GlaziusF

Done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator Project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a single-digit willpower/dark melee tank, on old Heroic difficulty.

---

Alright, interesting setup. But I have to wonder how I'm going to get very far if most of the analysts are superpowered people.

Oh, right. Positron is just an ordinary scientist. His powers are just icing on the genius cake. Thanks, bug text!

Okay, let's read up.

A little bit of background here which is helpful, but I wonder how it's going to point my research into the anomaly.

Well, that's interesting. He was trying to give his class super-powers so they could understand researchers better.

Oh. A sniper. That's not really a good boss, since it's pretty much line-of-sight aggro.

And he's talking about blowing the place up? Dang. I smell chained objective.

He talks about some kind of alternative environment he's been living in. Was the Council keeping him in storage for just such an occasion?

...oh, or the super-soldier serum wore off. Yeah.

I guess I get lucky finding the boss. The second floor's a bit of a fork, and if I'd gone the other way I'd be running around an empty last floor.

Not sure what to make of the last clue I find - the Council were planning to attack their own base?

Anyway, I leave to report to Positron.

...instead of the "good kitty" animation, he's acquired the original PsychoChronoMetron destruction animation. That's a thing to see. In triplicate, yet.

---

Hey Positron's report, such a thing as the manipulation of the "power net" has been recorded in history. Just not ours. The Rikti cut off their access to Magic to boost their development in Science.

Also seems like there need to be a few more line-breaks in Positron's accept briefing. Other agents, huh? Okay, let's go say hi.

I rescue... well, I'd call him a Brutal Legend tribute except he's not a roadie. Ah well, metal is metal.

After taking out the Family I get the time to look over the documents on the Council mainframe. So there were Nictus in storage here but they've taken the chance to escape.

...without anybody to fight them off, they're going to take over the city! Diabolical.

---

Positron says that the Nictus deliberately influenced the agent to break it out of its containment, but I didn't see much in there to support that.

For some reason, Sunbeam and Heavy Metal are free right after the map starts. They talk about the amount of death in this place.

I hear a battle between some of Nihil's servants and unturned Council.

Also, I think Sunbeam might benefit from having Transfusion. I realize that'd make her even less Kheldian-seeming, but at this point utility's important too.

I find the Archon who's trying to resist Nihil. He barks out orders but is sufficiently convinced of his own power that he doesn't bother to fill us in on what's going on.

Well, that's fair.

The agent's at the back, feigning death. He does run off when he's freed, though. He should probably be some kind of stationary ally, even if that means he dies standing up.

Seems a bit forced for Positron to tell me what happened to him just in the System Text.

The Nothing is destroying our world. Quick, someone get to a window and shout "Moon Child"!

The last room is full of a number of suspicious items, none of which are activatable. I head back into the empty mission to look for clues.

Ah, that box of junk. Let's see.

Oh. Dang. I also see a corpse, which was the professor's... looks like Nihil jumped into his body to run the experiment.

Huh. And that spawned a Council escorting a destructible crate... with another log. And now the giant pile of glowies in the tiny end room are active. Time to read some logs.

This is all so easily missable, but it's pretty important. Apparently Nihil influenced this guy to build a power nullifier, and the weird anomalies Positron's been seeing are Nihil learning how to use it.

Any reason it can't just all be available from the start of the map?

---

And we're off.

My allies are free at the start of the map again.

The enemies are entirely composed of gunners at the minion level. That's unfortunate, since you can get into an eternal loop of debuffed defense. Maybe you could throw in some black-and-purple Nebel Fists or some Galaxys (dunno if they're this low).

Taking out a Dark Nova and a brainwashed Archon, popping a Shadow Cyst, and then taking out Nihil, who is an Energy Blast/Energy Aura custom.

His last words are rather ominous -- it seems to be letting his own device run out of control.

I look around the cargo ship for the barrel mentioned in Nihil's description, but no dice.

The souvenir mentions a couple of things that I don't remember happening - the Peacebringer keeping me sane, and other Nictus expecting Nihil to open a portal to their home galaxy instead of nullifying all power everywhere.

---

Storyline - *****. Makes use of little-seen parts of game canon in a way to justify the weird goings-on and set the player up quite reasonably to save the day. Kind of an interesting parallel between us and the Council guy who starts this - we're both less than notable people in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

Solid, interesting, and I wanted to see how it ended.

Design - **. The enemy group in the final mission has the cascading defense debuffs as noted. More to the point, there are a couple of missions - the first one in the lab, and the third in the warehouse - where it's possible to completely miss the first link in a chain of objectives that stretches up to the final room. Consider either using a more linear map or reducing the amount of chaining -- especially in the third mission, there's nothing to prevent us from checking logs, narratively or otherwise.

Also the extremely tiny end room in the third mission meant that its walls were lined with a closely crammed-together mix of glowies, which is probably not the visual effect you wanted.

Glowies are also hard to pin down in the Council base, because they can be tucked into the tiny sub-rooms out of line of sight.

Finally, my allies are completely unescorted on the final two maps. That seems accidental.

Gameplay - ****. Because of the design I ended up doing a bit of mild backtracking now and again. The end boss was pretty reasonable, and the helpers were a decent amount of help, though again I'd suggest Transfusion on the Kheldikin, and maybe a different weapon set on the rock star, as he was nearly one-shotting many of the minions.

Detail - **. The problem is that the story as told to me by Positron doesn't really seem to match the story I discover in the mission. The big points of disagreement are the escape of the Nictus (the clue makes it sound like they were spooky but somehow managed to escape on their own with the power suppression field up) and the ultimate fate of the null device (the story suggests Nihil destroyed it but I interpreted his closing comments as leaving the device to run out of control). Maybe putting the null device in as a chained glowie on Nihil's defeat would work there.

Overall - ***. A good story, but confusingly told in places, and with some pretty big problems with events not chaining as they should.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, all bosses no AVs two heroes at +0.

---

It is a little more plausible to get this line from Ouroboros. One thing that might need a little more elucidation is how she knows someone from the Liberty League went in after. Did she send them in? Are we plan B?

Regardless, off I go.

Objectives in the navbar don't need title case - you can get away with capitalizing the first word of the objective and any proper nouns, like the name of enemy groups.

(If the framing device was more mythic you could probably get away with this, and this would be a workable gimmick for a Mender, but yours has been pretty straight so far.)

Up on the top floor is a room with a normal spawn hiding in the corners, a boss fight, and another group of ALL guarding the hostage. And a safe.

