinclair.

It seems the RNG was just being a sillypants, as I encounter a second, also melee, boss here: a Celestial Guardsman. Her bio talks about some kind of munitions expertise, but she's just broadsword/shield.

In the last room I find Manticore, and a computer containing... the record of the final battle with Arachnos? Apparently the computer I type the false report on is down a side passage somewhere.

And with a giant protracted glowie click... the arc ends.

Wait, what? I was expecting like a boss fight or something, but nope, arc over. It was just a brawl against the rank and file all the way through.

---

Storyline - **. Save these people! Okay, now invade this base! Okay, now rescue Manticore! Okay, now ARC OVER. The one bit of pertinent background story -- the prelude to the invasion -- is entirely optional, and any other differences in this alternate reality are so far kind of academic in the face of the alien program to divide Earth up into 13 administrative districts. Or whatever the heck has happened to Earth, I still have no idea. There's notionally a ceasefire but troops are conducting normal detentions and executions anyway, on the orders of... somebody higher up we never really see even an intercepted communique from.

Are these people taking orders from the same guy who declared the truce, who is having a giant protracted battle (perhaps of wits) with Statesman on the homeworld? From some other general? Their motivations just sort of seem to materialize from the ether, though given the extremely tiny viewport I'm given to the story thus far, there's a whole lot of ether.

And that's my problem here. The introduction is over and I have no idea where the story is going. What's happening to this alternate Earth, in the big picture? There's a supposed peace but forces on both sides seem interested in breaking it -- are they rogue forces or is "parley" another word for "die while talking" to these aliens? Has anybody on the hero side come up with anything like a plan for dealing with this occupation?

Because if I'm going to take the first arc as a harbinger I'm going to spend the rest of this series fighting fires - reacting to stuff that’s happened off-camera in set-pieces which may be well put together but don't actually connect into a larger story or reveal any motivations.

Design - **. There was some real work put into working with a unified color scheme but still giving units their own distinctive patterns.

Unfortunately the only impression I really got was “blue with white bits” and the occasional “white with blue bits”. Everybody was roughly the same size and shape, and so thin the patterns didn’t really come off well. Longbow is all red and white, but in general you can tell the minions (red tight heads) from the lieutenants (white tight heads) from the bosses (helmets and capes) and pick out the irritating minion in the bunch pretty easily (it’s transparent).

You have to consider that a custom enemy isn’t just standing there against a contrasting background the way it is in the costume creator -- it’s moving around, often in diminished lighting conditions, and more often in the close company of other custom enemies. The head and shoulders are the most readily visible part, at least in my experience as I like to play with kind of an “isometric” camera pulled back and tilted toward the ground. I don’t know of anybody who pulls in and tilts up with the camera. And I think you had different hair colors and styles going, but there wasn’t a clear progression I remember from minion to lieutenant to boss. I just remember the blob of blue and white.

And there’s less power variety in Longbow. Or, well, different variety. Here’s a breakdown of what I can remember from your customs.

Bosses: kat/SR, BS/shield.
Lieutenants: storm/elec,ENBlast/ENManip, ENAssault/ENAura, PsyBlast/PsyManip
Minions: DBlast/DMias, sonic/sonic, psy/emp, ENBlast/pain, iceblast/thermal, rad/rad, grav/kin, bots/FF.

There are three themes here which don’t work well together: futuretech, energy channeling, and buff set bingo. And there’s the most variety among the minions, so any given spawn may well have completely different minions from the next. Longbow Wardens and the Tsoo get it pretty right on the dynamics from spawn to spawn, I think: a generally identical arrangement of minions, a few variations on the lieuts, and when a boss shows up they’re the interesting thing that varies from appearance to appearance.

The bosses and some lieutenants favor melee but everyone else stays at range, which is again the opposite of a lot of ranged/melee divisions in other enemy groups - consider your basic Hellions and Skulls, who all have largely melee minions with range-capable lieutenants and bosses. There are at least three benefits to having a large number of minions who tend to clump up around their target:

- Safety. Many debuff and defense toggles benefit from having a lot of things in close proximity.
- Efficiency. AoE attacks generally get damage/endurance parity when they hit at least 3 targets.
- Fun! Seeing a giant burst of particle effects go up from a packed group is satisfying.

Minions who clump up on their own give you all of these for free. Minions who don’t mean you have to spend the time corner pulling to get them -- or just give them up, take out a tough target, lose most of your blue and green bars in the process, and then spend time afterward sweeping up the peanut gallery of minions taking potshots at you.

