GlaziusF

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

So now we're probably going to investigate this phenomenon and--

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

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

---

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

From the Dean's master console.

While she's studying Oranbega.

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another ridiculous time interval, another random arc.

Previously played:

Enter Japes (96001) Verdict - *.

Tonight's arc: In Search of Lost Time (44588). Verdict - ***. Review below in this thread.

My current queue:

• Random reviews! Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter will actually function as originally intended. Text, enemies, and entire enemy groups can be replaced depending on what the censor objects to. In that case I'll message the arc author and call it a night.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

Sigh. This is starting to get ridiculous. At least nobody's expecting a review from me, right? Random arcs incoming!

Previously played:

Tales of Cimerora: Of Feathers And Fur (12647) Verdict - ***.
Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate (367872) Verdict - ****
The Fractured Dreamer (498588) Verdict - ***
Is it Live, or Is It Memory-X? (70210) Verdict - ***

Tonight's arc: Krusaders Adventures (475115). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• Random reviews! Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter will actually function as originally intended. Text, enemies, and entire enemy groups can be replaced depending on what the censor objects to. In that case I'll message the arc author and call it a night.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

Slime creatures! On this... giant sprawling oil platform.

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

What is with stones being monster magnets today?

---

And now the doom deer have struck.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So yeah. Return of Revenge of the Son of Long Hiatus 2: Daily Grind Harder.

I think it's been a month since I initially played this arc, so if anything's changed since then let me know and I'll give it another once-over.

Speaking of things that have changed, have you taken all your arcs back and made sure the glowies you want in the back actually say "back" because it actually works that way now?

I know, I can't get over it either.

With nothing left in the queue I'll start up the random arcs again. If I encounter something that looks like the censor went nuts, I'll just send a message to the arc author and break off.

Tonight's arc: An Epic Tale: Clown Capers (501562). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• Random reviews! Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter will actually function as originally intended. Text, enemies, and entire enemy groups can be replaced depending on what the censor objects to. In that case I'll message the arc author and call it a night.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-20s Peacebringer, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

I don't suppose you could have gone with a generic President, put in to prevent the arc from becoming dated?

Or at least Michael Wilson.

Anyway. Place seems pretty empty, if disquietingly hi-technical. I don't suppose there are any single-floor labs out there? This is a little big for--

Oh, appearing patrols. Okay. Looks like this is a real family business. (Also you shouldn't spawn multiple patrols and have them all talk - NPC dialog has a huge radius these days and multiple patrols saying the same thing just clutter up the text window with copies. One patrol that talks and the rest silent.)

Hmm. You can actually lead NPCs to glowies these days, there's no need to try to pretend I've found my escort when I'm clicking on the glowie.

Oh, I see. I think you may want to chain the glowie off of Skeeter being led to it, rather than it being interactable right off the bat, since I found it before I found him.

...assuming that works. I remember some weirdness with glowie chains, no clue if they've sorted that out yet.

I realize you're trying to make a reference with the debriefing, but I'm pretty sure there's a little NBC in the mix here at least.

---

Hmm. Willpower minions. Do they have enhanced perception? I got a bit swarmed in the opening room.

And pretty much everywhere else. Wow. Fortunately I can lobster up and let my pistolero buddy do some damage.

Some heroes have already fallen to the squeaky-nose side - martial arts and illusion control lieuts, and a fire/rad dual blast boss. Or maybe he was fire melee/manip?

Anyway, the end boss is a macer who again seems to spot me from a decent distance away.

Ah! But it seems it's not over yet.

---

What's better than mutant clowns? Mutant cyborg clowns!

Most of the lower ranks seem to be borgified versions of higher-ranking unroboticized Burger Clown employees, which is a nice touch.

Not such a nice touch - I don't know where you expected the alteration pods to wind up, but two of them spawned earlier in the map than I found the glowie that triggered them.

This meant a decent amount of empty backtracking before I could trip the boss fight.

Anyhow, just for reference's sake, the Rikti mutation drug has the street name "Shift".