Maybe you can move the boss fight to middle? Room was a bit crowded and I got shot to hell.

Also, the clue from the envelope in the safe should come after the clue for dropping the boss.

---

Ah, blue caves. I pretty much never see them in MA. Still.

A hostage and a glowie, and I take the measure of the enemy group more fully. Looks like fire, ice, and martial arts minions, claws lieutenants, and dark/dark bosses.

So Statesman left this costume for little Liberty to have an adventure and find, but the ALL have gotten in the way. Is that what I'm seeing here? It might be nice to get that more explicitly.

Also the ALL probably shouldn't have the anarchy symbol as their main motif. Anarchy is basically an edgy 90s version of liberty -- if you want to express tyranny you can probably do a good job with one of the fist chest symbols.

---

The sendoff in the briefing is still a little offputting. You could do more to establish Wells as something of a treasure-hunter in the previous briefings - Menders are at least a little eccentric in their own ways.

I think I've figured out what's going wrong with the Deathblossoms, Boulders, and Granites, where it's even odds if they'll actually cough up tickets or not. There are two versions of each, one of which has a power called "SummonFX". I think that latter version may have mistakenly been mixed into the randoms - it's a summoned version that's not designed to give experience or other rewards.

If you explicitly put the versions without SummonFX in your custom enemy group that should get rid of the problem.

Also maybe give all the monsters some kind of alternate description. I can get that Fern would want plants and rocks, but what are the Wisps? Evil sunlight?

---

The descriptions on the ALL would benefit a bit from mentioning that they're all from some kind of dark future.

I mean, they are, right? MAL is some kind of nigh-immortal old man who's sending his minions to mess with history?

Statesman-from-today doesn't make much sense as having been captured, but Statesman-from-the-future, whose powers were depleted by the same catastrophe that destroyed Paragon City, would be perfect.

No clue how the swords wound up here in a coffin, though.

---

And now for the denouement. That's French for "when the villain gets it".

Whether it was in the original spec or not, Liberty Rose looks dashing with her red and blue laser swords.

We make our way over to MAL, collecting a couple helpers on the way. He's some kind of Psy Assault guy, and the shockwave hurts a bit, but thanks to the taunt on Animated Stone's attacks he spends most of his time trying to break the will of a giant hunk of rock, which is about as effective as you'd expect.

No complaints here though, aside from Liberty Rose doing the hundred-yard dash several times because her advanced perception spotted some ALL on the other side of a rock.

Also the souvenir from the arc should probably not be Ms. Liberty's Journal since she's not involved anymore. Unless it's the one from mission 3, in which case say so.

---

Storyline - ***. This arc feels like I'm watching the three-part season finale of Liberty League but only tuned in at episode 2. It seems like it could do more to set up the extent and nature of the ALL, including the elites I fight, and MAL's theft of the essential elements of Liberty Rose's powers and subsequent scattering of them through time.

As it is I feel like these developments are being introduced tangentially but they're never really connected together. Now that you have a contact who's outside of time, you can probably paint a big picture for the player.

Design - ***. Missions 2 and 4 kind of need a boss. I like the idea of MAL entrusting his council of evil with the pieces of the one thing that can destroy him, and we're big heroes now and can take bosses down. They'd also help establishing the story as a whole.

The factions in missions 3 and 4 retain their original descriptions. Custom descriptions are a big use of space, but you can probably get by with just changing the name and giving a single-line blurb.

Gameplay - ****. One frustration here is Liberty Rose running off on the last map because of her Willpower perception boost, which isn't something you can really do much about without gutting the set.

The other is getting no rewards about a third of the time from the enemies in mission 3. It's probably a result of a bug in the MA, but it's one you can work around.

Detail - ***. Now that you have an original contact you can probably give her a personality that justifies the occasional cracks about treasure. I mean, maybe her little eccentricity is that she's a temporal treasure hound, and she was tasked to, or asked to, help with recovering this stuff because she's got a nose for it. That's someone who can wonder why people chase after books and lament at only finding a costume in a treasure chest.

Maybe this is just because I never had much of a nose for the "random interjection" school of comedy, but I tend to find comedy to be a lot funnier when it's actually something plausible to say.

Overall - ***. You've found a better contact to tell the story, and one who's more capable of giving people the big picture. I'd enjoy this more if you established her personality a little bit more, and fleshed out the big picture a little earlier on in the arc.

Tonight's arc: In Pursuit of Liberty (344916). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

Well, with Two Tickets To Westerly taken care of, I suppose it'd only be fair to ask for a review of Malta: Impossible (378274).

You don't actually fight Malta and it's not impossible, so two words, two lies. New personal record!

@GlaziusF

Running this one on a mid-40s ice/axe tanker, no AVs all bosses 2 heroes at +0.

---

Seems to be an extraneous > before "As I was saying" in the opening briefing.

I... seem to be dealing with perhaps a Shadow Shard exile here. Someone who doesn't know what grass is. Ah well, if you can't be kind to aliens or perhaps people from the future, who can you be kind to?

Also at about level 40, anything you might describe as "hoodlums" stop being a concern.

Oh. Nemesis. Yeah, they might actually be self-described hoodlums.

Ah dear. Yes, alright, "Mender Silos" does anagram to "Lord Nemesis", but I'd suggest recoloring or renaming the troops, or at the very least making them from a different enemy group. Nemesis doesn't have a reputation for being quite this obvious.

But there's a time traveler out there, and we've just helped her.

As for the closing briefing, you probably want to put actions in bold or italics or a different color from the rest of the contact text.

---

More of those extraneous > characters in the second accept text. But alright, she's somebody else concerned with the integrity of the timestream. Let's go save some lives. That's always good, right?

...ah man. A cargo ship. I can see the sole navbar objective right when I enter, but I doubt it'll be so easy.

If this Stephan is who I think he is, his name's spelled with an F. Stefan.

He and Marcus are in the first two rooms of this cargo ship, and the mission completes.

Which I guess is alright (and the dudes who jump us are pretty spiffy-looking) but I have a look at the rest of it to see if I'm missing anything.

Nope, it's all empty.

---

Okay, so now somebody's going to cut the Rikti War off at the knees. I really don't feel like this is something that needs to be stopped, but okay, let's give this a go.

So there's some temporal weirdness still going on. Statesman isn't viewed very favorably, and I see a boss group of wraiths after I pull down some of the data on the Rikti War.

They seem to recognize me, for some reason. Defeating them wasn't required to complete the mission, even though they showed up in the navbar.