Gameplay - ***. This might be a bit higher on a ranged character, but hunting down or corner pulling every single minion got a bit old, and Energy Drain and Drain Psyche are both absolutely brutal close-ranged attacks, at least on the ol' blue bar. Having my initial salvo get healed back up to full by the occasional spawn full o' healers was a tiny indignity but it happened several times a mission. There weren't any real hard moments, not even the giant hordes of ambushes, but the average battle was about equal parts fun and irritating.

Detail - ***. The bits of incidental detail to flesh out the history of the world and its interactions with the Protectorate as a whole are fairly well done, and hint at some potential dynamics that the story doesn't really pick up on.

But the descriptions on the custom mobs are just giant walls of text and nigh-impenetrable. Consider the occasional double line break, maybe?

Overall - **. I realize this is going to seem low, even given the scores above. I mean, you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into not only the mission itself but the surrounding universe. The problem is that most of that effort is not only wasted but sometimes counterproductive.

There’s a decent amount of text detailing the past of this world before the Galactic Protectorate struck, and a large amount of the enemy descriptions deal with the power politics and mythology (?) of the Protectorate itself... but neither of these really help answer the questions I have about what’s going on here. What are these aliens actually doing in the big picture? This isn’t another Rikti invasion -- there’s a notional peace instead of blind genocidal fury. I don’t need to know an ultimate goal but anything Synapse has observed of their immediate large purpose (e.g. dividing Earth into 13 administrative districts) would help set things up. I also don’t know if there’s any larger goal I’m working toward or will be working toward. Peace and freedom for all mankind is kind of a given but there’s one big “then a miracle occurs” between that and the current state of affairs.

There was also a decent amount of design work done in coming up with the custom group and its various elements, and making them fit a central color scheme, but the costumes just blend into a blob of blue and white under combat conditions, and the massive minion variety means there’s such a change from spawn to spawn that I only get a shallow understanding of this enemy group despite clearing two and a half missions’ worth of them (clearing Red Atlas is a fool’s game). It doesn’t help that there’s really no notable enemy personalities in this arc -- they’re all just grunts acting under somebody else’s orders, and we never catch a whiff of this somebody else.

Now, I don’t mean this effort was wasted in general. But it was wasted for purposes of this arc, establishing my motivation in this universe, setting up the shape of things to come, and creating a cohesive enemy group that was fun to fight. That just didn’t happen for me - I felt more confused and frustrated than engaged and involved.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator review project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

Well, this is interesting. I like the setup as a "neutral party" - a superpowered detective - and the scenario is compelling, though why Silver Mantis would use blackmail to get anything but another knock-down-drag-out fight is beyond me. Maybe somebody put her up to it.

Anyway, I'm glad I picked up invisibility. The infiltration goes smoothly, nary a combat, and I find... the tape is in another castle. Peachy.

I decide to inspect the elite boss (wow!) anyway, and she's a pretty capable psy assault. The PPD show up to read me my rights at about the time my phantom army runs out, so that's done with at least.

The safe was in the room before her - deliberate, or has glowie misplacement struck again?

---

My internal narration should probably be in a different color, or bolded or italicized or something.

So time to sneak around the PPD to get them off my back. Though I kinda feel sorry for them given the givens.

The opening popup, though, talks about how much I wished I'd stealthed through the last mission. Little silly considering I did, but B&E is bad enough just by itself.

(If you want actual assault maybe you can tone the senior partner down to a boss?)

I find a clue in the first room that sets me up to examine it on... a computer in the same office? There's no apparent reason why I shouldn't just take it and split.

Anyway, the computer's one room over... and mission complete? Wow.

Yeah, I don't see any reason to use PPD computers with that at all. Maybe it's a proprietary card that needs a hardware key only the PPD machines get?

Anyway, I was expecting something like a talky patrol, but only the boss has anything to say. For the sake of curiosity I throw down with him, though he doesn't have much to say aside from some side comments about how the fight's going.

---

So, fight against Silver Mantis. Right. Time to go get a Shivan, and there should really be some kind of EB warning on her too.

Fortunately it seems to be an earlier-game version that doesn't pop buildup yet, and the ding I get mid-mission is also a help. She's just as disturbing as ever, and the patrol reminding us how she likes to play rough certainly plays into that.

I was kind of joking about Silver Mantis using blackmail to get herself a knock-down drag-out fight but from a certain perspective that's exactly what's happened here. It's not like it's ill-suited to her.

---

Storyline - ***. The story really feels a little too coincidental for my taste. Breaking into the law firm has got a prosecutor calling for my head? No problem, my contact has arranged for his entire workplace to be full of sympathetic PPD! Leads have gone cold? No problem, Silver Mantis got bored of waiting around and decided to tell my contact exactly where she was! I realize this is supposed to be, like, what, Sherlock Holmes crossed with a noir parody? But it leans too heavily on the latter to the point where my detective work feels more like a scavenger hunt and less like deducing.