The souvenir mentions something that was never really touched on in the mission, that the mad cyborg clown blew himself up rather than be brought in. His death rattle was a malfunction sound and I never saw anything like a clue about a horrendous explosion either.

---

Storyline - ****. A parody piece that doesn't try to be more complicated than it has to be.

Though it does make an effort at establishing a timeline, I have to say I'm a little confused. It seems to go: 1) discover Rikti wreckage 2) found Burger Clown 3) establish 60-year reputation for quality and service 4) MUTANT CYBORG CLOWN ARMY! There's some indication that the founder has been dipping into his own mix for a while, and that he's recently made some poor business decisions, but these are awfully grounded concerns for the sort of comedic tone you can't help but get with mutant cyborg clowns.

Design - ****. There's some good design work here, making an enemy group that does the Crey thing where the bosses and lieutenants of one level band are the lieutenants and minions of the next. The powers are varied enough that it's easy enough to come to grips with a battle when you're in the middle of it.

...not so much the actual color choices, though. You'd think in decades of the burger business the guy would have settled on a better scheme than electric yellow and neon green. I understand the intent is to portray a Z-grade burger franchise, dubious coloration and all, but that doesn't make the low contrast between the bright colors any less garish.

You could always go with purple. For some reason everything looks more fake with purple.

Gameplay - ***. I don't know whether it was my bad luck or whether your customs actually kept the +perception powers from Willpower, but while it's fun to manage a spawn and an ally, it's not so much fun to manage a spawn and an ally and brace for impact when the next group over spots you.

Also, be careful about placement of objectives on that final map. Some maps, like the one you chose, tell a little story in themselves: a company office built on top of an alien bunker. When I find out about alien conversion pods I expect them to be in the "alien bunker" part, especially when I can see the hole leading down when I activate the console that tells me about them. Clearing the entire bunker out only to find nothing means at worst a bugged mission and at best a lot of dead air while backtracking, and this isn't the sort of deep immersion or suspense arc that might benefit from some down time.

Detail - **. There's a point at which people and events leave the realm of political satire and enter the realm of historical parody -- not so much in authorial intent, necessarily, but in the reader's interpretation. I must confess that I can't tell you when it is, exactly, but it's closer to the point at which everyone involved is dead than the point at which everyone involved is still in the living memory of a grade-schooler.

Depiction of such recent people and events in a parodic fashion, which is a sizable portion of this arc's comedy, runs the risk of backfiring. And for me, it did.

Overall - ***. I'm ignoring the detail here because it's just subjective on my part. Ultimately the arc stands or falls on how fun the mobs are to fight and how fun the missions are to do, and this is generally okay but could be better, mostly due to perception and backtracking issues... and my needing the allies to be a little more than just occasional color.

Oof. That was a long hiatus. Sorry about that. Work had me running.

Tonight's arc: An Uncivil War: Preclude (415877). Verdict - *****. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• An Epic Tale: Clown Capers (501562)
• Random reviews are on hold indefiniely. Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter will actually function as originally intended. Text, enemies, and entire enemy groups can be replaced depending on what the censor objects to.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 fire/energy tanker, +1/x2 with bosses on.

I can't help but see "preclude" as a typo, though it's certainly a distinctive search term.

---

So I'm being used as a patsy in an intravillaingroup power struggle because one faction's brought out the NBC. I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover warheads in Warburg.

There's a time limit clearly called out in the briefing, which is nice. ...it's actually 45 minutes rather than the hour the briefing suggests, which is less nice.

So let's see this enemy group. AR/ninja bosses, AR/dev and AR/SR lieuts, AR/dev and pain/energy and mace/shield minons.

Judging from the chatter the minions outside don't actually think they're part of an internicene feud. I wonder if this is one of those practical shakedown ops. ...for some reason even the man in charge of the op doesn't think he's part of a feud? Yes, I would say something is up, though at least he fesses up as things start looking desperate.

Seems like everybody's actually been crawling all over this place trying to find and disarm the warhead? ...which has actually been de-NBCed into a normal bomb.