The end room for this mission is actually completely tiny, and it's got two glowies and a destructo in it, in addition to the Rikti... ambush? Patrol?

It's very busy, is my point.

Lady Starburst's signoff mentions... bane spiders? In Paragon City, yet. Hmm.

It's called a "Pyrrhic" victory, exit text.

---

The header for this mission calls it "act three", even though it's the fourth mission. I guess the first mission was a prologue?

Anyway, looks like I'm going to piggyback on an invasion and look for information.

Interesting custom troops guarding the place. Nice mix. I maneuver through a lot of fights and hit a bunch of glowies, finding a personnel file on my contact and the greater wraith who apparently started this whole thing...

To get my contact's old ID tag.

I... I wonder if it's actually her trying to stop this whole thing from going down.

---

Anyway. My contact falls down the temporal rabbit hole, and I'm going off to a crazy mixed-up world where up is clown and black is right.

Or the DE office. That's a pretty nice bit of chaos, yeah.

I find a young version of my contact, and a slightly older version a bit deeper in - she tells me to go back toward the entrance, but I met her just after I got off the elevator and the first floor is clear.

In fact it's not until the last floor that I meet the Professor. She tells me I must head for the deepest parts... but I thought I was there already. Hoo boy. Time to backtrack.

Back on the third floor I meet a meditating Starburst, who tells me that she hasn't just been fighting the Timewraiths, she IS the Timewraiths.

In fact, she's the end boss. Well well.

Unfortunately for her, I only get stronger with swarms of minions. Go Energy Absorption! The Timewraiths are a bit more of a bump, but nothing I can't handle, and she goes down.

The mission doesn't complete until the two little temporal shadow friends in her boss group are down, which seems a bit off.

Ah. Apparently I wasn't just making a John vs. the zombies joke up there, and she really was the timewraiths. Caused by repeated time-traveling until she became supremely powerful and supremely insane.

The end blurb is something about facing the consequences of my actions... this text really needs to be formatted specially. Especially since the bit about facing the consequences of my actions is really needs to be set up better, perhaps with some bolding on "your", to make it clear that it's talking about my actions as a whole rather than just my part in this storyarc.

---

Storyline - ***. I don't think the overall story is bad, but I think it's a bit wrongly paced. The first three missions are basically putting out fires and learning nothing about the big threat, with the first one rather superfluous overall. And the time interventions are a bit inexplicable. Are those her attempts to get rid of the TimeWraiths by preventing the Well of the Furies from being uncapped and turning back the Rikti War? We don't really find out. For that matter, how does the information from TimeGuard point to that odd little Nexus?

I mean, as far as I can tell I spend the first four missions just moving a pile of dirt back and forth before my contact remembers that it all ends in the Nexus and points my time-watch there. Which isn't a very satisfying way to spend the first four missions. They really need more of a connection to the overall story as revealed in the last mission, though the boss in mission 4 is a nice piece of foreshadowing.

Design - ***. The cargo ship ends a bit early, the portal lab and Time Guard HQ seem to be very heavy toward their end rooms, and the temporal duplicates of my contact misdirect me in the final mission, which is a bit worse than saying nothing at all.

The custom group is largely featureless, but that's fine considering what they are, and the photonegative clones are a nice touch.

Gameplay - ****. As a tank I was a bit frustrated that none of the customs wanted to have a punch-up. They were all ranged. And if I was playing anything but an ice tank I probably get a bit ticked off if enough minions connected with infrigidate. That's a bit of a bear to face as volley fire.

If you can put a melee minion in the group I think that'd help, assuming you've got the room.

Also, the running back and forth uselessly in the last mission as was noted.

Detail - ***. My contact has a lot of things to say, but most of them are either restated in the last mission or irrelevant to the overall story. That applies to many of the other clues I find, too. They're not out-of-place or even inauthentic, but they just don't help paint a picture of what's really going on here.

Of special interest is one largely throwaway line about bane spiders protecting things and "Statesman's thugs" messing them up. That's something I would have liked to see happening, perhaps instead of that first largely tangential mission.

Overall - ***. A generally good last mission if you can drop the misdirection by captives, but it seems to stand apart from the other four, rendering them make-work to one degree or another. If you can do more to tie the earlier missions in with the overall story, and if possible space objectives out a little more reasonably, the arc would do a better job of living up to the last mission.

Tonight's arc is Time's Shadow (371445). Verdict - ***. Review below in this thread.

Friday night is game night, but Saturday night's all right for an arc.

Tonight's is Two Tickets to Westerly (374002). Verdict - ****. Review on MA Forums Thread.

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator Project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this one on a single-digit energy/FF defender, with the old "heroic" settings.

Romance tag, huh? Let's see.

---

Get somebody out of a gang. Alright, that's a good low-level objective.

Wow. They cleaned this place up pretty well for an abandoned warehouse. I didn't think Skulls were this concerned with hygiene.

And there's one of 'em now, getting his Dyne on. It goes boom.

I find some guy named "Toothbreaker Jones" who seems chatty up front. He drops Bonebreaker's name but I only associate it with the person I was looking for a few minutes later. Maybe you should put "Bonebreaker" in quotes into the nav bar, instead of Roy.

You should probably tweak the description on these Dyne labs, though, since in the MA they don't recharge your blue bar.

Marrowsnap talks about Bonebreaker already running off. I guess he had a lot of things to take care of before he talked to his girl? Wonder who this TZ is, though -- the Petroviches head up the Skulls, so it's not their initials.

---

People LARPing in the steam tunnels. Oh lord. This is gonna be a trip.

Got my Lesser Missile Swarms all prepped and ready, so down I go.

Steam tunnels aren't actually sewers. They're subterranean conduits carrying steam pipes and other utility conduits, with enough room for people to walk among them for maintenance.

(also there was never actually a dude LARPing in the steam tunnels. Some PI had that as a working hypothesis, and the kid asked him not to reveal the truth since he was really just looking for somewhere out-of-the-way to kill himself.)

Lots of CoT, but I'm not seeing anybody else.

Wha? Hordelings? Is this a custom group of CoT? I'm not used to seeing them heroside.

(hilariously there's a lasher holding a torch with his NO HANDS)

Finally I get some conversation in and around the boss room. Yeah, the CoT going after LARPers definitely makes sense in this range, where the perception is they're still a cult.

