CoHMR Aggregator (a review thread)

Already sent in "Hammer and Sickle of Paragon City", arc 351727, and awaiting acceptance! Hope you guys enjoy it when you get to it!

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-teens broadsword/shield scrapper, old Heroic difficulty but with bosses on.

---

"Someone has a problem that's generally beneath the notice of heroes. Can you investigate her? I'd do it myself, but she's beneath my notice."

Are you sure that's how you want to start things out, contact?

Well, this is a roughly street level arc, so let's do this.

(also "coughs" doesn't take an E, first paragraph)

Oh. The actual mission briefing is in the opening clue. That's... something I haven't seen done before. Mostly because I've been habituated to the mission being set up in the briefing, so in this case mission 1 would be stalking the streets of/an abandoned warehouse in Kings Row to find the person who needs my help.

Parking somebody as a hostage on the first floor of one of those office-to-underground maps might work?

And the busy message seems to indicate my contact has plot cancer. Joy.

The map is a pretty standard Lost warehouse. The shrines to their Rikti overlords are a nice touch.

The end boss talks about the "teacher" who gave him his powers, but I don't get the clue for defeating him until I look behind the crates to find a minion who's been hiding. It seems sensible to make the objective boss-only.

Ah. Dude I was looking for drank the kool-aid. That's a thing that happens.

Oddly enough, interjecting the contact dialogue with my character's explicit responses feels more invasive and less genuine than that old Ninja Gaiden standby, "...".

---

Interesting. Isaac is not gone, only changed.

(also this is the point where the names became familiar so I went looking after badges, and I've got the history plaques open in another tab)

Interesting use of... what, is it ally/nearest door with the "out of range" text set?

But given the cultish nature of the Lost I can't imagine "why is it screaming like that?" is an appropriate response for them. At the very least use "he", but it needs to be wrapped up in prettier language. "Brother! The ordeal will being you closer to the gods!" or somesuch.

Another group with an earlier transformation refers to the victim as a "specimen". That's even worse.

I can appreciate wanting to have multiple sets of dialogue on the captives, but both the early and late transformations gave me an identical clue when I intervened.

Minor typo in the barrels: "You find the barrel itself immensely heavy as you lift of it's rusting lid..." should just end "lift its rusting lid".

Also you'd think after the fourth barrel or so I'd stop being horrified, but the system text begs to differ.

Anyway, I defeat Ishmael but he teleports out, dropping a device which I... somehow understand to be a psychic dampener?

Maybe it can be a jury-rigged one stolen from DATA that still has the label on it.

Hang on. The debrief says that my contact was heading for the monorail sewers, but that's where I went.

---

Next briefing is a bit hard to work within the admittedly imperfect model of the MA - the "busy text" can be seen at any time after you've taken the mission. Makes it awkward to work out what to do with it in cases when your contact comes with you.

Names need to be set off with commas in the dialogue. This includes pronouns and epithets like "child".

Huh. My contact's a psyker. I would have expected, y'know, COLD.

I frob a bookcase and find an assortment of books. Listing their titles in the clue might paint a better picture than discussing their subject matter.

One boss with dialogue on getting whittled down with a clue to drop was fine. I've found two other copies of him on the way up, though, which approaches overkill.

One of the bosses (a Pariah model) makes a threat on my life, and the clue on defeat mentions the building getting bombed. Seems that'd be better in the system text, especially as the clue itself is fourth from the bottom in the list of clues.

(Clues appear in the same order on the clue screen as their associated objectives do in the mission design. Objectives can be dragged and dropped to rearrange them.)

---

Interesting progression. The building doesn't come down right away, so now it's a race against time to get out.

...I was expecting more of an abandoned office look than a CoV one.

I find four bombs kicking around the first room. They've been shielded, but my contact suggests relocating them to blow my way out.

Did you want them to be nearly invisible against the walls and cave floor, or was that just an unhappy accident?

I find some hostages, mostly in the caves, then get notified there are more of them -- must be topside, so I head up there.

And after that, or perhaps after I rescued the Grimm Fairy in an unheralded objective in the end room, I have to place some number of psychic inhibitors? In bookcases?

Ah, reading the clues I can kind of see what you were going for? But CoH isn't set up to do the kind of "we can tell how you completed the mission" thing you have going here.

The contact is apprehensive that we may have to off the pariah, but she certainly didn't give me any warnings about treating him gently in the second mission -- or the third, for that matter.