Yeah, seems like a regular ol' paramilitary fire drill.

...wait, what's that in the debrief? "My death"? Am I speaking to a dude from beyond the grave? Or is he being, like, metaphorical about this, that this was intended to kill him? Because it doesn't seem like he would have gone to the site himself if he couldn't find a hero.

---

Now time to punch up some Rogue Arachnos and steal surveillance data.

Standard arachnowarehouse, got a bunch of distracto-glowies from the main objective. Sensible.

Oh, interesting. Some of these are wired for alarms. Nice touch.

Surveillance footage seems to indicate the Council as co-conspirators. They don't seem to be the mind-control type exactly, but this is a complex scenario.

---

In pursuit of the warhead I storm Burkholder's base. Patrols are talking about hunting down traitors there, too, so it looks like there's some other power pulling a bunch of high-test strings.

Hmm. Sounds like the Ascendant in charge has worked out Crey's behind it all. Mind control and cloning are in their auspices.

Oh. Wait. Someone stole Vampyri information and nipped off to Crey? That... seems unrelated.

Not unrelated: the again return of stealth warheads!

---

It is apparently Kovacs who stole the Vampyri information, having worked with the Council for an unspecified length of time. Off to Crey!

'nother warhead in this building. Kovacs is part of some kind of cloning project which has all gone a bit loopy, as SCIENCE! tends to do, and he's trying to fix it with fire. And by "fix" I mean "kill" and by "it" I mean "everyone involved" and I think we're good here.

Ah. I get some files. Crey was just gonna kill all the clones on account of they turned out faulty but he set them free and maybe gave them pick of the random piles of superpowers? I fight an elec/energy assaulter at the end here and he certainly wasn't throwing down that kind of mojo in round 1.

---

Kovacs has taken over the main lab. Have to hand it to the dude, he double-crossed his way through like three major players in the pursuit of not dying ten thousand times. But I wonder what I'm going to be fighting in here.

If it's Nemesis I shall be very cross with you.

Ah. Nope, one-per-rank Kovacs. Kovacses? Kovaci? AR/elec armor minions, elec/energy lieuts, elec/elec blaster bosses, and an elec blast/elec armor EB who I get lucky enough not to get a sentinel from until near the end of the fight.

Word to the wise: from a boss on up, a voltaic sentinel is a Malta Sapper you can't destroy or crowd-control.

Some pretty quality chatter from the last remnants of the Crey, but I have never in all my months of Architect seen a battle that waited for a hero to get close to kick off. Especially for maps where proximity can be on the other side of a wall, keep this in mind when choosing dialogue.

The true Kovacs is elec melee. He calls an ambush, my ally ambush distracts them by dying nobly, and that's all the time I need to take him down.

---

Storyline - *****. Boy, superhero comics have a lot of outs, don't they? Robot doubles, mind control, projected images, alien clones, Nemesis plots, in addition to the writer's usual grab bag of genuinely hidden motivations. I'm almost entirely positive that in every mission in this arc except for the last one you go in with a premise that is functional but, in some important way, wrong.

And that's pretty great. Both parts of that. Because of the "wrong", every mission is some new revelation, but because of the "functional" there's never really a time when I figure I'd be better off just going home and watching The Rogue Isles Have Talent Or Else. The general structure drives me to the end, with good excuses for butting heads with a variety of opposition.

Design - ****. Couple little things. The initial enemies, basically Mercs Plus, commit the common sin in enemy groups of not really being distinctive at range. They're all black and white armor in similar shapes with the occasional targeting drone. Distinctive color highlights help, especially in groups that can't plausibly do a lot of size variations.

Second, if I picked up something like a remote control to turn the stealth off the nuclear warheads in the first mission I completely glossed over it. In subsequent missions they pop up in the objective bar as soon as I know about them, which is sensible, but that doesn't quite jibe with how I had to manually disable the cloak in the first mission but never worry about that again.