For dramatic purposes I guess it's alright to have Joe and his buddies keep their brains instead of going to live inside tiny crystals for the rest of eternity. But Joe's death scream doesn't really work since his last acts were to hypnotize me and then self-destruct.

---

Man, never make friends with geeks. They'll stick with you through thick and thing but then stab you in the back for a plastic model.

Anyway, here we go into -- Oranbega?! Man, they just keep bringing this place up earlier and earlier. I know you hate the blue caves with a passion but they are where the Circle kick around in lower levels. Maybe you could even use the Roman caves or something like that.

I rescue an average Joe (well, an average Brad) from his mystic prison -- is there some reason Captured (Floating Struggle) wasn't available? That's the stock Circle capture animation.

And then I find a Janet. ...is there a succubus named Magenta somewhere deeper down here?

Tarsis? The name's familiar for some reason. Is he the one that ran off with the Jewel of Hera?

Finally I think I see the guy I came for. Wow, that's a long description on him, but I can't say it's not relevant. Anyway, I came in just in time for the CoT to have pulled the darkness out of him.

Though I wonder why he wanted to get rid of it? Make a clean break? It's not like the powers of darkness wouldn't be, how you say, useful in the future.

Then again, maybe the Skull version of them does something to you. Something terrible.

Hmm. Interesting narrative, but I'm never really comfortable with a contact going missing. There's always something in the back of my head saying "but you're right there, I'm talking to you".

---

Also kind of hilarious to see Nadya's face when Roy's talking to me.

Anyway, gang building on fire, and I spring Roy, who's a Willpower/Baseball Mace custom.

Ah. That's TZ. I can see why they call her that. Zombies/DB is pretty beefy, especially since the zombies fixate on Roy and I want to see him survive this, so I spend a lot of time force bolting her aside and focusing on the zombies. Eventually I say screw it, though, and just blast her.

And there's a happy ending. Hooray.

---

Storyline - ****. Leaving the "Spirit Thorns do not work that way" business aside, there isn't much to find wrong with this story. But one thing I couldn't figure out is why TZ specifically was interested in keeping Roy around. The Skulls don't seem to be a very tight-knit gang, and even if they were TZ doesn't strike me as much of a management cog interested in keeping the team together. Bone Daddies aren't exactly in short supply, after all, so Roy is replaceable.

So here's a thought: TZ is using her Aztec magic to make her own cadre of Aztec-flavored Skulls, and either Roy would be an ideal candidate since he's got Aztec blood in him somewhere, or he's already part of it and that's why he's desperate enough to turn to the CoT to get the ancient blood-starved warrior out of himself.

Design - ****. The sewers and Oranbega don't exactly fit the setups given for them (this is really just my personal preference to keep Oranbega as a big reveal) but I can see what you were going for in both cases.

Just as an aside, that room with the little temple is more visually impressive when you have to get to it by running over the bridge and into the mouth, rather than when you come into it from the side and sneak around the back. I don't know if there's a reasonably-structured and -sized map that does that, though.

Gameplay - ****. Multiple bosses in a given map are a little much at lowbie levels, but aside from that the gameplay was pretty smooth. No backtracking or wandering around confused.

If you take the suggestion about TZ making custom Skulls you can put a custom lieut in instead of the first Bone Daddy in maps 1 and 4.

Detail - *****. Aside from the oddness with Dyne labs not actually buffing recovery in the MA, the descriptions were all fairly solid and everything came across pretty clearly.

Overall - ****. A solid but not spectacular low-level arc, and worth the time playing. (also it was about one level's worth of XP)

Tonight's review. Pretty much at the end of the little queue I had saved up from being inactive -- I try to keep reviews from individual authors a week apart.

The Tangled Weave (338575). Verdict - ***. Review on MA Forums Thread.

Last night's play, tonight's finished review.

An Arachnos Slumber Party (335317). Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums thread.

Part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-20s stone/stone brute. 2 villains with boss fights, even level and no AVs.

---

Kalinda wants to make sure everybody's ready to fight before they party down. ...guess I better use the soft mallets then.

Huh. Purple widows and fortunatas? Are these Aeon University school colors?

Anyway, looks like I get to deliver a rough initiation to an SR custom in red armor, and restock the base fridge for free.

---

And now to investigate these odd premonitions Kalinda's been having.

Prank call! ...uh, I look into the clues tab for who I might have called, but just get a little comment about being careful. Did I accidentally ring security?

Nice costumes on them, though. Cage or RIP?

I maneuver through the halls, looking for interesting things to see, and I spot a lot of them... including a Tarantula Mistress with a hostile escort?

Oh, coffee to die for. I get that. But these are pretty empty halls. ...though I guess wandering ally patrols would spring the Tarantula.

Oh dear. Seance gone wrong. Nice skin color there, very Oz.

And a pillow fight with a Night Widow who seems unclear on the concept of "nonlethal".

The clues suggest that I'd meet her first, then Jenny, then the witch. I don't know how much ordering you did there, but I went Jenny/Witch/Widow.

---

Oh god rumors and infighting. Time to show people the business end of my rumor stick.

Many of the same NPCs show up from last mission. Same map, too.

And at the end of it all... the Freakshow. Yeah, they're on parties like white on rice. Though this seems to be more of a splinter movement... within Arachnos? of people in cosmetic armor.

Nice design work there, by the by.

---

Somebody called an abandoned base? ...oh, for the lovva Pete.

Oh. Okay, this wasn't my prank call gone way wrong. This was something else entirely. Though I do appreciate the help against the lady Freaks.

And... oh dear. It seems Kalinda has caused the very situation which she foresaw! Foresight's a real bear like that.

---

Storyline - ****. If you can accept the idea of an Arachnos slumber party there's nothing in here that'll throw you. (And if not, the heck are you doing playing an arc called "An Arachnos Slumber Party"?) The tweest at the end is a pretty classic one, too. But I've got to wonder: where are the Freakshow in all this? Not the new Freak fan faction. The Freaks are basically cybernetic frat boys -- you'd think they'd be a little more enthusiastic crash this party than the one please-boss-don't-shoot-me specimen who shows up.

Design - *****. Mostly this is for the Freak fans, who are very well realized, with good use of tech armor to fake up cybernetics. The partying versions of various Arachnos personnel are passably done, though just a suggestion for the recolors -- if you're trying to represent pajamas with the alternate color, you might want to try making the top and bottom different colors. Don't know how possible that is, though.