---

Okay, so this is the last mission... we're at the facility in Kings Row, I guess? Usually the opening text has at least paid lip service to the city zone we're operating in. When the CoT mage spoke up about the tower the Lost were building in Perez Park I thought that's where we'd go while the Freedom Phalanx saved people in Kings Row.

The navbar has two identical "find information" objectives. Was there a problem with plurals?

Ah, that's right. The facility the Freedom Phalanx went to was in Atlas Park. One of the clues reminds me of that.

...and I'm getting the "whispers in your mind" clues in all kinds of a mixed up order.

It'd be nice if in addition to different names, the bosses had slightly different dialogue.

The final boss pulls some interesting bits, summoning visions of "Isaac" with no attack powers as distracting images. He goes down, and then a boss vision of Isaac appears, with the objectives "Kill Isaac, Strike the Final Blow".

So I kill the boss vision and then assume that last means to hunt down all the decoys.

Except since they have no powers they scatter to the four winds.

And some of them can fly.

And I have Super Speed, so no vertical mobility. Or range.

And it turns out taking out the decoys doesn't complete the mission.

I head back down and there Ishmael is, in front of the other elevator. Along with a gunner who looks like he's flying. What emote is that?

Pff. "Read the clues". Thanks, exit text. Did that already. But it'd be easier if they didn't go 7-1-4-2-3-5-6-8.

(That's about 5/7. I don't know why I remember that.)

As it turns out, all I did was flush him out so my contact could take him down. Chaos, rioting in the streets, dogs and cats sleeping together, et cetera.

I just get to lay the body to rest.

So, uh... where's the three? Forms of the final boss? City zones the arc takes place in? Average number of chained objectives per mission? Blind mice? What?

---

Storyline - **. History plaques this arc contradicts?

So here's the bright history of the Ishmael affair (as told in the plaques for the Intellectual badge). Ishmael experiments for months to try to work out a way to control the minds of the entire city. Eventually he's thwarted by a solo heroine called the Grimm Fairy, who submerges her will long enough to come under his control and track him down in Kings Row. After his arrest she realizes the horrific extent of his operation, and a task force of heroes liberates the prisoners from a Lost test facility in Atlas Park and finds his planning center in Galaxy City. Sister Psyche gives the city a good psychic loofah with the end result being a slight general inclination toward conflict in Perez Park. Ishmael is explicitly called out as captured, rather than killed, and the Grimm Fairy survives her confrontation with Ishmael at least long enough to talk to Positron. She's not called out as "former" either, which you might expect of someone who's dead.

Now, I could buy this arc trying to be the dark history that the city covered up. It could address this, or try to, in the souvenir, but it doesn't. The souvenir is basically my contact's obituary.

Which brings me to the big problem I had with this story, canon issues aside. I am basically the Grimm Fairy's sidekick. What I can do in the missions isn't much compared to what she can accomplish. The first mission is something she basically fobs off on me while she's off doing more important things. I then blunder into disabling Ishmael's psychic blocker so she can actually track him. She jets over to Galaxy City, stops the building from collapsing, and works out escape plans. I do the grunt work. And even when I'm free to operate on my own in the final mission, Ishmael considers himself beyond me, but she punks him off-screen.

Design - **. There are a lot of good ideas in this arc: an ancillary contact, the use of "ally captives" to call out plaintively in the second mission, the fourth mission taking place in the wrecked remains of the third, a mission with alternate paths to its completion (blow a way out vs. intercept the bombs), and a final boss who summons up images of himself to serve as decoys.

I hate to call somebody else out for something I've definitely been guilty of (and heck, may still be in violation) but not all of these ideas can actually be realized very well, or at all, in the Mission Architect. And ultimately, you write the arc with the editor you have, not the editor you wish you had, and that means some ideas can prove unworkable and need to be abandoned.

For all my contact talked up the ancillary contact -- Isaac's sister Abigail -- she was a preface to the first mission and then never seen again. Aside from the single hole in the floor, the fourth mission looks in even better shape than the third, mostly because of the different color palette. (I was expecting something abandoned, but admittedly I've got no idea if there are abandoned maps over anything that isn't Rikti caves.) I can't speak to how the "alternate objective" might work, as its apparent mechanism (rescue Grimm Fairy, click some glowies) wasn't acknowledged on the navbar and the mission completed in the original manner before I finished it. And the decoys certainly confused me -- into unnecessarily chasing them all down when the fight to complete the mission was actually one floor back and around some corners.

The saying goes "it's better to aim high and miss than aim low and hit". In terms of self-improvement this is certainly true. But what I see playing arcs is the result, not the process, and from my perspective a miss is still a miss wherever you aim.