Gameplay - *****. The terrible temptation of Mercs Plus is to put AR/Dev on the minions and call it good. This gives minions a spammable defense debuff and a spammable control power which also seals the space bar and saps recharge.

This has been deliberately avoided, and the missions play better for it. There's still the matter of Voltaic Sentinel being a holy terror at high enemy ranks, but that's a one-off concern.

Detail - ***. My contact doesn't really care much about Kovacs' motivations. He just wants Kovacs brought to ground. And in a certain sense that's fine. The guy has already progressed to the point where he's toying with the flip-top cover on the big red button.

At the same time. I am kind of curious how the timeline shook out on this. Crey doesn't seem the type to drag their heels on life support for faulty experiments, so Kovacs can't have been operating on a very tight timeline. But was he a triple agent from the start who pulled out all the stops to get his own clone army, or just an above-average mook that Crey sampled without his knowledge who thrashed around in search of a solution when he found out that thousands of people were going to die because he had bad genes? (Or, more likely, somewhere in between?)

Maybe finding bits of Kovacs's diary scattered around the last mission would help with that?

Also, watch the comma splices. Generally there's not enough text lying around for it to really matter, but you should be careful when you're trying to pull a whole pile of clauses together into a sentence. Commas should only be used to group together things that are already closely related, not to try to establish causal relationships. Otherwise it's a bit of a jigsaw trying to work out what's actually related to what.

Overall - *****. Ultimately this is an arc with distinctive but not overpowering custom enemies and a story that suggests worthwhile actions but keeps me guessing all the way to the end. It could benefit from a pass for refinement, but there's very little in the game that couldn't.

Tonight's arc: Black As Midnight (482914). Verdict - **. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• Random reviews are currently on hold. Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter isn't going to have inexplicably replaced text or characters in it.
• Reviews period will be on hold for about a week as I'll be out of town, but I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

@Glazius

Running this on the original low-20s broadsword/shield scrapper, still +0/x2 with bosses on. I’ll try not to comment on anything that seems like it hasn’t changed.

---

Hmm. Did you change the briefing? This new contact briefing text is kinda hard to read. Too dark.

...for some reason the bug-the-contact text has this this odd “in person” and “cell phone” section that hasn’t shown up yet. The labels on those are very clear but the text itself is still muddy blue.

Looks like the escort is noncombat this time. That’s good.

---

Yeah, not really digging this briefing. Now I have to keep track of everybody’s text colors?

It does kind of a good job of emulating the idea of having an entire squad to talk to, but there’s still the part where I have to reconcile that with only clicking on one guy.

Right after popping Brother Dayless, I run into a demon the Circle have summoned. I manage to take him down with the last of my health and reserves.... and then he self-resurrects?

In the ten seconds it takes to get my mouse over to the rez power, he has completely demolished Brother Dayless. I think perhaps he is pitched a bit high.

...is it the Willpower rez? That one gives you a sizable hit and damage boost after you get back up.

Anyway, the Circle here are working with the black zombies, and I pass by at least one boss-class specimen of them, who has a big maul and... poison spew? Poison is some really potent individual debuffs.

The disciples show up when Tormas is on low health. Pretty sizable group, looks like.

The ending clue tells me that Tormas namedropped somebody called Black Maverick, but I don’t think I was exposed to that name. ...the text color is the same as Raven’s speech, and the Tome of Alteration is the same color as Deadfall’s.

This is kind of a problem with using a lot of text colors: beyond six or so they all run together.

---

Er, hang on. Apparently I can somehow get out of this fog eyes portal cell phone depleting situation and tag back to my contact?

It’s kind of a shame there isn’t anything investigable in the Midnighter’s Club aside from the mask. For setting if nothing else.

The mask is called the Spirit of “Me’tuka”. His description mentions something about those who walk the easy path suffering the consequences. For some reason I imagine this is supposed to be a reference to what he was in life, but the name is completely unfamiliar.

Ah. She. Always hard to tell with these names. And lack of body.

---

Okay, so after the experience in the Midnighters I am apparently teleported to somewhere completely different.