Gameplay - ***. I don't know if this was just the stone melee speaking, but the Fortunata minion/lieutenants and Wolf lieutenants (with their web grenades) pretty much killed my attack chain. Pretty frustrating. No boss fights were that unreasonable, but with the wrong arrangement of enemies in the custom partiers I was pretty well stymied.

Detail - ****. Some nice humorous touches in the system text and description messages. Generally it was entertaining to pay a little more attention.

Overall - ****. The story's silly but self-awaredly so, so it's not much of a stumbling block, but the power mix on the initial customs can be a bit frustrating, and I don't know why the stock Freakshow don't have a better role.

Well. Been a while. Job + holidays + Martian death flu = extended absence.

cohmissionreview.com has kind of faded into the twilight in the meanwhile, which is a bit sad, but I'm going to be back and posting.

Just a reminder for how things work, as it's been a while.

1) put arc up on cohmissionreview.com
2) once arc hits front page (spam moderation is done by the site owner, who is not me - repeat - not me) post here with review request
3) I pick a random arc to run every night - should I run out, I pick from the cohmissionreview.com backlog. The review goes up there, and either in this thread or a thread you've started for your arc, assuming I can find it.
4) Also, you get 5 stars in-game. I can't do anything to affect the opinion of enough people to put you in the Hall of Fame or whatever, so I may as well just be generous.

Also, since as of now a majority of my arcs have been inspired by other stuff I've seen while reviewing, this is official notice that I'm not going to be entering any dev-run or player-run contests based on arc authoring, critter design, or whatever. So submit in confidence.

Coming back in with a review, In the Darkness Creeping (347709). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

Getting back into the review groove, and testing this thing's lowbie chops with my sub-20s Peacebringer. I realize he's a bit under, but he's all I've got.

Running this on standard difficulty with bosses on.

---

For real supernatural adventure it looks like I'll have to go to Helen Bach!

...yeah, sorry.

Hmm. Generic investigation. Alright. This is going to be the big outdoor blocks, which aren't generally good for placement of clues. We'll see.

Oh! No, it's the mausoleum. I'm surprised. The city block graveyard is pretty obviously taken from KR.

Taking the measure of these customs. Pretty reasonable undead powers, though the heal is a bit overpowered on minions. They get almost all their HP back!

Seems to be a number of identical distracto-tablets, all called "Tablet of Power" with the same message. Eventually one of them pops up an altar, with a single minion kneeling by it. It seems to summon several waves as it's destroyed, but as the waves show up in the ring canyon and the altar was on the lip, they don't do very much.

Overall I have no idea who this consonant salad of a god is or why he's important, but the minions seem pretty standard undeadly stuff. Helen, fill me in?

Okay, she doesn't know either. Fair enough.

---

My contact informs me that X-guy is an ancient supernatural entity associated with corruption and rebirth! Perhaps part of some group of... exiled deities?

I kid, I kid. Time to go to an abandoned warehouse and see what's up!

Hey! This is clearly an abandoned office! False advertising!

Also it's really dang tiny.

Wh- whoa! Surprise EB! Dang. I realize Helen has no idea about what's up here, but Surprise EB isn't good for anybody. Warnings, warnings.

Seriously, a warning would have been nice. Dude comes out of nowhere, and apparently he's going to fight me to the bitter end. The mission briefing gives me no idea I should even be worried about him.

He's Zombies/regen, so he's not too unreasonable a fight, but even so. Elite boss out of nowhere is a bit unreasonable for characters not even necessarily in SOs yet.

Per his description, the dude's a famous betrayer of the occult forces of good. News to me.

---

Okay, so now I get to tear the book up and put it into magic Ziploc bags. Interesting angle.

Wh- whoa! The leader, entry message? Another unheralded EB? Well, I'll see when I get there.

One of the battles breaks down into the X-guy's minions beating on each other, though I realize this is how battles work.

10 is a large number of things to find, but I manage. ...and yep, the Wraith is an EB. Still no warning about her, though apparently she's another corrupted good guy.

I guess I need to take her out to stop her from breaking the yellow-and-blue-make-JUSTICE seal on the magic Ziplocs, so here we go again.

DBlast/Pain Dom. Not too hard to take down... though the death message is worrying. Are both of these people going to return in the next/last mission?

---

Helen informs me that the dude from mission 2 has been resurrected and is trying another ritual, but that he'll be a pushover.

Of course, she's read the black manuscript and probably come down with a case of the Ia's, but let's take this at face value.

Huh. There's Soul Destroyer. He's... an elite boss. That's not much of a pushover.

And the Wraith and Helen show up as he rants about them joining him. (though Helen's a bit ahead of schedule, she shows at 3/4 health but he rants about her at 1/2.)

Helen's a DMias/Zombies EB, so I say screw it and pull out my Shivan. He takes the Wraith redux and Helen while I kite around and blast them with space squid rays.

Everybody has read from the same script so far, about the glories of their consonant salad, and Helen's no different. Your classic case of the Ia's. Kind of a shame, really.

The story ends with a simple summation of what's happened, as Helen is off to that great cult meeting in the sky.

---

Storyline - ***. This story isn't bad, flawed, or inconsistent, but it is rather generic, and there are a couple reasons that just doesn't work.

First, City of Heroes takes many ideas that have been popular in comic books and changes the names associated with them. The Family is a crime syndicate, Nemesis is a technological autocrat, Crey is an evil corporation, and all these are generic types. Similarly, the Banished Pantheon is a cult of the elder gods. (The Coralax are an elder race, which is a bit different.) So an ancient forgotten god who creates zombies would fit right in, and it's rather odd that they're not even mentioned, let alone not even used. The arc doesn't really do much to establish the consonant salad of a god these people are supposed to be worshipping, so I don't get much of an impression of him by the end, and overall it feels like a pale imitation of the Banished Pantheon rather than a legitimate threat in its own right.

Second, one of the things that really makes horror work is a perversion of the ordinary. That's why an abandoned house is way more creepy when there's a music box playing somewhere. Two of X-guy's minions I never get to meet in their non-cultist form, and I don't get much sense of Helen as a person before she turns into a cultist so the sense of horror isn't there.

Design - ***. The undead are visually nice, though generic, but I had some quibbles with the choice of maps. The opening cemetary was more Dark Astoria than Kings Row, the second mission was an abandoned office but described as a warehouse, and the third mission was supposed to be some MAGI vault, but it was actually a covert Longbow base.

Gameplay - **. Surprise elite bosses aren't a lot of fun, and there are more of them than there are missions. The Zombie/Regen can greatly heal himself, and the Zombie/DMias can tank your accuracy and damage, which are still somewhat problematic at the low 20s. And again, none of them are even announced.