Gameplay - ***. Taking out the decoys in the final mission (though ultimately unnecessary) was a return to the nightmarish days of chasing things as a melee class. Anybody remember that? Melee attacks had no range, so you had to queue up an attack and hope you could park yourself in the way of an enemy so the server would register it in melee range when it bumped against you? Those were the feelings I had when two dozen decoys all decided they'd rather be somewhere else.

The fourth mission was a bit of a pain too, what with trying to find spots against the brownish-orange woodwork to plant brownish-orange transparent bombs, and backtracking out of the tunnels to find some more hostages. For... some reason that was never really made clear.

Detail - **. There's a lot of detail. Sweet Christmas is there a lot of detail. But it's got more than two problems.

First, it's out of order. This is the easiest one to fix now that you can reorder objectives. This shows up in two places I could remember. The taunt from the Pariah about the bombs going off was scrolled off the clue window by two more objective clues and a mission complete clue about the manuscript he was carrying, and my clue window isn't exactly teeny. Knowing there are terrific explosions happening around you is kind of key to the plot progression, so I would have figured that for a mission complete clue. The more egregious one is Ishmael's piecemeal ranting, which as I documented is all broken up and out of its intended order. There are probably more examples than this but I didn't really notice them because of the second problem, namely:

There's just too dang many clues, and some of them are huge and irrelevant. Abigail's prelude to the first mission is one of them. Isaac's journal (big enough to be an end mission/start mission pair) is another, as it's an extended mix of his piecemeal rant in the clues of the last mission. The genuine duplicate clue in mission 2 is a smaller example, and the Grimm Fairy's piecemeal commentary on her escape plans in mission 4 tries to play tricks with chaining objectives to get itself some extra space.

And the third problem, also of the "aim too high and miss" variety, is that the detail often worked at cross-purposes with itself. Take the second mission, with the Lost hostage guards considering their fellow Lost to be lab specimens, "it"s -- things, instead of people. I realize there is no subculture so reviled by the mainstream that it cannot itself find an internal subculture to revile even stronger, but that dialogue just took the seeds of sympathy for the Lost planted in the first mission and scorched the earth. Then there's my contact, or rather, the green text that showed up whenever I talked to her. Here's a tip: the easiest way to get me to stop caring about something is to narrate at me that I do care, or that I should. The most hilarious example of this is when my contact pauses and the narration interjects that for various reasons I don't interrupt. Really, narration? I've sat back and let Operative Vargas natter on at me about proactively synergizing my core competencies, but all of a sudden you feel compelled to justify my lack of interruption? I realize that the arc expects me to care about my contact by the end of it, just in time for her to bite it, but if you can't just sell that with her dialogue on its own, then narrating at me that I do care after all is just going to have the opposite effect.

Overall - **. This arc is very ambitious, but in its attempts to overstep the bounds of the Mission Architect it trips and falls, and in its attempts to be cinematic it often makes me feel like more of an audience than a superhero.

Aside from reordering the clues and paring back on some of the less workable mechanics, there aren't many hard and fast fixes. The reality is that Ishmael almost mind-controlled the entirety of Paragon City and the Grimm Fairy soloed him. A player hero who's a direct participant in that kind of story is going to wear the Second Banana hat, barring impressive continuity gymnastics. One possible out is not to make the arc about that story, but about the Grimm Fairy, the player meeting her on patrol in Kings Row, maybe helping her pull free of Ishmael's control, and then participating in the cleanup, with the revelation of the true nature of the Lost saved for the end, after which the Grimm Fairy gives up her mask and the player hero would rather not be immortalized as an accessory to what went on.

I'd just like to basically make a post held for future editing, as I got some really bad news today which basically tells me my time has been grabbed by the proverbial balls for, well, a while, so it may take me some time to respond to your criticisms. Regardless, I'll try and make some time to reply by the end of this weekend.

Tonight's arc: The Hammer and Sickle of Paragon City (351727). Verdict - ****. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a high-30s archery/energy blaster, +1 x1 with bosses on.

---

Hmm. The giant orange paragraph at the bottom of the briefing... why is it orange? Colors are good for emphasis, but I think a block that large is some kind of other conversation. This is my contact saying all of it, right?

So some custom psiblaster has stopped being a Crey test subject just in time to meet some heroes on a routine mission. That's unfortunate.

---

Okay, now we go mind-diving to try and figure out what's happened to Hammer's partner.

Hmm. Looking through a file, it seems like Toxin was making a deal with Crey to pick up some illicit chemical weapons?