Ah, a pantheon cave... with another one of those willpower demons. Fun.

Anyway, the spirit of death here is labeled a spirit of life that according to its description looks like a feathered dragon.

...uh.

You might actually be able to do that with the feather cape.

---

Still don’t like this map, but it does have one advantage. The end room is closed off so patrols won’t be in there. I’ma just pop on Super Speed and run run run through the whole thing.

On the plus side, the disciples do have that “wisp” aura about them so I can actually see them in this cave.

---

Storyline - **. There’s some good work done fleshing out the motivations and consolidating the enemy groups so that the dark zombies and the shadow Circle and the nether disciples all appear to be on the same page. I do end this arc with a much clearer picture of what’s going on

But at the same time, pretty much the entirety of the briefings and chatter in the first two missions are used to set up the little group of Midnighters who’ve come into Dark Astoria, and the problem with that is that they’re aggressively written out of the story come mission three. They stop mattering.

And given that they’ve only started mattering in mission one, that’s basically only enough time for me to start to appreciate these characters. It makes my getting chosen to guard the barrier between Lifeside and Deadside feel even more contrived since that kinda seems like something the Midnighters might know about or be interested in, but as that plot starts ramping up I can’t really get in touch with them at all.

Design - *. This arc does a lot of great work with visual design and technical features. That’s not why this rating has nosedived.

This rating has nosedived because this arc came the closest of any arc I’ve ever played in the Mission Architect to achieving complete separation of mission and narrative.

I can kind of understand collecting all the clues into one big start clue and one big end clue, from a coherency perspective. But the net effect of all of this is that I followed the directions in the navbar until I saw mission complete and then looked in the clues window to see what I had actually managed to do.

System text and NPC dialogue are both important tools of scene-setting, and they’re certainly used here, but they only stick around as long as the chat buffer doesn’t scroll them off. There isn’t a bright line between the two extremes: the mission as a participatory narrative, and the mission as an obstacle course that must be navigated to receive the next part of the narrative. But when I don’t actually create the narrative through clues as part of the mission, it tends to shade toward the latter extreme.

Gameplay - **. The finale is still the finale as it was. The wisp aura helps a little to pick out the enemy group, but the cave itself is still the navigational nightmare with one fixed solution. There’s no reason not to just stealth to the end and ignore everything, which I’m pretty sure is the opposite of what you want to happen.

Also the new demons with the Willpower rez are insanely punishing bosses, and while technically optional they’re fought in such tight quarters and have such range that they may as well not be.

Detail - ***. Colors, colors, colors. Briefings use fonts that are often too dark and hard to read, and color is used as a pure highlight and an indicator of the narrative source pretty interchangeably, which makes it hard to tell at a glance what a given color is supposed to mean.

There are CoT spectral demons and a Pantheon mask which are notionally on my side, but the Circle and Pantheon models also appear in enemy groups. The demons and the mask are supposed to be something different -- in the mask’s case drastically different -- from just their models, but just having that clarification in the description isn’t enough.

Overall - **. The narrative has been clarified. But it’s been done in such a way as to pull the narrative out of the mission. That makes the narrative harder to follow, as it comes in fits and starts, and it makes the missions less engaging.

Tonight's arc: The Fractured Dreamer (498588). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• Black As Midnight (482914)
• Random reviews are currently on hold. Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter isn't going to have inexplicably replaced text or characters in it.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

CBP. I don’t know that acronym. Coast... Border Patrol?

Anyway, something’s bad at sea, and Mynx is going to cut support while I go out on the water.

Ship’s full of Malta. Hoo boy.

Malta who were abducting a single kid. Well, you have to get the metas young, I suppose. But the op leader had some awfully high numbers in his name. I’m suspecting there are more of these snatch-and-grabs going on.

---

Off to investigate the warehouse that was receiving these kids.

Crey. Well, alright. I pop an experimental subject, who... comes with me to help fight? He’s only a lieutenant. A stray patrol almost wrecks him. ...and there’s another helper lieutenant just a ways in.

