!!! Possible spoilers in this post !!!I forego spoiler tags, however, as I don't like them. If you want to play it safe, skip this post!
But in contrast prior campaigns, I am simply feeling overwhelming with the sheer amount of STUFF I am being told to do. I felt, well, justifiably pissed off when the mission briefer snarked, "Oh, do you need to take notes?" I'm sorry, but I don't feel that is good game design. I am sure many vets will oogle over the sheer amount of stuff you can DO in each mission, but the main point has to come back to, "is it fun?"
The FREDDING is amazing, the graphics are amazing, the story is amazing. But from where I am right now, the campaign just isn't FUN. It feels like a chore.
Yes, that is what I think about this act, too. Perhaps I'm gonna change my mind if I get to know these missions better in the future, but at this point I hav e to say I'm very much disappointed.
From a FREDding point of view this campaign is, again, a masterpiece. Anyone denying this is either a complete fool or has never used FRED or both. You can see huge loads of work put into this in any single mission. When playing this, you can constantly see why it took years to make this.
Unfortunately
Tenebra lacks of good gameplay. Or let's rather way: Gameplay one expects from a space combat simulation. The first combat mission was okay. It is a rather classic mission with cool new features. I liked that. But all the other missions are more like pressing buttons rather than doing anything else. And that, at some points, was really, really annoying me.
Let's begin with
Everything is Permitted. This mission already suffered from information overload in my opinion. Maybe it's because I'm a non-native speaker or I'm just exceedingly stupid, but in my first tryout I didn't understand at all what's going on. Well, I then tried to kill the target with a Mjolnir. Unfortunately, I never found out what button to press to get the sentry gun fire its beam. This is probably because I had to play on a 1024x768 resolution so not all of the HUD was displayed, it doesn't matter anyway. The mission failed to tell me what button press and that is, I'm deeply sorry, bad design. Again, maybe I'm just stupid and again terribly oversaw something there. Anyway, in the end I used cheats to beat this one, because at some point I was just sick sitting there trying to find out which button to press now.
And this is really, really sorry, because overall I liked this mission. Great stealth feeling!! That is how a cover assassination mission is supposed to look like.
Then the Gef mission. It is cool to fly a capital ship for a change, nice new tools there but in the end it was just about flying into that huge asteroid, kill the reactor, get out again and kill the enemy mother ship if you like. Nothing special about that. To be honest, I liked
The Blade Itself at lot more. This would have been a lot more fun if you would've led a few fighter wings in there. Would have been a great opportunity to fly the Lao'tse fighter, I think. New toys and features are cool to support story telling and improve mission design. Here they replace mission design in my eyes.
Now for
Her Finest Hour. Oh my god, am I disappointed. This mission is NOTHING than pressing buttons. Again a basically great idea and great design, but absolutely destroyed by total overload of information, new functions and new features. I think I tried this mission 15 times or so didn't beat it properly. In the end, I used cheats to beat it. I later tried it with Battuta's tips. It works rather well this way. But what does this tell you about the mission design if you can only beat it when the campaign maker tells you how to do it? Before I read Battuta's post I didn't even realize you can call in the Toutatis into the mission. Also, the artiellery ships stop firing at some point. Why is that? Maybe I would've beaten the mission if they wouldn't do that.
Overall I am having the impression that you need perfect timing and a huge amount of previous knowledge to beat this mission. In Acts 1 and 2 you had a lot of missions where you needed perfect timing to achieve secondary and bonus goals, for example safe those cruisers in
Aristeia, but most of the missions could be done quite easily in the first try.
The last combat mission is... well, you know the drill: Cool basic idea, screwed up by pressing buttons orgy. I really don't understand why you introduced that clumsy interface here to place the turrets. Why not just let the player select a platform on which he or she wants to put a turret and press buttons 1 through 4. 1 standing for mass driver, 2 standing for missile launchers, 3 standing for flak turret, 4 standing for rapid-fire plasma turret, for example. This would have been an easy and effective way to upgrade a classic mission design for something new and cool. Instead you put HUGE amounts of work into there to have a clumsy new interface that totally distracts you from the battle and has nothing to do with space combat.
I don't know what these critics you meantion earlier, Battuta, expect when they play a Freespace 2 campaign. I think Freespace 2 is a space combat simulation and in a space combat simulation I want to take my fighter into dogfight to contest other craft and warships. Not just open up building interfaces and place turrets or just select targets for capship turrets. If I want to build turrets and commandeer warships around I go play Star Trek Armada Fleet Operations or Starcraft 2 or what.
I understand and appreciate your efforts to make covert ops mission feel different from what you saw in Acts 1 and 2. Basically, this worked perfectly. You have cool new ideas for cool new features, but you use way to much of this at the cost a game fun and streamlined mission design. That leads to another weak point in this act: Most of the story is not put forward in actual missions, but only in that dreamscape (which again was a cool idea which you spent a lot of time on) and the last mission, which was too long for my taste, by the way. You probably might want to split this into two, but I'm getting distracted.
Let me point that out in greater depth by using an example from Act 2. In
Aristeia you first experience an epic and cool mission which shows advanced FREDding and uses new features (beam inhibitor, credits to force play to choose which reinforcements to call in, new music) to improve story telling and gameplay. The player is facing a cool gameplay experience here and at the end the main story is driven forward in a in-game dialogue.
In Act 3 you have that Gef mission, for example, in which there is not very much happening, except that you destroy one or two greater targets and, perhaps, two fighter wings. And before and after that mission you are in the dreamscape where there is also nothing happening except flying around and talk to other ships for seven to ten minutes. It is really good that you can skip this, which I did once. Because this is really boring after the second time, even though you might get interesting information; then again it is not important information, because then you shouldn't be able to skip it just like that. Anyway, if I want to just sit there and read text I go reading a book.
I hope I could make my point clear in this grantetly long review. I really appreciate and deeply respect the efforts you put into this. As a FREDder I'm just jealous of what you accomplished. As a player, however, I remain quite disappointed at this point, though I'm still looking forward to see more BP in the future. I hope that Acts 4 and 5 come out soon with new features used more deliberately.