The tech my contact borrowed this machine from is in here. I would have appreciated a heads-up.

The refrigerator drops a line into the system text on completion which is, basically, its clue. Seems redundant.

Toxin rants about poisoning my mind. Wonder if Crey just wound him up and turned him loose.

---

Hmm. So he can project neurotoxins now. Somehow. Also he got the chemical weapons but couldn't get any ammo.

Unfortunately by the time I get to the university the 5th have made it out with the chemicals and left another Soviet expatriate to cover their tracks.

(Dude shaves off a big chunk of my health just with throwing knives. Hate those things.)

---

My contact warns me that there's a catch about the A-Team-styled guy he's sending in. But the catch is... New York Sickle will be there at some point?

I thought the catch was that I'd have to break him out of the Zig or something. My contact does seem to warn me that this guy might betray me, but that's more of an afterthought than a natural progression of the "slight catch".

Oh! He's a Council agent! That would have been a nice thing to learn in the briefing. Nice bomber jacket on him, too.

As soon as I grab the guns, the dude goes for a backstab. I get a little time to pelt him so he's not too overpowering.

Halfway through the ship I find a whiteboard with the ship's destination marked on it. And... that completes the mission?

Yeah. Rest of the ship is empty. Dang.

---

Chemical weapons contained, it's time to free Sickle.

I find a lab on the way, which is probably the antivenin mentioned in the opening.

Sickle talks about how she knows the truth about the Column and their attack on the Council, but that seems to be generic patter as she never lets on to us what that truth is.

And yep, lab needs clickin'.

---

Storyline - ****. Simple story, solidly told. The subplot about chemical weaponry provides a nice little mini-boost before the final fight.

Couple things bug me, though. First, I thought the simulation in the second mission was set up to find out what happened to Sickle, not investigate Toxin's Crey experience. We could do that even without a simulation.

Second, for all that the Council/5th conflict features in this arc, it never actually spills over into the missions, aside from the extremely temporary ally on the cargo ship.

I'd say run a sim as Toxin fighting some Council and finally capturing Sickle, during which time we find out about the weapons and that Sickle's on Striga... somewhere. But that's just me.

Design - ****. Overall, good choice of maps and costuming. Couple things about both, though.

Toxin... the name honestly conjures up black and green more than it does white and red. White and red are Longbow colors, and seeing Toxin in them just makes him look like some kind of demented candy-striper.

On a more minor note, American Hammer's American hammer needs some red or blue highlighting.

Something you should be aware of with the university map is that it's all so close-quarters that a boss chained off a glowie click can spawn in right around the clicker. Maybe they should both be on the map from the start?

The whiteboard about Sickle's location can be there from the start too, on the cargo ship. And... was it in the middle of the ship for a reason? Lately I've been ending a lot of cargo ships early, so I wonder if something's bugged somewhere. I can see the reason behind not wanting to put someone through the entire cargo ship experience, but at the same time with the way tickets work I like to know when a mission's going to complete. Generally I don't expect that clicking a glowie in the middle of a map is going to complete a mission.

Gameplay - *****. Pretty solid stuff, with the custom bosses interesting but not overpowering.

My one minor gripe here is that Hammer and the Mechanic can both nearly one-shot a minion, which is partly a function of tanker sets having such a big damage scale and as a result, at least in Hammer's case, not something you can address. Maybe you could make Mechanic a bots mastermind but with just the laser rifle, or something along those lines.

Detail - ***. I can kind of understand the reason behind highlighting an entire paragraph in the briefings, but I've got a couple of problems with it. I'm used to orange being something of a warning color, like for elite bosses or a minimum team size or a timer. And blocking an entire paragraph off, rather than a single sentence, indicates to me at first glance that there's something in the paragraph separate from the briefing -- like that warning. Since the highlighting is the "most important" stuff in the briefing it doesn't really work well to single it out as separate.

Many of the clues in this arc were what I'd call "yellow boxes". Basically some narrator breaking in and talking about what's going on. That doesn't really sit well with me -- I'm used to clues representing concrete things that my hero keeps or remembers, and narration's a little more transitory. It isn't always relevant in the way that many clues are. If you want to keep the style you have going then you should have the clues be, or include, things that the relevant people have said, rather than a description of their actions. It also helps to ground the clues, in terms of where they were found -- for example, mention in the antivenin that it was found in a 5th Column forward base on Striga Isle.

Overall - ****. A very accessible arc that sometimes plays with my expectations, but not in the good way.