I get them to the top floor when something terrible happens. I pull off part of a spawn on the lower half of a split-level room, and once it’s down they go after the upper half. Before I can do much they knock back one of the tanks into the boss room and bring down the wrath of the boss and about fifteen tanks on them.

And then on me.

Oh, I survive it just fine, but they don’t.

I saw something in a previous mission that I thought was kind of nice -- an optional “escort to door” objective that let you drop an ally out of the line of fire. You can’t do it without making the whole ally optional, which would ruin the chaining you have set up, but you could probably get Mynx to radio in at the start of the mission with some basic parameters and hope people will free the “optional” kids so the mission doesn’t look like it completes weirdly.

Anyway, the lab was apparently trying to enhance existing mutant powers. I rescue a few test subjects, including a mentalist who’s rather out of it.

---

And now she’s having nightmares. Well, at least nothing worse is happening right THE CLINIC OF CHARLESTON IS UNDER ATTACK!

By... Carnies after the mentalist. Maybe they just want a psychic for the sideshow? ...yeah, probably now.

They apparently tunneled in to this place. ...either that or there’s some weird therapy sessions going on here.

Mynx is... unescorted, but her objective was present to kick off the map. That’s a change! Usually allies come free right away if they’re not escorted. I guess not all changes were for the worse.

Looks like she got out, but to where is the question. Also looks like Vanessa has been sensing a giant psychic potential, which I suppose was our mentalist. You’d think the people at the clinic would have picked up on that.

---

Anyway, now she’s broadcasting psychic waves that control the easily-led and incapacitate everyone else.

I don’t feel like fighting several entire city blocks of Carnies, so I spring around looking for something notable.

Pink flames around something holding carnies in energy rings. Yeah, that’ll do. Mind/psy dominator who calls ambushes of Carnies that she also seems to be speaking through... but no clues to be had.

...oh. And... that’s it.

So much for leading her out of anything. I was figuring that’d actually happen. Always up for a little Psychonaut action.

---

Storyline - **. So let’s see. Of the five mutant children augmented by Crey, the two with the survival instincts of mayflies are going to be heroes, one dissolves everything he touches, one has senses so enhanced she gets claustrophobia in anything less roomy than a sports arena, and despite my saving the last one twice she’s in a permanent comatose state and will drag the world into a solipsistic vortex if she ever wakes up.

The end! No moral.

Especially since the last two missions are exclusively about the mentalist child and there’s some foreshadowing you’ll be carrying her out of a bunch of monsters, having the arc just end on that depressing note feels like those missions were a waste.

Design - ***. The fourth mission lends itself a lot better to being a lead-in to a capper than being a capper itself. It’s a massive outdoor map with exactly one salient objective. And, yeah, a couple ambushes to make for an interesting boss fight, but it’s just one boss fight.

Also I have to wonder about the Malta. It’d make sense at this level range if they were working with one of the many post-Countess splinters of Crey, but it seems like the Crey are the drivers here, using the Malta as hired thugs -- instead of the Malta using the Crey as hired brains.

I mean, I understand that at this level band you’re fighting high-global or cosmic-level villains. Hired thugs went away a long time ago. You might consider ratcheting this down to 30-40 and using the lower-level redside Carnies; that’d at least give you more potential groups to be on the boat.

Also I didn’t really notice any armor on the experimental subjects. Given Crey’s propensity for AOE at the high band, it was hard enough to keep them alive when they weren’t running off where I couldn’t see them.

Gameplay - ****. The panic trying to keep the kids from getting themselves killed in mission 2 is entirely my own devising so I can’t really ding you for that, but mission 4 really doesn’t feel like a finale.

Outdoor maps are really hard to work with, especially outdoor maps as big as the Steel Canyon Carnival is. I’m sure you’ve been on a team running missions, getting a little momentum going, and then you hit an outdoor mission that sucks it all out. It’s tough finding a balance between enough details to make slugging it out a rewarding proposition and few enough details that one doesn’t wind up in some corner of nowhere, but one boss fight is a little too little to do on that map.