Because of the detective setting you can probably play a little more with "forcing" actions by my character, to make me the active party rather than handing me coincidences to roll with. Prosecutor out for my blood? I can still put a tail on him and grab some incriminating evidence from a den of vice in a not-disused-enough section of the sewers. No leads? Make use of Silver Mantis's preference for action by suggesting she bring the tape to a happy little throwdown.

And now that the new morality settings are in you might consider tagging this one as "vigilante". Seems a better fit for it than "neutral" and it may even get you some exposure, since so few people use it at present.

Design - ***. I don't mind stealthable missions, but I don't much like stealthable missions where I don't even have to get to the boss room to finish the map off. And the series goes basically noncombat mission - noncombat mission - AV fight, which is about as much whiplash as you can get. From a story standpoint it'd make sense to have to inflict grievous bodily harm on some of the lawyers so the cops would get bothered. Maybe they have some key to opening the safe?

Gameplay - ****. A psy assault EB is pretty brutal for a level range that may not even have SOs yet. Silver Mantis seems to be her more reasonable lower-level incarnation, but I didn't really get a chance to see much of her. Make sure and inspect the version you're using to make sure she can't pop Build Up. Aside from that the enemy groups are either stock or reasonable.

Detail - ****. Everything is fairly sensibly spelled out. My problem with this arc isn't with the particular turns in the plot as by how they're come by. It makes sense for Silver Mantis to get bored and want to fight somebody, but for that letter to just show up feels like the plot is something that's happening to me, rather than something I'm creating.

Overall - ***. This arc has two seemingly contradictory problems: not enough agency on the player's part beyond just combat, and not enough combat. I think I've presented a case for making the player into more of an actor in this little drama, so let me talk about the second.

Characters in this game can have access to stealth from several different sources. So in theory any mission that's not "defeat all" or "clear the end room" is stealthable and non-combat. But in this case, the enemies - powered civilian lawyers, and cops who were explicitly on my contact's side - weren't things I felt that the story demanded I fight, so I didn't. Which made the final mission in an actual Arachnos base a big contrast. Even putting a required objective in the boss room would help this feeling that the earlier missions were disproportionately short.

I'll just leave this arbitrary time period's reviews here, then. From the random pool at CoH Mission Review come:

• The Golden Scepter (9852). Previously reviewed, verdict - ***.
• Tonight's arc: A Scandal in Paragon City (392334). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.
• (And next in line was The Sleeping Star (53951). Previously reviewed, verdict- ****.)

I'll keep pulling random stuff from CoH Mission Review, unless somebody wants to submit theirs. Again, details are in the first post.

The arc's name has been changed to "Operation Fair Trade", in the hopes of avoiding sticker shock. No substantial changes have been made since the last revamp. Though I haven't a clue how to tweak the title of the thread.

Review for this arbitrary time period: Twisted Knives (397769). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My queue is currently empty, and so I'll be pulling random arcs from CoHMR unless I get submissions. If anybody wants in, the instructions are in the first post.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, +1 x2 with bosses on.

---

Okay. Opening description is short and clipped as befits our Mr. Crimson, but I wouldn't mind if there was more meat on the arc description, describing the sorts of activities you might get up to in the arc.

...Crimson got offed so he's sending me in. To a matter important enough for Crimson and Indigo to both be doing direct field work instead of coordinating.

Wawawow. I appreciate the dude's level of confidence in me, at least.

So a custom DB/devices boss tells me that the Knives of Artemis aren't evil, they're just hired by evil people. ...uh huh. You were hired to ritually sacrifice people in order to empower yourselves? (Indigo's missions can get into this particular angle.)

I mean, okay, sure, they may not THINK of themselves as evil. And it's also odd to hear them call Indigo "your spy" when she was a former Knife.

Anyway, as it happens, the Knives have been infiltrated... somehow by some people for some reason.

And I get a list of upcoming missions to stop. Which I guess I can capitalize on regardless of what's really going on here.

---

Part one, some senator has been kidnapped for nefarious purposes.

And judging by the emptiness of the mission and the bodybags, the Knives involved have all been killed. Is the purge going ahead of schedule?

The Senator was being held by Nemesis troops, who don't capitalize his full title when they scream at me. And I'm guessing the last surviving Knife is one of Nemesis's famous automatons.

But damn there's a lot of empty space here. There's like four rooms and a bunch of corridors in this mission, and just the handful of glowies and the one rescue, so far.