Last night's arc that I fell asleep after playing: War Against the Undying One (91044). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

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

---

So here's something you missed while you were away: contacts can have their own descriptions! Yes!

Anyway, it's time to pretend I'm playing that fantasy game that's got dwarves in it. You know which one it is, I think it's called ALL OF THEM.

Also new wrinkle: opening clues. You can actually give the rune thing as a clue passed to us by the contact.

Oh hey, villain-palette blue caves.

For a second I wonder if the vines are what you needed, but nope. SHROOMS.

They do definitely add to the atmosphere, but if you're just using them as allies to fill in it doesn't matter if they con grey or not.

(also new: you can set arcs to be whatever level range you'd like, though it won't scale up enemies)

Also also new, you can edit the descriptions of enemies you use in custom groups.

I was expecting a clue about the rune key on complete, but nope. Briefing on the dwarves.

I hear some goblins up ahead, but they run into the local flora and die horribly.

For a second, before I checked out the briefing again, I thought the monument up front was telling me that my contact's uncle died in the centuries he's been away. But no, different Dwarven name, wrong timeline.

---

Okay, so this time I actually have to fight. I skipped the dwarves last mission since it was recommended against by my contact.

Now... build up on the lieuts? Ouch. Also new: you can pick which powers enemies have precisely, so taking Aim and Build Up off your rank and file is recommended.

Also also new, mission pacing actually works, so unless you want your mission to start out with swarms of greens I suggest you see to that.

Have these shield guys got phalanx fighting or grant cover? They seem to have a lot of defense when they're all clumped together.

Damn. Between the earth control and the radiation infection, if the Rune Maidens can land enough stuff on me NOTHING ELSE CAN MISS. Seriously, they're all swinging at 95%. And I'm down around 50.

The king is just an ordinary boss of the faction, which seems a little off. I fought several of them to get here.

No clues at all about what happens after I sit on the king and read at him.

---

As is customary among his people, the king demands that we accomplish his fetch quests before he fights the ancient evil that will end all reality.

Wonder what this armory looks like.

Oh. More Roman caves.

Plant/storm. Odd mix for a subterranean critter. Also, Carrion Creepers are a bit bugged when enemies use them and tend to follow you around for several minutes.

The alchemist poison also seems to zero out my defense.

Blacktooth is at least an elite boss, and a decent slugfest. There are a bunch of glowie chests kicking around, some are empty, some full of weapons and armor I collect...

But still no clues.

---

Next fight looks like it's going to be another warlord fight, though, which doesn't get me very excited.

Oh. Blue cave.

Yeah, I know that this arc is about good old-fashioned dungeon running and there aren't many authentically medieval settings (which is a shame, we need a Castle Doom to storm at some point) but caves aren't many people's favorite.

At least there's no layer cake.

This map's goblins have been supplemented with Pantheon Zombies and Tempest Elementals. The boss, though, is another fighty type. I was expecting like a necromancy mastermind or something. He's got battle axe and build up, which means I spend the first 15 seconds of the fight trying to stay out of range.

The altar could use a custom description. It summons some reflavored Lanaruu when it breaks apart, and that's all. No clues, no exit text.

I haven't gotten a clue since mission 1.

---

The Red Delve, huh? It's... another villain blue cave.

No Troll tunnels? No Arachnoid caves? Those things are pretty cool.

The "trolls" are DE rock-monsters, which are alright except didn't I see them in the Creatures of the Deep too?

...in fact this is exactly a red palette-swap of the last map. Wow.

Oh. The king has come. ...alone. Now that doesn't seem right. Maybe he could talk about how the beasts killed his guard or something.

If this is king in the Discworld sense of "mine foreman" it'd make a little more sense for him to be out here but I thought the dude was pretty important. I mean, he's the same mob type as the runemasters, just call it a guard captain and we're solid.

The end boss is a stone/stone tanker. Once I maneuver through his mud pots to get to the cairn, the king and I take him down pretty quickly.

---

Storyline - ***. I wouldn't be surprised to see this exact quest chain in a fantasy game. Verisimilitude aside, though, there's something this arc really doesn't do that I would expect it to, as a first arc in a trilogy: set up the Undying One and the threat he poses. Not in terms of things said by my contact, in terms of actually fighting the guy's minions or learning his plans.

Unless that was an altar to him I busted up in the fourth mission, in which case that needs to be a little clearer.

Design - ***. CAVES. So many caves. So many teeny little passages. And the last two of them were identical save for the color choice! You could probably use the Arachnoid caves for one mission outside the dwarf tunnels, and Oranbega would make a serviceable dark temple. The customs were pretty visually distinctive -- no complaints about looks.