Detail - ****. I may not have liked where the plot ended up, but it was pretty clear how it got there. I do find it a little odd that the clinic staff don’t really have an idea about the mentalist’s capabilities -- and we never really get an indication of exactly how bad things were with the kids who just ran off in mission 2, to boot.

Overall - ***. The ending’s unsatisfying and comes too early. Watching Mynx de-rez into the hologram, and reading the final briefing, felt a lot like hitting a brick wall.

Tonight's arc: Fusionette Incarnate (497003). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

My current queue:

• The Fractured Dreamer (498588)
• Random reviews are currently on hold. Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter isn't going to have inexplicably replaced text or characters in it.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-20s Peacebringer, +0/x2 with bosses on.

---

Oh hey! Hello there forgotten canon contact. I always like seeing this sort of thing.

Some gold miners have gone on strike and the Family is being brought in as strikebreakers. Well, can’t have that in this city.

Ordinary Family stomp with a few Scrapyarders to rescue, and a boss hostage who tells of demon things in the depths.

---

And now we go to punch them, as is only right and proper.

The demon things, I mean. Not the depths.

Stock Fir Bolg, a “banshee” who’s a little sonic blaster, and an ice knight boss, so far...

Also mace ogre lieutenants, knife-wielding goblin and kicking Satyr minions, and a plant/thorns minion. You should be aware that plant/thorns has the unique feature that all its powers debuff defense for a decent while, precipitating a cascade into always getting hit.

Anyway, various miners are worked to death (or nearly so) or killed by caprice. Obviously these are less than optimal working conditions.

Some kind of spider priestess is leading things up in the end chamber. Her name is “InvalidStringReplacement” so you might want to have a look into that.

Critters with twin offense sets, too. Axe/sonic minotaurs, and a fire melee/elec melee boss. ONE offense set is actually enough for full XP on most critters, if you turn custom on but leave the powers unchanged.

…”critter failed validation and melted into a goo”? If that’s an MA error message it’s a much better one than just having somebody turn into a 5th column automaton.

Well, they’ve found some jade thingy that’s probably important.

---

And now based on whatever it is they’re raiding the Midnighters.

Boss in here is a necro mastermind, which is problematic because if a large number of those henchmen connect they can floor your accuracy.

...bother. Get wiped by the (accidental?) Protean Hydra who peels off my flight and resists knockback, and I wind up outside the map when I come back. Self-destruct was made for times like these.

Anyway, I spring the last Midnighter, who informs me of some researcher, and combined with the boss’s earlier rant about the Jade Prison seems to indicate that these characters are planning to drain the Midnighters through the arcane connection.

---

Now, on to the end boss! There’s a warning about Queen Mab who I guess is the optional AV fight mentioned in the description...

Oh. Oranbega. Man, there’s no room to steer clear of anything here, especially in the Oranbega called “Oranbega”, which is all twisty corridors and not much else.

Hmm. The Duchess is a storm/ice EB. Even a Shivan doesn’t really help, and she’s right near the start, because there aren’t a lot of places for things to spawn on this map. The problem is that cold comes with a giant slow and storm comes with more, so if enough connect then your powers turn into little dots and you can’t get away.

Flanking the end room, and in probably a total coincidence, are a fire melee/elec melee and necro/dark boss from the custom group, who appear to have MORE powers than the named bosses of the same type I fought earlier in the arc! At least I know the earlier necro boss never pulled out his Lich, but the Lich is the key to the overwhelming -tohit of necro.

In quick succession I break the altar and free the prisoner, and then head back to the entrance. No sign of the AV, but since I’ve picked up a Living Armor I don’t really look too hard for fear he’ll decide to run off and find her and then I’ll get pasted.

Perhaps she wasn’t actually here at all? Then again just because we’re taking her granddaughter to safety is no reason for Queen Mab to hold anything back...

---

Storyline - ****. Not until the end do we find out what actually went on here. On the one hand this is kind of typical of hero arcs which start with a mysterious happening and then work to get to the bottom of what’s going on. On the other hand, we spend this entire arc doing the right thing basically completely by accident.