Detail - **. The minions just bill themselves as generic skeletons, zombies, and ghouls, which really don't do much to distinguish X-guy from the Banished Pantheon. If they had gimmicks of some sort - claws or elemental attacks or demon weapons - they'd help to establish the personality of the god or his servitors.

Overall - **. Slightly off map choices and surprise EBs aside, the big problem here is that both the new group and most of its named bosses are encountered pretty much in isolation. I never got a feel for what they wanted to do or who they were.

Now, generic invocations of various horror elements can work, but mostly if you're using them in comedic setups or as some kind of contrast, and as far as I can tell, this story is trying to play everything straight-faced. If you want to keep the customs, this story needs more to establish their place in the city than a namedrop of MAGI and some Midnighter redshirts. Even with the radio missions' shallow story, we get to see most of the featured groups out in the city doing various things and get a bit of background in their descriptions. This arc doesn't really get a chance to do either.

Arc Name: Operation Fair Trade
Arc ID: 391172
Faction: Longbow, PPD, Arachnos, Malta (cameo), Knives of Artemis (cameo) -- heroic alignment
Creator Global/Forum Name: @GlaziusF/GlaziusF
Difficulty Level: Hard
Synopsis: Crimson asks many things of heroes. Infiltration, investigation, extraction, and sabotage: all covert and deniable, all to save the world. He asks these things of you, and one thing more: you must turn your back on Paragon City.
Estimated Time to Play: 60-90 minutes
Link to more details: CoH Mission Review entry

Notes from the author:
Or, how to use 100% of arc space with exactly one custom enemy. Several recolored groups appear, to what I think is good effect, but there's a lot of stuff to do and read.

Important note: the Malta do not actually constitute a primary enemy group in any of the missions. So for all of you sapperphobes out there, rest easy.

@GlaziusF

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Alright, let's try this one on. The worst thing seems to be an occasional EB, so I'm going to try this with my rad/sonic offender, old diff 1 but with bosses on.

---

Alright. Feels like some Psychonauts stuff is going on here. I get to play having the adventures of some patient under observation somewhere.

(The bug text kinda "breaks the frame", though. It should probably be more like Larson's notes on what's going on.)

Okay, initial assumption unfounded: the popup text treats me as a narrator in this place.

Anyway, without a decent ranged attack on him, and a Psyche set on the ally, the Minotaur goes down in two volleys of lingering rad.

And the seer warns of trials ahead.

---

Oh dear. It is kind of odd the game doesn't have a mirror sitting around, but that's a rather amusing replacement. In an insane way, it works.

Huh. Okay, I think I've found "Sister Psyche". Slash Solaris.

So this place is empty. Of hostiles, anyway. I was worried I'd "gotten violent". The wandering NPCs are used pretty well as actors, with the only real problem being that being allies, they both follow you up the elevator. That seems a bit off.

So I'm some kinda robot with biologicals making up a small portion of it. But, uh... if 40% of my brain is gone, it's a wonder I can still read, write, and hold conversations. That stuff is a lot more complex than you'd think.

I'm reminded of this manga called "Homonculus", about a homeless former insurance adjuster who gets trepanated by an insane doctor and it turns out with his brain getting an airing he can see people's neuroses in the form of them turning into crazy weird monsters. Just the idea of pressure on the right part of the brain being somehow supernatural.

---

So I "played along" with this for about a month? Or I just slept longer than "I thought".

Ah. This is where I get violent. But if so much of my body is artificial you'd think the doc would have included some kind of emergency remote off switch.

As I contemplate what I'm about to do to complete the mission, it strikes me as weirdly hilarious for any ranged character, especially my sonic blaster, who yells at things until they fall over.

Hmm. Is Mike supposed to remind me of the minotaur? They both start with exactly the same line.

Geez, did I beat this guy so badly last time he lost his memory?

Huh. And the nurse seems to have some of Psyche's "powers" as well.

---

So given the briefing, I'm expecting... Nemesis automatons?

Yyyyyep.

The paranoid navbar text is great, too. Though the clue should probably put "boss" in quotes.

Interesting how I start to lose touch with reality near the end of the boss fight.

Geez, if I was supposed to have killed them all the mission should have been defeat all. Stands to reason.

---

I reiterate my statement from mission 3 about an emergency off switch.

Anyway, the problem with snipers is that they see through stealth, so the "boss" gets a nice jump on me. But I guess you couldn't very well put him in like a warhulk or anything.

Looks like Mike gets to play Babs this time.

And I've gone completely 'round the bend by the time I get to the top floor. Janitor Synapse and Nurse Psyche, who is now working against me.

Hmm. Reading over the souvenir here. Malaise. Is that... a deliberate choice of words, given who else used to sit outside Bell Medical?

---

Storyline - ***. This one's hard, as my imagination did a head fake sometime early in mission 1 and I expected a completely different structure than what materialized. But if I look at what happens it's pretty reasonable on its own. Cybernetics patient goes insane, tragedy results, some things man wasn't meant to meddle in, et cetera et cetera.

I'm told from the start that my hero is running around inside a snowglobe held by an autistic child, or something like that. Even if the warnings weren't there in the description I wouldn't expect anything that happened in the missions to reflect reality. But the ending needs a little something more. So here's an idea: the doc, sensibly, built an emergency off switch. But while other patients might suddenly find themselves toting around dead weight, because Patient M is so full-replacement it would put $himher into a coma, maybe even kill $himher. (would you believe it took me this long to figure out that's what you did? "Jean" can be unisex when it wants to be.) Mission 5 starts with Collin and Shalice arguing over whether to use it anyway - Shalice takes the position that since the treatment had such odd psychological effects Patient M isn't to blame for what's happened and hitting the off switch would be murder. But at the end, with her gone, the doc hits it anyway. If "the exploits of $name" represent Patient M's comatose state, then the end of the souvy makes a little more sense.

For completion purposes, here's my head-fake: I thought, given the setup of the first mission, that it would be a Psychonauts sort of affair, with my hero and her adventures being some kind of allegory for what's going on in the real world. The mission popups, clues, and custom descriptions would all fit the structure of the interview. To what ultimate end, I have no idea. Probably not the same one though.

Design - ***. And can you believe, most of this is for not putting in a defeat all? If I'm supposed to be crazy dangerous and leaving a trail of destruction in my wake, as the "debriefings" imply that I am, put in the objectives to make me crush, kill, and destroy. Didn't really throw down with the bosstaumatons, but they looked alright, and Modern Psyche is pretty well done.