Two rescues. The last Knife talks about her leader betraying them to the Nemesis.

Yep, it plays out as I thought. Though the Fake Nem is a little too self-aware and in kinda the wrong ways. Given that he's just as much an automaton he could lament how his programming is forcing him to be unsubtle.

He also talks about how no one will suspect the new fake mayor, but they nabbed a senator. Typo or defective automaton?

---

Crey are hiring the Knives to do some damage control damage? ...I guess people would twig to the Freaks, but still, they're practically traditional in this regard.

The mission is once again largely empty. I find some Knives with a big boom, bumpty-bump, and then some newspeople. ...why is JJJ taking his own photographs? He has people for that.

Anyway, the reporters are a bit of humor, and the Knife here is apparently a high-ranking Crey special ops who went undercover. ...I'm guessing here, as there's really no information about her. She may be a Protector or a clone of Countess Crey or who knows what.

---

...Crimson makes some bizarre leap that a Longbow traitor is working to kill Ms. Liberty. Wouldn't it be more likely to be an Arachnos operative infiltrating the Knives? Arachnos operatives have already wailed on Ms. Liberty as part of the Lord Recluse Strike Force.

Anyway, I get to plow through some Longbow in search of a traitor, so stealth mode on for this one. Heh, though I'm assuming after three missions of empty maps this one's going to be different.

Yep, empty map.

I find the personnel (note spelling) list on the bottom floor, and then I guess the two Longbow groups I had to defeat were the paired section commanders in the opening room.

I have no idea why I had to take them both out to find Ms. Liberty, though.

Anyway, I find... is it Shadow Spider? Some high-ranking Widow? Whatever happens, she pops Elude or similar at low health and then turns on Liberty when she lands a shot. Fortunately I have enough inspirations to take her out before Liberty bites it.

---

So Indigo has been turned over to the Malta. Peachy. Alright, time to spring her.

Crimson describes the layout of this cave when I link up with him, but there's really one loop and one room with a catwalk. And... why a Council base?

The AV there's a giant warning about is a bots/devices mastermind, who wouldn't really be much of a challenge even without Crimson and Indigo there to beat up on him. And aggro the entire room. I'm not entirely sure how he managed to jump them in the first place.

And apparently our Knife was a merc working for Wyvern, which does explain why she's so detached from Indigo but not why she tried to pitch the Knives as a neutral party. Maybe she's going native.

---

Storyline - **. I have three major problems with this storyline.

First is "the Sword" trying to prevent the Knives as some kind of neutral party. They kill innocent people for money and/or power. These are not the acts of a neutral party. They may be officially neutral in the context of any conflict between villain/hero groups, but if there is such a thing as a contract they're unwilling to take we haven't seen one yet.

Second is "the Sword" keeping her identity secret until the end. I mean, I could understand Crimson knowing shortly after mission 1, and sharing that information with me only on a need-to-know basis, but at the end of the arc I don't think I really need to know. I mean, if you can tell anybody a secret you can tell Crimson. Dude is the soul of discretion. Revealing that she's actually a mole for Wyvern (once nobody can hear, that is) would help establish her bona fides.

Third is that every group with an infiltrator in the Knives decides independently to "burn" them within hours of each other. That's just way too coincidental. Now, I could see if this was a deliberate plan on Manticore's part, dropping some kind of information through his mole that would goad any infiltrators into bailing out now and perhaps being less than cautious in the process. But there's no hint of anything like that going on.

Design - **. I'm not against missions which are largely empty for reasons of atmosphere. The first one was pretty effective in this regard. But rank-and-file enemies serve two important purposes: first, they're fodder to replenish your inspiration stock, which gets depleted over the course of the average, say, boss fight. Second, at least for me, they're an opportunity to think about the story while I work through my attack chain.

But when four out of five missions don't have any autospawned enemies in them, that really seems a bit excessive. There's no reason for there not to be autospawned Nemesis in mission 2, of Crey in mission 3 since they're willing to sacrifice the reporters' escort. (Well, Crey at this level are pretty monolithic and boring, so there's that.) And while autospawns in mission 4 would make it tough to get Liberty out, they'd at least make sense attacking her if the base was invaded by Arachnos.

The Knife infiltrators are decent visual works, as is the civilian Liberty, but running over giant swaths of empty space to look for things is like backtracking except without the combat to clear the way in the first place.

Gameplay - ***. The real dealbreaker here is trying to take down an EB who's popped elude before she can manage to mow down my escort. Without elude (not sure if that's possible unless that actually was a custom rather than a stock Widow type) it'd be a little challenging but not hair-pullingly terrible.