Well, aside from saving the miners. That was the right thing done deliberately, but stopping a hostile takeover of an entire villain faction kinda overshadows that. I can’t come up with a way off-hand for the story to be rewritten so that we know what we’re getting into, as nobody who’s involved with this thing is very liable or able to tell us what’s going on in advance.

Also, “Faerie Gold” is kind of a nice title, very evocative, but it stops being relevant when the actual plot picks up.

Design - ****. There’s a lot of variety to the enemy group, both visual and terms of powerset, but it’s all pretty easy to make sense of. I understand the cramped mining caves, but that particular Oranbega map is far too constricted and spawn-restrictive to really work as a final boss location. Also you should be aware of the spawn bug in the stock Midnight Club map where a character can zone in just behind the door and fall out of the skybox. You could probably just use the CoV offices as those fit the Midnighter fronts pretty well.

Gameplay - **. But even though the power sets make sense thematically, they don’t combine into a very good experience. Consider the other enemy groups present around this time: Sky Raiders, Family, Warriors, Freakshow. The new annoyance is the Devouring Earth, and their big “trick” is fragile control powers on a minion. The fairies end up being way too high-test for the level range they’re supposed to be used at. Watch out for:

Control powers on a minion. There are often a lot of minions in any given spawn and they can surprise you.

Debuffs on a minion. Again, there are often a lot of minions, and debuffs can stack up quickly.

Overabundance of to-hit debuffs or slows. Not being able to do anything because you have no power icons or can’t hit just leads to a sitting-around-waiting-for-death scenario, and nobody enjoys those.

Two attack sets. The easiest way to give a critter the “right” number of attacks is to select the standard mix you want, then switch the enemy over to custom and take away powers until you’re just at 100% XP or slightly below. You will always be over 100% XP even if you’re taking two attack sets at standard. Critters start every battle with all their attacks recharged so a large number of attacks means a big alpha strike.

Detail - ****. Apparently the weirdness in this arc is part of an overly aggressive filtering system. Said weirdness aside, everything was pretty decent to look at, though with the large number of clues they could stand to be set apart by mission, as often the clue window opens in the middle of a previous mission’s clues when you have a lot.

Overall - ***. The combat is what really drags this one down. The custom group is pitched very high relative to other groups at its level. Correct that and you should be good.

Tonight's random arc: Faerie Gold (95553). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

Randoms I'd played already:

• Too Many Bunnygirls! (101165) Verdict: ****
• Dyne of the Times (6600) Verdict: ***
• Crossing Over (111352) Verdict: ****
• Looks Can Be Deceiving (137657) Verdict: ****
• My Will (136438) Verdict: **
• The Galactic Protectorate - 06 (355068) Verdict: **

My current queue:

• Reviews are currently on hold. Due to the overeager text censor I can't be sure that any random arc I encounter isn't going to have inexplicably replaced text or characters in it.
• I'm still open to reviews by request, for anything you know is working.

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

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

If your arc is coming up this way because of no reason you can see, head to the second page of each mission, where the objectives are and expand all the tabs on the right. That should get everything to show up.

Crimson has decided that popular names are too ambiguous to reflect the truth of the matter at hand and now refers to Longbow as "Freedom Corps", Black Scorpion as "Ernesto Rodriguez" (and his researchers as "Ernesto's Engineers"), and Sunstorm as "Officer Carter". All relevant forces are now at a suitable level of declassification.

The Tsoo "Cloud Guardian" was recently visited by copyright lawyers claiming his name violated a registered trademark. Over protests of his various trainees that derivative popular culture is a part of their cultural identity, he has changed his name to "Cloud Scribe", which he believes reflects his duties better anyway.

The Timekeeper was recently visited by copyright lawyers claiming one of his minions infringed upon the trademark for "Splinter". He attempted to claim prior art by being a timeless force as old as the universe, but they would have none of it.

The name has since been changed. He apologizes for the inconvenience.