Gameplay - *****. My own predilections against wiping out any unnecessary enemies aside, things went pretty smoothly. The minotaur was reasonable with help, and the end "automaton" was find with some lucks and break frees.

Detail - *****. Aside from the third-person/first-person hiccup in the first mission, things are nicely detailed. Nothing breaks through the mission's backstory unless I'm supposed to be hallucinating a "normal" enemy.

Overall - ****. I think you might have been a little too cautious about hero "forcing" and the like. It was pretty clear to me that there was some serious unreality on the march from the briefing for the first mission, so why not take advantage of that and force me to do the horrible things Patient M is supposed to be doing?

@GlaziusF

Running this on my level 50 spine/regen scrapper, no bosses all AVs 2 heroes at +0.

---

Hmm. This is somebody who could be improved by the little bio option they give for arc contacts now. As it is she's a mystery, and I'm wondering why she's so dismissive of the scientists at Portal Corp.

Oh well, let's go see these horrors from another dimension.

Looks like DMelee/DArmor minions and DBlast/SonicR lieuts. Pretty reasonable mix so far. DMelee/DArmor bosses too.

Heh. Just checked the navbar. Dr. Joike, Dr. Bobo, and Dr. I'm Different, I presume?

Anyway, it seems like I may have been misled by the contact I've never seen before. Either that or these guys are good at mind control.

Anyway, I get the "we must understand these creatures!" explanation in a clue once all three of them come outside.

Hmm. My contact doesn't say anything about the mind control. I have a feeling I'm being lied to.

---

My contact says the plants have spoken to her. Uh... huh.

I wonder if these guys are just - gasp! - HERBIVORES.

Anyway, it's a defeat all in a short cave and everybody in it is absolutely silent. Not much to say there.

---

These briefings could use some paragraph breaks. They help break up ideas for easier consumption.

And something the canon missions tend to do that I like is generally spell out the location of the missions and what I'm expected to do there, the latter in green text, with the accept text an objective restatement of the same.

Anyway, I go in to a place to save some people. A fire controller in a suit and an elec/elec bug, who because he's running Lightning Aura speaks up as soon as I enter the door and almost takes out the guards before I get up to him.

I dunno, maybe that's intended for him?

But a couple of EBs are really overkill as allies.

Though this is like a two-floor building so I don't even get the chance to ditch them before I've cleared it out.
---

And some heroes are trying to get in our way, so my contact and her EB buddies are going to hold them off while I wreck the queen. Alone.

She's probably an EB so there should be a warning about that.

Huh. The Paragon Police are here? I don't see 'em. A talky patrol would be a good idea.

...a fire control/radiation elite boss. Ouch.

Well, there should be a warning anyway, even if it's not the queen.

But there's no real reason to believe the hero over the scientists from the first mission. Especially if my contact could hint that they're being compromised.

It does bother me a bit how I managed to MEET the villain in the first place. Neutral territory?

I let the queen get away? She was out the door before I ever got there, lady.

---

Anyway, the final mission briefing could use some commentary from my hero on what I was planning to do.

...what?

Spirit Croatoa?

How did I wind up here?

Okay, having rescued the Queen, these Oraith guys ARE psychic.

And having an Oraith boss as an ally means he's running his dark aura and killing his guards.

Anyway, with a sonic blast/DMiasma EB and two bosses and two lieutenants, the end boss (plant/psy assault) goes down like whoa.

In the end she rants about making the tough choices.

And that gets me to thinking...

---

Storyline - **. It's pretty clear from the first mission that there's a disconnect between my contact's orders and the way other people are reacting to these creatures. And my contact doesn't seem interested in addressing that disconnect, which makes me doubly suspicious. Honestly, I wouldn't voluntarily be following along after the first mission.

But here's something. These things are psychic. My contact can claim they use mind control. It actually makes what happens to her grandparents more terrifying - they were controlled into shooting these things so they could claim "self-defense".

And after the fourth mission, she's convinced I'm in on the conspiracy, so she fights me in mission 5 no matter what - and then I decide whether the queen in mission 5 gets away or not.

As it is, if I've decided to go ahead with things after mission 1, I don't think the new information in mission 4 is going to change my mind.

Design - ***. The enemy group, while small, is interesting, and the allies are pretty nice jobs too. There are things like vocal patrols for mission 4 which would help set the scene, but with the exception of the Spirit Croatoa final map I can mostly follow allong.

Gameplay - ***. On occasion when I get swarmed by lieutenants the sonic dispersion/sonic siphon proved to be too much. But this is really for the overpowering allies in the third and fifth mission, and the rather unreasonable boss in the fourth mission. I may as well have just stood still for the big climatic boss fight, and the fire/rad can kill anybody's greatest defensive strength.

Detail - **. It doesn't help that I only get two clues and both of them are about people who've talked to these dimensional creatures already. There isn't a single thing in any of the missions that isn't required, which is a real shame because I'm clearly supposed to have developed some kind of sense of both my contact and the mysterious invaders by the end. Finding clues in the lab, in the cave, in the crumbling office, and in the police warehouse can inform my decision about what I "should" be doing, even if the last mission isn't a choice at all.

Overall - ***. Overall it's an interesting concept for an arc, but the difficulty is a bit uneven and the plot is a bit more obviously railroading than I'd like.

Yesterday night I passed out before I could get into the game. Tonight, not so much.

Tonight's random arc: Carmina Rouge (43697). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Taking this one on with a high-teens Peacebringer, who is old diff 1 except he fights bosses too.

---

Well, this is a promising sign for light comedy - the TV is labeled "Supergroup Relaxation Device".

So the briefing starts with "[Your show's just about over and you are about to find out what "It" is, when the reception crackles and goes blank...]" Why am I wondering what "It" is? A little description of the cheesy monster movie would help here.

But it's always good to help the nascent technologists along, so let's go.

I can't speak for everyone, but I like how the game does accept text, which is to turn some of the mission description green to indicate the most important bits, then make the accept text an objective statement of the mission goals.

Anyway, I head in to find the Council everywhere, and their scientists examining the thing I was supposed to reboot.

Oddly they both seem like melee types.

Even more oddly, the robot a decent way from the end room completes the mission with the hostage still waiting.

I go anyway... huh. Maemae? Really? I thought from the opening briefing I was dealing more with grade-schoolers.

