Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.
@GlaziusF
Running this on a level 50 stone/ice tank, +1/x2 with bosses on.
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So, sneaking mission, weapons and equipment are procure on site. Got it. Lets try not to cause an international incident.
Hmm. Okay, it looks like Ive been set up to cause one anyway. Second sentence of the opening popup should be Something is wrong.
Oh. Malta. What a surprise. I never would have expected. Well, so much for not fighting anybody.
I frob a console to look for clues, and theres no activation message but it sounds an alarm, summoning Renegades, a custom military-style group with ice/device and sonic/illusion lieutenants, and minions I cant quite get a fix on because I need to go Granite and deal out some damage. Ill probably get a look at them later.
For now: kill more Malta.
Another glowie. Its labeled Misc 2 -- you should know that players can see those in the target window so they should get sensible names, unlike, say, patrols and/or ambushes, which can be named whatever.
I find a patrol of minions on the next floor: AR/emp medics and AR/ninja spectres.
All I find is a burnt note about attacking China, written in Korean. No sign of whatever produced the blood trail mentioned in the opening popup. Not even any bodies. Also the glowie is called search for clues. Glowies can have a navbar description separate from their display name.
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More spying, this time to see if China has any clue whats going on, as theyre hovering their national fingers over the big red button and making demands of us.
...impossible demands, actually. Unlike most forms of debt you may be personally familiar with, a foreign government which owns a part of the US national debt has bought government bonds, and the repayment terms of bonds are declared by the bond issuer, not the bond purchaser. In fact, there is a thriving secondary bond market, and China could resell its bonds and net close to their original principal plus accumulated interest to date. Certainly China is free to extort any amount of money to not press the big red button, but our national indebtedness to them is an entirely symbolic figure for these purposes.
More Malta and this new group, including a mind/psy boss who calls a large ambush on defeat. (It should respond with en route. Its entirely a French loanphrase.)
Apparently theyre handling MHIs while the Malta set up global thermonuclear war.
I meet another boss. Earth control, with both quicksand and earthquake. With only rock armor running he manages to take my defenses negative and start stacking them down even further. Granite saves yet again.
The interaction with the last glowie in the mission says uploading even though Im presumably downloading information.
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So someone is planting information that the US is going to attack China and China is going to attack the US and North Korea is going to take sides with both of them. A group of North Korean black ops is apparently involved? But it seems like either way, North Korea would be screwed.
While command tries to de-escalate the situation (note spelling) I go into a Renegade base and try to throw down for info.
The boss is a real handful. Hes a merc/mind EB, who in addition to summoning a complete entourage calls for escalating ambushes at 25, 50, and 75 percent health gone. ...and, completely unheralded, bolts for the exit at 90 percent gone or thereabouts. This is a terrible thing to do, because the fight itself is already a giant slog and he may be bolting down and/or through a part of the final room or corridors leading up to it that hasnt been cleared, because players arent expecting an escape.
I spam my prestige immobilize and manage to catch him up, fortunately.
Su apologizes... to my contact, as he goes down. And I find a letter in my contacts handwriting, which is very odd, because how would I know what my contacts handwriting even looks like? Am I reading his diary on the sly?
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Yeah, Im betting on Moment here, especially since my contact is apparently in two places at once. But anyway Im going to clear his name.
Just a note, the mission title and subtitle refer to prompts that appear in the briefing window, not the navbar - this is the compass active task text. The mission title seems a bit redundant if its just stating the primary objective of the mission.
The boss hiding in the first little corner should be called Whiskey 5, and actually should be called something like Whiskey X-Ray 5-2-4 because the Malta boss pattern for generic dudes tends to go NATO letter NATO letter number-number-number, and he summons ambushes at 25% and no health, meaning double surprise Malta with the Sapper moratorium lifted.
Apparently the Malta are expecting Kim Su here, and his merc group is here as well... kinda odd given that Malta are probably planning to cack him.
Ah. Double ah. The unfortunate thing from a plot perspective with Going Rogue is that it is no mere mirror-universe, but everyone in Praetoria outside of the Imperial City is presumed devoured by Hamidon. So what I am seeing should not, technically, exist. But my contacts mirror-universe self is ice con/psy, which means I get to watch my recharge time bonus get down to about -200%, and thats always fun.
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...oh for the love of little green apples, the Asylum map? I hate this map! I hate this map because its all full up of head-high obstacles with terrible geometries for navigating and I know it off by heart because so many people use it! ...well, not so much anymore. But so many people used it to kick off Architect and its short enough to memorize.
Also how the heck is this guy going to get tougher than extreme ice/extreme psy?
The mission pacing is set up so that the opening room is at -2 to the mission -- and consequently, so is my ally, my ice/psy contact. I realize mission pacing may not have worked when you created this mission, but it sure does now.
And when I fight a +2 boss, he realizes that hes grey to him, panics, and bolts.
Fortunately the end boss is just +1, so he sticks around for that.