The end boss was pretty reasonable, putting out mostly damage and generally pretty easy to deal with in that respect.

Detail - **. There are a couple things missing from this arc that I've come to expect from Crimson.

First is any kind of bonus intel. One of the major features of the big Indigo/Crimson arcs against Malta is that there were optional glowies that gave more clues about what was going on. Crimson in his sendoff for the first mission seems to make reference to this, talking about how he won't mind much if you go after their target, but there's nothing extra to be had anywhere at all.

Second is, well, Crimson. Crimson's more of a spymaster than a frontline agent. Indigo will scout occasionally but she's not a combatant either, and it doesn't make sense that they'd somehow be acting as a strike team. (Their combat models are for villain arcs where you break into a Longbow base to confront a mastermind behind some sort of espionage/sabotage.) I can't see this arc playing out any differently if it were just some Longbow operative who never returned and Crimson wanted you to investigate. You wouldn't have two EBs helping you take down the end boss, but in my experience they were really a bit of overkill. Especially since Crimson and Indigo can clean house in the last mission even without my help, it doesn't seem sensible for them to have been taken out before the first mission starts.

Overall - **. I can't say I agree with the use of mostly empty maps. It was fine in the first mission but wore a bit thin in the next three. And the EB who's trying to whittle down our escort could do without Elude.

But an equally big problem here is with how tough it is to write... well, intrigue, I guess you could say. Seeming coincidences with a hidden reason behind them, and people keeping secrets to benefit themselves, are both major themes of intrigue-based story. The problem I have here is that, as far as I can tell, the coincidences (every mole coming free at the same time) are just coincidental, and "the Sword" keeps the secret of who she is until the end of the arc for no real reason I can see.

Optional glowies that might fill in the reasoning behind all of this would have been nice to find, but there wasn't really anything to hint at a greater story than the one I saw.

@GlaziusF

Running the final chapter of Labors of Rustam on the same DBlade/Fire brute, +1 x2 with bosses on.

---

Man, Mobius is still dropping her wall of text on us. Paragraph breaks are everyone's friend.

So apparently the Cold and the Dark are trying to cut off our beaker supply and abduct Great Scientists and Workers. Well, this can't stand. We almost won the space race!

And I'm going back in time to exist simultaneously at all fronts of the attack. Well, I'm glad she thinks so highly of me.

Oh what the hell, 8 more seedlings? And I'll bet they all say exactly the same thing. Again.

Well, Rustam seems to have recovered from the death of his son. ...unless this is a copy of him from before then.

The enemy group here seems to be some kind of undead fifth column. Medics are elec blast/also elec blast? (I see both blue and red lightning.) Engineers are melee fighters with Dark Armor. Stormtroopers are perhaps the most sensible, being AR/dark blast, but I could swear I saw them firing off Blackstar.

Continuing to rise I find Dr. Aeon and a bunch of Frostling patrols with identical dialogue. Once again: 1 talky patrol, N-1 silent ones. Less dialogue balloon spam, same amount of information.

All 5 seedlings of Pyre Blossom have had identical talking so far, and I have no reason to believe this will stop.

Ah, wait, no. The "doctors" from the Column were tossing Blackstar. That's a bit more reasonable than having it on minions, but still painful.

Pyre Blossom's objectives don't complete until her spawn goes down, which given that it includes the DE rubble who can just run off somewhere and get lost is probably a bad idea.

I find Tina Mac. Her guards talk about some new Archon leading them. Wonder if Burhkolder's switched sides. Again.

I find the last identical Pyre Blossom in the same room as some "Mender Prime" who is apparently different from Silos?

Anyway. No clues from this mission, but at least everyone went free.

---

And now into the Zig to drop a few more ounces of prevention. I can see Requiem being obsessed with time-travel, but the Center? I never figured him for being much of one to live in the past.

I don't know if the pet scaling is off or what but these minion-dropped Voltaic Sentinels, in addition to being powerful sappers, seem to do a whole lot of damage.

And the undead column are led by zombie masterminds, who promptly zero out my hit rate since my minions are buffed while the Grave Knights slowly but surely debuff my defense to the always-hit point.

Ah, and undead scientists. ...with EM Pulse. ...AND Blackstar.

Of the two notable bosses here (both in the courtyard), one is up on a catwalk and not readily visible from the ground. (I only know because I hit another boss spawning there in another map.)

Rustam is in one of the cells. I can understand the Center and Requiem (though really, the dynamic after I rescue them is more Requiem and Arakhn) but Rustam would really be more useful outside.

Though I don't know if that's even possible on this map.

The Doom Magus can bypass one-shot protection with the Dreadful Wail he pops at low health. Given that he has multiple ways to debuff resistance it's pretty much guaranteed to wreck a melee character.

