There's been another T2 FM released for the Summer Contest, and I just had a run through it.
"Roofs of Gold" has Garrett falling for the old Troll's Breath trick at the bar - drink that one drink on the menu that knocks you out cold, then wake up with all your stuff stolen. With Garrett being the Master Thief, that's more than insulting.
The map is just this one small courtyard, but look up and you'll see where the challenge of the mission lies. It's a vertical dance-on-ledges and climb in through windows affair, and it does that pretty well...except when it's being a douchebag and denies you from mantling on a few ledges ON PURPOSE.
The mission's biggest fault is a rather big one - it's Really Fucking Annoying to play. You have no gear, not even your lockpicks, yet it won't take long to find lots of locked containers scattered about. One lockpick can be found pretty early on, but only ONE lock can be opened with just that lockpick - you have to find the other lockpick to open all the rest, and where's that located? At the highest point of the FM, for which you need to either find a rope arrow or make one hell of a running jump. So this FM has a Metroidvania approach to how things are done. You need to get past the rope arrow/running jump spot to find your blackjack and the sword is found in the first container you come across, but requires both lockpicks to open. That means that there's a lot of backtracking involved which gets very tiresome very quickly.
But by far the most annoying aspect of this FM are the jump scares. You read that right, jump scares. Loud noises are played at certain locations in an attempt to create "atmosphere" or "suspense". There are dummy mannequins EVERYWHERE and they're most often up to no good. You can get flashbombed in the face, have arrows and other things thrown/fired about and at one time hostile critters are spawned in the previous room just for a laugh. The problem with these jumpscares is that they're too many and too predictable, they wear out their welcome too fast. The only time I smiled through the whole FM was when Garrett said "I've had enough of this" while crawling along a ledge high up - I knew exactly how he felt.
One final point of annoyance that I feel is best to inform taffers of before they try this mission - right near the start there's an unfrobbable door that seems to do nothing. But examine it closely and you'll find four small bowls on the walls beside it. You're supposed to find four coins throughout the mission and then use them here to open this door and proceed to the final part. These four bowls are very hard to see because they're the exact same colour as the wall they're hanging on, another deliberate design decision that does nothing but annoy players because there's no hint or clue about this door.
Readables are basic and could be better, but at least they aren't confusing and get the job done.
Overall? It's hard to recommend this one. It's fun to explore the place, but actually getting anything done is just painful. The annoyances of the mission make it more challenging than your average FM, but that's meaningless if the player is too pissed off to want to continue.
