OK guys, it's feedback time! I beat the campaign earlier today.
Mission 40, the massed attack on Hiven, was epic. A few notes:
I assigned my fighters to cover the Euryale bombers attacking Hiven's engines. Once the bombers started launching Hegemonia bombs, my fighters got caught in the shockwaves and started dieing rapidly. I started over, this time telling them to form on my wing once the bombs started. Maybe fix this? On the plus side, the Nightmare fighters launching from Hiven's fighterbay got vaporize by the shockwaves too.
I succeeded in disabling Hiven and killing his main beam without loosing any bombers, bagging an achievement in the process. And that's when the fun began. Did somebody say beam spam?
I was pretty surprised to see that we had an entire
superdestroyer sitting in Spica the whole time. But of course that gets explained later.
The part where Hiven stated talking to us was... completely unexpected. He calls Ovidiah a "Mae'vir mind in a human body"... is that just a big compliment, or is it... literal?
Also, since Hiven had no beams left I was able to prevent both the Merdarion and Impaler from taking serious damage. That gave me my last achievement, for a total of 21.
And of course, the obligatory cutscene of Hiven exploding (the music fit it perfectly), followed by an epic victory speech by Admiral Peters.
At this point (the end of Mission 42) I was feeling pretty happy. We shredded Hiven, the Nightmares had retreated, and we had proved, as Peters said, that we were capable of holding our own in a dangerous universe. We'd just destroyed the most powerful alien warship we'd ever seen.
I gotta say, McKinley was right: I liked being p[art of Wolf's fleet. Wolf's Fleet was well portrayed as a competent armed force. They really felt like a well-organized navy that had a good plan up its sleeve.
Sadly, I ran into a bug after mission 42. I had won 21/32 achievements, but instead of getting to play the Bonus Pack of missions, the game sent me straight to mission 43. I decided to play the bonus mission in the techroom before moving on to the final mission of the campaign. Interestingly, despite the fact that I was playing them in the techroom, my loadout and damage carried over between missions as if I was playing them in the campaign. I didn't know the game engine could do that in the techroom; how did you get it to work?
And on reading the Command Briefing for the first bonus mission, I almsot fell out of my chair. Ovidiah had tricked us, SOC, and Hiven himself into playing his game... good grief!
The first mission was a pretty intense dogfight. I was pretty happy to see Mairead and her wingmen- my fighter was critically damaged when the warped in right between me and a wing of Banshees.
The third mission of the loop goes down in my list as one of the hardest I ever played. I kept getting killed while trying to download the data from Bowman- usually it was the Nightmare cruisers at the end that got me. Finally I solved the problem by hiding in the Cerberus's fighterbay once I had already been detected... although I had to come out briefly to attack the engine and buy Bowman time (poor Bowman...
)
Out of curiousity, what's an SCV? Miles seemed pretty upset to see them.
But I finally pulled it off. Two minor bugs in the mission: 1. support ships are available in the comm menu from the start (not sure what happens if you call one in) and 2. there's some ship labelled "scan sensors" or something like that which I can give orders too.
Oh, and on the last mission I took out Bailey with a Scrietzr... whatever you call it
All in all, the loop was fun to play and added a lot to the story, while giving some of the characters like Sentinel and Nesbitt some more facetime.
Then I played the last mission of the campaign, where we shut down the Shivan gate, once and for all. Um... I think the conversation between Miles and Grizzly at the end needs some editing. Grizzly acts like he doesn't know what happened to Jadhav (which he would know if you played the bonus loop) but he and Miles do know about the project to control the Nightmares (which they wouldn't know about unless you played the loop). I think this is the only time in the campaign where the English is problematic enough to actually make it hard to tell what the characters are saying.
Despite the confusion, I got the basic idea: Miles is going to SOC, Grizzly is taking over the squadron, and they both have a lot of memories from the war.
All in all, Shadow Genesis is officially one of my all-time favorite campaigns, and I'm looking forward to the sequel
Positive Elements:
Difficulty. Possibly the hardest campaign I've played yet, but that's due to good mission design rather than bad mission design. Requires quick thinking, strategy, and good aim.
Story. Unpredictable and epic. Despite borrowing a lot of tropes and themes from FS2, it felt fresh and new. Struck a good balance between FS2's cog-in-a-machine story and the heavily character-driven plots of some other HLP mods.
New ships and weapons. They look cool, and some of them rock. My favorites: The Ezechiel fighter, the Excalibur and Titan cannons, and the Penetrator II, Overwhelm, and... the however-you-spell-it missile (I love to use it, I just can't spell it!
) And of course, the Vampire super-fighter. These went well with a new and very difficult set of enemies: Avishags are a pain to hit, Phantasms are absolutely terrifying to fight, Gualis JUST. WONT. DIE. and Elihayuses have "nightmarishly" dangerous point defenses. And don't forget Meshulams.
Gameplay in general. SG succeeded at creating a realistic, strategy-driven combat model that was original, fun, and hard, yet felt like a natural outgrowth of FS gameplay.
And Ovadiah. A masterfully done villian. Even now I don't understand him. Is he in it for the power? Is he on the Nightmare's side? Is he actually genuinely interested in helping humanity? All of the above? Whatever he is, he's a genius. Is he even human?
Anyway, I'd be willing to lend a hand with cleaning up the English for the next patch- as of the current patch it's not really that bad; like I said there was only one part where I wasn't sure what the characters were saying. I'm a native English speaker with good grades- although I don't always try my hardest to use correct grammar on these forums
I could take a couple missions- or maybe some techroom entries- and proofread them if you like.