Gameplay - ***. Powersets, though, that I have complaints about. The tremendous defense debuffs on the Rune Maidens and Alchemists aren't much fun to handle, and Build Up is very overpowered on customs - unlike heroes where it's a 50% damage increase because our powers are already enhanced by 100%, custom villains start with damage on par with hero enhanced damage and get another 100% on top, in addition to the substantial accuracy boost. With Build Up gone, though, they'd be pretty reasonable.

Detail - **. Getting no clues at all beyond the first mission, even for things I'm supposed to pick up, doesn't help with this. But now that the stock enemies you use in custom groups can have their names and descriptions edited, that's really something you should take advantage of. Especially for the last mission, since your average CoH player is going to know what Trolls are - the big muscly dumb green guys - and may be confused at the animate rocks they've already seen walking around as random creatures of the deep.

Overall - ***. Even with the stock mobs getting some different names and descriptions, and the defense debuffs being a little less punishing, there's still no setup in this first part of the trilogy for the threats in the later part, and that's something I would have liked to see.

Woops, I forgot that it was only the lichen, not the vines... yeah, sensible enough, changing that. Der.

Design: Well, it's pretty much a 'dungeon delve' oriented arc, so it's going to be caves. Though the last two caves... yeah, that I missed -- I had been swapping a lot of caves trying to find one that was long enough but not too long. Arachnoid, maybe one of the spider caves. Mmm. The CoT tunnels get used later, but may be worth using them earlier. Thanks for tips.

Gameplay: As for build-up, fair enough. I had heard horror stories of what happens to XP if you remove things (at least until I17), but perhaps I worried too much.
As for the warriors (dwarven minions), they don't have anything but straight standard shield set.

The champions (dwarven lt. fighter types) have phalanx fighting and grant cover. Would removing build up be enough, do you think, or do they need to drop phalanx/grant cover?

Defense debuffs on rune maidens and alchemists are rough, but they are glass debuffers. So to speak. I'm hoping that comes across as 'tactical' rather than 'screwjob'?

Detail: Good points. I had been going down to the wire on arc size when I originally designed it, and had focused on other things. I'll try to flesh things out a lot more.

And fair enough, there isn't much setup for who or what the Undying One is. Mmm. I'll have to think on how to integrate it more.

Thanks for the review!

I could swap rad for fire control... what do you think? If that's still bad, any suggestions?

Tonight's arc: Time and Time Again (365851). Verdict - ***. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, +0 x2 with bosses on.

---

My contact has become aware of his nature as a character in a MMORPG - the Freaks are always going to be breaking in to his building.

Ooh, and he's gave me a thing that I don't know what it does. Those are always fun.

There seems to be a wandering patrol of Freaks on the first level but I don't see them saying anything.

Several wandering patrols. Those things actually count toward the defeat all, or they did last I checked anyway. Bit of a problem if one of them gets painted into a corner.

Still, very vanilla mission to start with, but then perhaps that's the point. The device has done its science so it's time to go home.

Ouroboros is creating paradoxes? Like, deliberately or accidentally? Generally they seem a bit concerned about the timeline and various forces messing with it.

---

Oh. It's not the same mission again? Just when I was all set to go through another time loop.

Regardless, this promises to be interesting!

Quick tip on mission structure -- generally how missions work in-game is that some important part of the mission dialogue, in this case it would be "find out what's happening", is highlighted in light green. The accept text is an objective restatement of the mission goals, such as "investigate the abandoned building".

I go in and -- dang. Menders. Pretty snazzy design and color scheme on them, too.

On the second floor I encounter the mainframe that may complete the mission. I save it for later.

A lot of the mender power sets make some kind of sense, but on the top floor the randomizer spits out ice/elec melee bosses, which both sap the blue bar something fierce and don't make a whole lot of sense together. Energy aura/elec are a little more thematic while preserving the same defense type.

Yep, the glowie on the second floor completed the mission. This is probably another case where a map confuses "back" and "middle" for glowies.

Oh. And there was a silent ambush attached to it. Would've been helpful to know before I alt-tabbed out.

The doctor talks about the evidence I found, though my clues tab hasn't had anything added to it. Seems like a bit of an oversight.

---

The doc wants me to talk with a mender he knows for... some reason? Have they worked together before, are they mutual acquaintances through a hero?

Anyway. I get the feeling it's not going to be a simple chat.

Hmm. Mock combat. But everyone here seems eager to fight me.