And once again the stock Adamastor is far and away the easiest thing on the map.

---

So we've found out where the Cold and the Dark live... somehow. Even though in the first arc they were messing with time somewhere close to the modern day to bring the modern CoT and DE back.

I don't actually remember if Mender Mobius put the trace on, but this seems like a good idea for clues in the missions -- we can be doing the tracing ourselves while we whittle down the vast numbers of people available.

But didn't we hit them where they lived last time, too? How do we know it's over this time? Perhaps I haven't been paying good enough attention and somewhere in the blocks of text is the reason why this, and not the bunker transplanted to Persia, is their actual real base.

It's full of the undead Column. And I have to kill them all, and hunt down any patrols that may have wandered into a little nook somewhere.

I'm going to die repeatedly and helplessly.

Yeah, I'm doing the math here. With Enervating Field on, these scientists can do more than my entire health bar in damage with Blackstar. And with Rad Infection on they'll hardly ever miss... and I'll hardly ever hit, especially since the -defense helps with stacking dark blasts.

The frostlings guarding the cauldron, in contrast, have about as much chance as a modestly cold thing in a very hot place, even with the ambush. (It's kind of funny that the patrol goes on about "softskins", considering they're MADE OF SNOW.)

I get about to the top floor, dodging around bosses, and can't find Rustam anywhere. As it turns out, he's on the bottom floor and has got himself sealed in the middle of an opening lab door that leads to a dead-end room.

I know you can't help the spawning, but sometimes I think it's out to get me.

Wow. Blackstar from lieutenants (at +2) imposes a to-hit penalty of like -60%. I can only imagine what it does from bosses.

When I finally collect Rustam and start mowing down the bosses, they start talking about some terrible kind of thing that's going to await me, and I don't know if they're quoting Nietzsche or actually foreshadowing. Judging by how the end boss is talking about his babies or something, I wonder.

Just to add insult to injury the docs don't even bottom out end when they Blackstar, leaving me with like a 10% base to-hit chance and still able to blast their little undead hearts out.

So the boss is in an abandoned Crey cloning facility. ...I get the feeling I'm gonna be jumped by about ten of him when he's damaged, but oh well, in I go.

Oh. Okay. He's cloned Rustam's son. ...this won't end well. For me.

Dark Sohrab seems to have One With The Shield, judging by how Rustam whiffs on him for a couple minutes while my lucks drop and I die, die, die, and die again. I didn't know the AI had the scripting to trigger One With The Shield on low health. But at least Rustam isn't turning on me while Sohrab's health drops.

Or when he's down. I guess this is postwar Rustam and he's had a good mourn and got over it.

And that's the end of everything. The clues continue their absence, so I have no idea how this is different from the first arc's ending.

The ending popup box talks about "the Howling Night they referred to so much", but I've gone back through the NPC dialogue from that mission and nobody mentioned the Howling Night at all.

As for the final sendoff... well, I'll address that.

---

Storyline - **. The story is basically an amalgam of the first and second arcs in this series: we track the Cold and the Dark through time to their lair, and Rustam cuts down his son and has a sad.

It's better in one respect: the Cold and the Dark's leaders are more spread out over the arc. But otherwise it's pretty much the same, which given that this is the third part -- and judging from my Mender contact, the final part -- makes it a bit worse. This is supposed to be some decisive blow to the Cold and the Dark, but it ends in the same way as the first arc and I have no idea why that victory counts and this one doesn't. Rustam is supposed to be somehow devastated by the loss of a hideous monster clone of his son, but he offed the original article in the second arc, had a cathartic rampage, and seems to be breaking faces with his usual enthusiasm, discounting that thing where his AI likes to stand five feet away and toss throwing knives.

Exactly how we managed to track down the Cold and the Dark this time doesn't really seem to be explained. We just stop them and then suddenly we know where they are.

And I thought the first arc was basically the Cold and the Dark breaking into the mythic confrontation of Rustam and Div the Insipid there, but it turns out that he and his lackey were an essential part of the alliance? I was expecting some new revelation about how this amalgam worked, but it turns out that in the end there was nothing new.

Design - ***. The new custom enemies were fairly distinct in my head, probably because they were all such distinct flavors of punishing. But unless I missed something they all seemed to be solid black. I remember that back in the day using solid black was a trick to save on file space, but they could really do with some colors to get a quick perception of a group's strength from a distance.

As far as maps go, all three make sense in terms of what they're trying to be, but Rustam is rather inconveniently positioned on the last two. He's in the back of the jail map, behind the bosses, and off in some forgotten corner of the cloning lab. And as noted, defeat alls with patrols going around are a bit worrying as they can get lost, though the helper arrows on the map can assist there, and bosses can be hidden up on the catwalks in the jail.