---

Anyway, time for round 2. Judging by the patrol chatter the Council are doing the time-tested thing and getting to an inventor via his family.

Lot of patrol chatter, though. It's not exactly missable anymore, so can you maybe do one talky patrol and some greater number of quiet ones?

The mark 2 is a pretty classy machine. But... it doesn't seem to have any offensive powers? It just follows me around and stares menacingly at things.

I spring Melanie from her captors but now I have to wax that signal jammer the Mark 2 was talking about. It's somewhere in the map before I found him, which I guess is unavoidable if you set 'em both to middle. There's just so much middle.

I find the signal jammer up on a catwalk, with perhaps a guard but he is non-vocal. It's a Vanguard warhead with the standard warhead description.

Ah. The briefing clarifies that yes, the robot wasn't accepting offensive commands. Ah well, at least he was a nice distraction.

---

Huh. I don't know how that little drone's going to be a fight for me, but alright, off I go to save the day.

Oh, it's Lou's. I was expecting a pawn shop. This place is huge.

And full of very vocal patrols! Eesh. So many dialog boxes they all over you screen.

Huh. Based on the rescue dialogue and the patrols, it seems like the scientists from the first mission have worked out a way to hack my contact's bots.

Oh! He was talking about the Mk II, not the little drone from the first mission. Yes, that one's a lot more dangerous.

Good lord, how many patrols are there in this place?

I investigate a control computer and find, among other things, "Additionally, it appears they know the location of it's controller, and there are notes citing questions only the creator can answer!"

Does that mean they're planning on asking the kid a few things in a less than forthcoming manner, or does it indicate they've already pumped him for information (or he's gone open source)?

The boss of the shop is still "hapless foreman" faction, and still has the description calling him the foreman of the PTS.

Reading the end mission clue, and hoo boy. The idealism of the wireless age runs smack dab into hard cold wardriving reality.

---

Yeah, they came after him. Saw THIS coming. I wonder why I didn't try to figure out where the kid was. I mean, I knew where his signal was coming from and that the Council was after him.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, I can see this map as an apartment building.

But apparently the Council got in, got the people, and got out, leaving behind only a bomb to erase their tracks.

The exit popup is I guess referring to the rogue SAM tracer from one mission back. But why didn't I follow up on that? How much time has it been? Are the timestamps in the mission subtitles just arbitrary or do they actually MEAN something?

---

Ah, that's why there's the warning - ambushes and patrols made up entirely of lieutenants.

Which thanks to the change in custom group XP are now worth less than minions. Because there ARE no minions.

Wouldn't be hard, just mix in some Mek Men and maybe Wolfpacks if you don't have bosses from this faction.

Man, I wish I had more inspiration slots.

Anyway, I spring Jimmy's mom (the navbar is telling me to both "save the last Driskel" and "find Jimmy Driskel" now, which is odd) and then Melanie, who asks me to take her to her dad... and then runs off.

You can actually set her to Ally - follow - pacifist to get her to really tag along.

Oh! Okay, so THAT's the last Driskel. See, "Jimmy" is a viable nickname for "James", so when the trace hit I thought it was Jimmy and his single mom.

And from Jimmy's description he's in the sixth grade.

...I am pretty sure Maemae is NOT in the sixth grade.

Okay, the doc is free, another batch of ambushers taken care of...

And the destruction of robot parts changes into "purge files to protect Jimmy" when it's done? Those two things don't seem to be causally related.

And the files are two floors down from the end room where I found the last crate of parts.

Man. I was expecting a fight against like the first Beta model with the new Mark 4 for backup.

---

Storyline - ***. The big problem I have here is that, per the clues for mission 3, my hero knows the Council is going to be coming after Jimmy, and has sufficient information to find both his house and the Council base where they're controlling the robots from. I think missions 3, 4, and 5 are supposed to hit in rapid succession, but you've established that missions 1, 2, and 3 take place some arbitrary time units apart, so it's tough for me to make the jump.

Maybe if the debrief from mission 3 actually had the Council showing up, with a little narrative note about how I'd better work on pinning down those coordinates, and mission 4 started with me finishing up on the coordinates and checking the TV to see if I can see anything more. Or something like that, anyway.

Design - ***. Minor but niggling - there is no force on Earth capable of convincing me that Maemae von Whooters is in the sixth grade. Maybe you could recolor, say, Penny Yin, assuming her psi-aura could be turned off.

Several missions seemed to complete early - either there was an implied objective like rescuing a hostage that I didn't do, or the required objectives showed up a good ways before the actual end of the mission. And I'm not sure why destroying the files on Jimmy shows up after I complete my sabotage of the robot parts in the last mission.

Speaking of the last mission, it actually worked out pretty well, if you intended the player to worry about dodging around the BADGUY patrols up until the Mark 4 comes into play. But the problem is that the Mark 4 showed up for me on like the next-to-last floor and before that, there were objectives that spawned ambush groups of BADGUYs, which couldn't be avoided. Maybe if you folded in other Council robots like I suggested the ambushes could use that mix.

The custom Council scientists are a bit odd in that they focus on matrial arts. Admittedly that is standard training for Council troops but I was expecting more of an assault rifle-y thing from them.

Also, why was the level range so oddly constrained? It goes like 10-15-20-25-25 as the cap. I didn't see any enemies that needed to be in that particular range.

Finally, so many patrol dialogues. So many. And all identical. One talky patrol, N silent ones, and I can practically guarantee you the talky one will not be missed.

Gameplay - ***. Mostly for the backtracking, trying to find things that spawned in the nebulous "middle" of a map. I realize this isn't entirely your doing, as the MA loves its flaky middles. But it rankled all the same.

Detail - *****. Aside from the occasional nonstandard description or faction, everything was fairly sensical. The robots had their own "voices", the clues are fun to pick over, or appropriately dread-inducing, and there's a nonstandard contact that's pulled off very well.

Overall - ****. Pretty much greater than the sum of its parts. If it worked at a consistent level range, tightened up the story a bit, tuned down the ambushes in the last mission, and either made it about a high-schooler or bid a fond farewell to MaeMae, it'd be better, but as it is, it tells a story through non-conventional means and pulls it off very ably.

Tonight's adventures in randomness:

The Shadowy Way Of Light (221466). Already reviewed - **.
Apples of Contention (3184). Already reviewed - *.

Tonight's random arc - Superhero Downtime (135096). Verdict - ****. Review lower in this thread.

(Another random one I've played, right after it: Talos Vice (338380) - *****.)