Maybe my contact could call ahead to Tesla? I have to admit I don't exactly see my motivation to beat these people down, but if Tesla's in on it their hostility could be an early clue.

So I just stealth up to Tesla. Defeating him and his entourage doesn't actually seem to complete the mission. I clear out the end room, and with the mission still not complete I make one more sweep, wondering if this was a defeat all with an odd name.

Nope. A minion in Tesla's spawn showed up behind a stack of crates. Taking her down gives me the defeat text; I stopped him from fleeing, which a spine scrapper is pretty good at doing. His dialogue did seem to indicate he was making a break for it, but it's a bit hard to tell either way since a lot of knockdown and slow will get an enemy to turn tail on occasion.

Tesla seemed like a normal boss of the faction, which I guess makes sense, but because that last room can put spawns in odd places I'd suggest scaling the objective back to just him.

Apparently there's a splinter group within Ouroboros that just loves them some paradoxes.

---

A cave that's seemingly gone unnoticed. The warren of some temporal mastermind. Wonder who it is?

A snake outline? Holy crap, it's Stheno! Ouroboros is the Snake biting its tail! This is gonna be an epic-

Oh. It's... just a Cobra. Who is, according to her description, a complete mystery.

I return to my contact, only to find the snake has eaten its tail and he has no clue what went on. Very Twilight Zone of him.

---

Storyline - ***. Ordinarily I don't much like arcs that keep you running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place, but in this case it's not so bad because it's the entire point.

The problem is that the links between the missions are a little tenuous, especially the jump between 2 and 3. Maybe Tesla shows up on that footage? But with the clue missing, I can't really tell.

Design - ****. The Menders are pretty great, visually, anyway. But the two lieutenants and the boss all like getting into melee, which can be a little punishing. I've already talked about the weirdness of the ice/elec bosses; what I'm suggesting here is that you swap the fire lieutenant for fire assault/prefers range, and maybe make an alternate, ranged, boss.

Gameplay - ****. The only real letdown was just facing a boss at the end. I've had some great fights with Stheno, and I was looking forward to another one. I think the cobra was actually less of a challenge than the rank-and-file Mender bosses, which seems a bit off.

Detail - **. The mainframe is missing interact text and its associated clue is missing completely, and every mission contains only the single objective necessary to complete it. That's pretty sparse. I'd like to see some flavor - if this is supposed to be a funny commentary on how nothing ever seems to change, have the Menders talk about how some villains accidentally saw Boomtown being constructed or how many people have tried to burn down Perez Park. Give the Freaks lines about deja vu - each successive patrol gets even more freaked out that they're all saying the same thing. Have a wooden barrel full of apples just follow you from mission to mission, for no apparent reason.

Overall - ***. An arc with an interesting and visually solid custom group. It aims at the fourth wall but doesn't take more than a half-hearted swing, though there's plenty of room to expand that.

Tonight and tomorrow night are going to be random arcs from the site, unless someone has something to toss out.

Tonight's random arc: Threefold Rule (197183). Verdict - ***. Review in MA Forums Thread.

I just put "The Christmas We Get" (#356477) into the system a few days ago. It's a seasonal arc, but then it's important to keep the holiday spirit alive all year long.

Set down your green beer and pick up an eggnog, 'cause it's Christmas on St. Patrick's Day.

Tonight's arc: The Christmas We Get (356477). Verdict - ***. Review on MA Forums Thread.

Tonight's random arc: MirrorsrorriM (251306). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a level 50 stone/ice tanker, +1 x1 with bosses on.

---

Well. This is starting out very Indigo/Crimson: a mission described in the most generic terms possible. Not that that's a bad thing.

Even the clues are being generic. Intriguing.

Back glowies show up in the middle; middle glowies show up in the back. This is a generic thing and not specific to your mission. However, it does mean that a canister shows up hidden in a back corner of a cluttered room, so when I expect the collection to finish in the end room I have instead cleared out the entire map and now have to go back and check everything.

---

Huh. So we just sparked a war between the Nemesis and the Malta. Ordinarily heroes work to stop that kind of thing; battles mean chaos, chaos means innocent people in the crossifre.

Also the briefing's kind of weirdly compressed; consider using more double paragraph breaks.

Welp, time for a timed run... oh wait. An hour? That's plenty of time.

...I hope it's plenty of time.

Oh good, indoors.

Heh. I have to admit I was expecting like a Blackrose or something, but this informant works too.

All the safes are in the back. It's kind of a tiny room, so three glowies are really a bit of overkill.