The jail could be a Longbow holding facility, but then it'd be rather similar to the last map. Not sure what to say there.

Gameplay - *. The least punishing members of the custom enemy group are the stormtrooper minions, and they've got freakin' full auto. Voltaic Sentinel is a sapper that can't be mezzed, one lieutenant has Build Up which as I've noted can increase lethality by a factor of 4, and the other one pops Blackstar. One boss is a full-featured necro mastermind, whose minions can bottom out your base to-hit (suggestion: drop the lich) and the other boss both has Blackstar and can fire off EM Pulse and all three of the core radiation debuffs, when one of Infection, Enervation, and Lingering Rad would be plenty sufficient to be irritating. And the de facto final boss pops a tier 9 on low health, just in case you felt like watching Rustam die again.

Detail - **. Impeding my understanding of what's going on is a complete lack of any persistent clues or substantive descriptions. I can appreciate that the original arc may have been very, very tight on space, but there's room now. Room to explain why things are different from the first confrontation. Or heck, even why they're not. I'd take that over not knowing anything.

Just putting some extra spacing and highlighting in the Mender's text might even suffice.

Overall - **. Punishing enemies and a plot that feels very much rehashed from the first two parts of the arc don't combine for a very good experience.

Review for this arbitrary time period: last installment of the Labors of Rustam trilogy, Rustam III: The Longest Day (78130). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• A review of Twisted Knives (397769).

And if anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post.

Okay. I think I've gotten myself in a position where I can get reviews out just a leeeetle more quickly than once every two weeks.

Knock on wood.

Review for this arbitrary time period: Tis Nobler in the Mind (257226). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• A review of the last installment of the Labors of Rustam trilogy, (78130).
• A review of Twisted Knives (397769).

And if anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post.

@GlaziusF

Running this on the DBlade/Fire brute, +1 x2 with bosses on.

---

Wow. That's a giant block of text to kick this all off. So there's this guy's rebellious son turned by some dude. The Wormtongue here is called an archvillain but I have no idea how he'll show up.

And I've got to go into this giant running battle and make sure he only backstabs on his father once.

What is the stage of history this time? Oh. Salamanca. Not bad.

...TEN seedlings of Pyre Blossom. Sweet monkey pants.

Man. Elec/storm bosses on the main custom group, with voltaic sentinel. That little guy is a sapper all on its own and Hurricane on a boss is about a -40% to-hit debuff. So I get Lightning Storm and Voltaic Sentinel draining my end. And I can't stop them and I can't actually hit the guy who's producing them because I can't get in-range and still be able to hit him.

Oh. And he's got freezing rain, which takes my defense down, and Tornado, which triple-stacks a -10% defense debuff, so I'm basically being hit all the time unless I eat half my inspiration tray in lucks.

And Short Circuit, so while I can't get away from flopping over with freezing rain and the terrible chill of snow-storm I lose the entire blue bar because I can't dodge a thing.

Okay. I basically have absolutely no hope of defeating this guy. Better go somewhere else.

I can at least take down Pyre Blossom with judicious inspiration use, but I have no hope against these stormers.

The fire blast/ice manip lieutenants with Aim and Build Up aren't exactly walks in the meadow either, but at least I can hit them.

I find Rustam up on some rocks and lead him down to fight his son. ...at which point he betrays me. Swell. Dude, you were in your son's face taking him down, why take it out on me? Ah well, I'll just avoid you when I get back from the hospital.

The Wormtongue is a ninja/fire control, who slows me down a bit, but who is because of my armor the easiest fight on the map so far.

And there are only 8 more copies of the same EB fight with the same dialogue to go!

I get a clue for an apparent data crystal in the Wormtongue's ring, but there's no followup. I guess he teleports out with it or something? (Ah, souvenir. Got it. Might help to call it out in the debrief.)

And the hell you saying, exit popup? Is this about Sohrab? Uh, dude was a rebel, of the age of maturity, or at least in armor as beefy as his old man's. Maybe he got his fool self mind-controlled but killin' a dude who was actually dead on the stage of history (or, uh, watching Rustam do it) isn't really big on the "sick sense of horror" scale.

Also he was about the second dude to go down in my grand rampage across the stage, so I stopped thinking about him after the sixth identical clone of Pyre Blossom.

---

Storyline - ***. The cliffhanger's alright. I guess the single mission is due to the giant amount of customs? But trying to twist the knife about Sohrab's death seems to be reaching a little. I mean, at this point I've carved my way through two entire armies of normal mortals - this one, and the one that abducted Rustam's king back in the first arc. Sohrab's death is certainly more important to Rustam than any of the armies, but he hardly even registers.