You know, when my contacts mirror-universe self said he had a plan, I was figuring there was another nuke hidden somewhere or something, not that he just wanted to have another punchup. He doesnt even call any ambushes.
Oh, and apparently he was only extreme ice/hard psy before, as now he spams shockwave.
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Storyline - ***. Im a little confused whats motivating Kim Su and his mercenary band in this. Hes presented as a North Korean national and operative, but his Renegades are working with the Malta to open up North Korea to invasion by both the United States and China. Is he just disgruntled, or being misled? For that matter, are the Renegades his band, or are they more assembled by and loyal to Mirror Spinks? In a story about international intrigue its important to have a picture of who is on whose side at the end.
And whats Maltas angle in all this? Their previous attempts at instigating Chinese war with America were done to accomplish their twin goals of suppressing metahumans and defeating communism, and the war wasnt an actual war; they planned to use a combination of a shapeshifter delivering belligerent rhetoric and killer nanomachines to make it LOOK like China had struck down American metahumans, and then show up to save the day with their giant robots.
Mirror Spinks certainly seems as though he wants to engulf the world in a nuclear firestorm; this is a perfectly legitimate goal for him, but doesnt seem so legitimate for the Malta, as theyre basically a bunch of Western intelligence operatives gone rogue. Perhaps they were using him until he was half-done, but that doesnt explain why they continue to back him up after hes gone to ground.
Design - *. Surprise failable mission objective.
I feel I should qualify this since Ive brought it up two arcs in a row. Im talking about an objective that causes the mission to fail when its failed, that a player isnt expected to fail (an example of such an objective would be a boss that runs at 90% close to the entrance), that a player isnt warned about it being failable in advance, and that in the worst cases doesnt spout any dialogue that might suggest its running.
Some type of warning, whether in the mission briefing or the navbar itself (for example dont let Kim Su escape!) is pretty much necessary for a couple reasons. First, speaking as someone who can throw around a decent amount of slow and knockback, sometimes when an enemy cant attack for a decent stretch of time they decide to withdraw for a while. So just seeing an enemy move away isnt enough of a hint that its bolting and you need to stop it. Second, knowing an enemy may run is incentive to make sure its escape routes arent cluttered with anything to run into it, as opposed to stealthing it because youve gotten a bit tired of the Malta engineers and their tiny startup time meaning they can summon a gun turret even with a DoT on them.
My other issues are the choice of the Asylum map, which isnt a lot of fun to maneuver in, and the pacing on it, which turns my ally into a -2 occasional coward.
The custom group is pretty well designed, with distinct looks and a decently executed theme. The only sticking point are the minions, who look identical minus the defense auras on one of them, and relying only on particle effects as a distinguishing feature doesnt work very well when theyre the more subtle ones.
Gameplay - **. The enemy group is pretty decent, with only a couple of rough spots. The sonic resonance lieutenants sonic dome gives anybody in her group practical immunity to all shut-down status effects but sleep, which is a bit of a pain as youd want to casually shut down some of the minions and their -def assault rifles or the ice/dev lieutenant and all his slows. The earth con/fire boss has two placed zones and an entire powerset based around defense debuffing, which can cause a cascade effect powerful enough to take my granite form into the negatives. Just Quicksand or Earthquake, Animate Stone, and the single immobilize or hold will do for him.
The huge amount of recharge reduction that the end boss and his earlier form can put out is a bit of an issue. Survival is really not so much a going concern, as if you could survive drilling through his hitpoints then theres really no worry about staying upright however long the fight lasts. But the massive amount of regen means youre attacking much slower and hes regenerating comparatively faster, which just turns the two fights into giant extended slugfests since he doesnt do anything as his health is whittled down. Kim Su, even with his bolting at -90%, is a much more varied fight, because in addition to periodically resummoning his mercs he calls big beefy ambushes as his health goes down. He was actually a much more dynamic and varied fight than either incarnation of the end boss, who was really more of a see how many temp powers you have because your mainline powers are still recharging affair.
Detail - **. Theres a lot of words being used wrongly in this storyarc. In route is the big offender since every ambush seems to say it. En route is not a loanword but a loanphrase -- if you want to say it in English you could go for in transit or on my way. Theres also a general density of text to the briefings that the tiny game font makes a little hard to understand. Consider double line-breaks every couple sentences or so. Dont break the rhythm, but chop things up a little more finely.
The intent of the text is generally pretty good though. The customs get paramilitary bios explaining the original purposes of their supertech, which I thought was a nice touch.
Overall - **. A decent story of intrigue, but plagued by typos and a few plot misfires, with a surprise failable mission objective and several threats capable of bottoming out your defense and recharge all on their own.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
For some reason they deleted my original Post
Red Typhoon
Arc: 4912
Heroic
Malta,Customs
Tension rises in the Pacific after a missile launch by North Korea. Can you deescalate the situation and prevent a nuclear war?
MA Arc:
Red Typhoon 4912
Akhdar Blood Arc: 247198