I think you need to put hard returns between the agent's italicized "poses" and her dialogue. Italics aren't too distinguishable from straight text at the default resolution, so it takes some doing to pick them out in the middle of a solid paragraph.

---

Hmm. For a Fifth Column cave these doors look awfully Council.

Huh. A radar room? Yeah, those don't come in Fifth flavor. But wow, that's short.

...wait a second. From my contact's description this was a Fifth base that Nemesis took over. She mentions brass and difference engines. But this place contains only Malta.

So. Reports on Hellions, Crey infiltration, and stolen Vanguard ordnance being prepped for use against civilians.

---

And my contact decides we're... going to look into this Crey thing? Uh... alright, I guess?

"Dr. Renault", on the top floor, is a sniper model. Seems kind of odd for a researcher. He summons a defendable object -- was this arc written before chainable glowies? That'd work better, and it'd provide an opportunity to actually drop some clue about what this boss is that showed up.

---

Okay, so Crey is creating synthetic heroes and planting a bunch of sleeper agents. Bad news for obvious reasons.

Oh. Not actually sleeper agents, just clones of dead heroes. And according to the narration about the weird familiarity I feel and some of the dialogue, it looks like I'm one of them.

Ugh. These bosses are both gigantic slogs. The dark/shield brawler combines powerful to-hit debuffs with considerable defense - he'd be better as dark/dark. The grav/rad kills my regen, accuracy, and damage output, and in addition her summoned Singularity tries and fails to repel me two times a second, meaning for the entirety of the fight I'm listening to its whiny repulsion noise.

I get a clue from Tau, but not from Rho.

And... that's it. The arc ends with my contact guardedly congratulating me for a job well done. So much for a resolution.

---

Storyline - **. This arc spends 3 out of its 5 missions on something that is not what turns out to be the main thrust of the arc, and mission 4 is more in the way of exploratory investigation before the big payoff. That's a bit out of whack.

More out of whack is that the first three missions are relatively light-hearted, with an offbeat contact who makes Aquaman jokes and sends me to save a houseplant from a burning building, and then the arc ends in what I can only call "identity horror", with the ending impression that I may very well have died and been replaced with an exact duplicate that could go homicidal at any time.

AT ANY TIME.

Design - ***. Mission 3 seems to have the wrong enemies (Malta, not Nemesis) in the wrong map type (Council base, not 5th). And while I haven't seen the hospital map in a while I'm not that much more favorably disposed to it. It's a pain to fight in and a pain to find anything in, with a lot of blind corners and geometry that's easy to get hung up on. An ordinary abandoned office would have worked just fine.

Gameplay - ***. It's hard enough to spot an ordinary glowie in a Portal Corps storeroom, let alone an invisible one. That was some hair-pulling to end the first mission. The last two boss fights are a bit of a pain in their own right, the first because it's easy to get trapped in the whiff singularity, the second because the occasional tight quarters even in the end room means it's possible to get trapped in a Repel sound loop singularity. My poor ears.

Detail - ***. Part of the reason this thing ends so dishearteningly is that, not only do the Crey projects present a united front in their belief that I'm one of them (gabbagabbahey), but the system text is pretty explicit - I recognize all of them and the last mission seems like home.

Info windows and system popups are as close to absolute truth as anything you can get in the Mission Architect. Occasionally they're played with as part of some greater framing device. but as a general rule your contact may lie, the enemies may lie, your navbar may lie, but the popups and info windows will always tell the truth, even if the truth is that you're unsure.

There's nothing in the last mission to contraindicate what they have to tell me. No, say, files to find, about breaking hero confidence through creating guards with the most statistically common costume features, or flooding the facility with a pheromone cocktail to evoke memories of belonging on the instinctive level. Nothing that might indicate I'm not a fake.

Overall - **. What this feels most like is two different arcs, with the beginnings broken off and stapled to each other. There's no real room to bring either of them to closure, or even to allow them to develop completely. And while that may not be much of a problem for the comedy prelude, for the horror postlude it leaves a very unsettling impression.

Tonight's random arc: No Good Deed Goes Unrewarded (155312). Verdict - *****. Review lower in this thread, perhaps a few hours on, depending on if I need a nap first.

Anyway, my current queue:

• A re-review of The Skein of Fate (22740), no earlier than March 22.
• Reviews of the next two installments in the War Against the Undying One series, Drawing on the South (98754) and Striking at the Heart (139463), to be done as soon as the author finishes a revamp. (possibly also a re-review of the first arc, depending on how much has changed.