Or if the "sick sense of horror" is about the giant field of Pyre Blossoms, you should probably call that out.

Design - ***. The problem with the single mission is that the task of "come to grips with new enemy group" is kinda overshadowed by the two custom bosses to fight and the ten normal (but elite) bosses to fight. And the large amount of Aim and Build Up among the lieutenants doesn't exactly encourage idle contemplation of the very similar enemies. I can respect that as an army they need a similar uniform, and the yellow haze isn't doing any favors for distinguishing one from another, but I can't remember any real distinguishing features.

Gameplay - *. Talking of the enemy group, I've spoken in other reviews about how off-mark Aim and Build Up actually are. Enemies have a base chance to hit around 50%, and Aim and Build Up essentially double that -- also, their damage isn't enhanced like hero damage is, so what would be a functional 30% to 50% bump in damage for a hero is another 100% for a custom enemy. That's basically a short-term quadrupling of damage.

Adding to this is the general disparity in numbers. A hero fights through hundreds of villains in a mission, a handful at a time. Aim and Build Up are designed to help even these odds, with the caveat that they're often not available in every fight. So is the incidental debuff on many attacks, and the "force multipliers" of buffs and debuffs in general. But with a custom enemy group, any given hero is already outnumbered. Applying a force multiplier of any sort to that can often create a rather painful imbalance. A storm/elec defender could lock down and sap one target. Out of a handful of enemies, that's not such a big deal. But a custom doing it to me often has backup - and even without it, I'm still locked down.

I realize this is, what, a Repeat Offenders production? As a big team challenge map it works just fine, but the normal spawns in the custom group can easily overwhelm a solo hero.

Detail - **. 10 identical fights against Devoured Pyriss, right down to the dialogue, is a bit of a slog. I might have liked a smaller number, with actual variety to what they said. And the descriptions of the customs are rather terribly short. I realize this was probably a limitation of the filesize, and you haven't had time to expand them yet. The extremely clipped descriptions aren't misleading, but they don't really help distinguish the army types from each other.

Also, while having Rustam go mad with grief made narrative sense, it was kinda a kick in the teeth that while I was already depleted from trying to weather Sohrab I was up against basically a clone of him right away and also lost my only ally. Part of it was that I thought Rustam had taken his own son out originally so I didn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe the Mender could say something about Rustam going mad with grief when his son died?

Overall - **. For a single-mission arc, the attraction is in the unique mechanics or the combat, not necessarily the plot. Not much in the way of mechanics here, as it seems a pretty standard fightin' map. And the combat, for reasons detailed in "Gameplay" above, often turned into short periods of excitement followed by long periods of being dead. At least against most of the customs. Devoured Pyriss was alright (but a little boring after the third time or so), Sohrab was a wreckin' machine, and funnily enough the Wormtongue here went down the easiest of all.

I can appreciate that the size and complexity of the enemy group probably prevented anything more than a single mission. (Or for that matter, a very cursory description, which in most cases was fine but I really didn't get the sonic blast on the healers. Maybe archery?)

Overall this arc would probably greatly benefit from the new changes and the compression of critter files specially. Having a mission to come to terms with the customs would be very helpful, as they're rather overshadowed by the mass (and mandatory) duplicates of Devoured Pyriss, and the two custom bosses are challenging enough (well, one of them is) without also having to decipher who in their entourage I should bother with.

Wow. Been a while. A mix of work pressure, monster heartburn, and, uh, Civ IV on sale for ten bucks has left me without much time to run mission reviews. But here's an old one that finally got written up:

The Labors of Rustam II: Rustam and Sohrab (59243). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

My current queue:

• A review of Tis Nobler in the Mind (257226).
• A review of the last installment of the Labors of Rustam trilogy, (78130).
• A review of Twisted Knives (397769).

And if anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post.

Backwards Day is one arc that I wished I had a little more space for.

And now I do!

So what's this extra space got you?

• More variety in the shards of shattered time
• Bright primary colors to break up and highlight Maros' blather
• Optional objectives now actually exist
• You can investigate every element of the undone futures, not just the notable bosses
• And probably more I've forgotten about

Tonight's arc: Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate (367872). Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums thread.

My current queue:

• A review of Tis Nobler in the Mind (257226), no earlier than April 29.
• Reviews of the rest of the Labors of Rustam trilogy (59243), (78130), no earlier than April 18.
• A review of Twisted Knives (397769).

And if anybody else wants in, the instructions are in the first post.