- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
- 352
Welp
Finished Pt2, which I wanted to do before commenting on it. My honest review:
I was hoping that perhaps Pt2 would have had voiceover by now, but unfortunately not.
Except for Samuel Bei, who makes a return at the end.
Could be manageable in some scenarios, but Pt2 in particular is very verbose, including in missions. For reasons explained below, every briefing is also 10-15 screens with lots of text, so it's quite a chore to read through and grasp what you're supposed to do.
I can kind of see why Pt2 hit different than Pt1. Pt1 was the orthodox Freespace 2 battles. but with a lot more drama and a bit of psych and fantasy thrown in. Now in Pt2 you're part of an elite stealth unit that's linked to a neural network, and you perform special missions where other forms of firepower have failed. Real wet work that sometimes involves killing all witnesses, innocents, or craft from your own side to maintain opsec, like Silent Threat or the SOC loop from FS2. Which is a cool concept, but then every mission revolves around a specific skill or gimmick:
- Infiltration behind enemy lines (just as frustrating as a similar mission in FS1 until you figure out how to avoid enemy patrols and AWACS).
- Hacking enemy craft by scanning subsystems.
- Commanding and piloting a cruiser (with your wingmen manning the turrets).
- Commanding a whole fleet in a massive capital ship battle, including artillery. Using your skills accumulated so far to whittle down the enemy fleet, thus earning "points" to call in more strike wings to take down an enemy destroyer.
- A kind of tower defence game with different sorts of turrets on platforms (pretty fun, but then just when you're winning, stealth fighters warp in that will shred the transport that you were supposed to protect within seconds).
In between missions, you fly around in a "dreamscape" where you're neurolinked to your fellow elite squad mates to reflect on what happened and learn what's going on. And you do trainings in the dreamscape to learn the next skill/gimmick for the next mission.
All of these are pretty fun by themselves, but it does mean that most missions are basically puzzles revolving around their central idea or gimmick. There are basically no dogfighting or bombing skills involved. Just lots of frustration if you misplace a piece of the puzzle somewhere. According to the Mrs, I was talking in my sleep last night about being frustrated with these missions.
Then the last mission is another psych horror mindfuck like in Age of Aquarius where you're "flying" in your own mind, trying to interrogate your imaginary friend Ken, who is actually the Shivan side of the Vishnan-Shivan battle over the mind of Nagari-sensitive people. You have to uncover your purpose and the reason for the war in the grand cosmic scheme of things. All the while, Samuel Bei is trying to run interference on behalf of the Vishnans. You have to get out of it without losing your sanity. Which is fine, except the mission takes 45 minutes and you can fuck up and go insane at one point and then you have to do the mission all over again. There are no checkpoints or other ways to skip the revelations you've already seen. At the end, it's revealed that your wing leader/lesbian crush from Pt1 is still alive, so you can choose to either pull back from the brink of insanity, or you can deliberately let your mind be destroyed out of fear for the consequences of having people running around being controlled by alien entities.
Before the credits roll, it's implied that act 4/pt3 will have you involved in squadron fighting again. The Federation needs a legendary ace, a Ghost of Kiev, but real. So I guess we'll just have to wait for that. Although it seems the dev team follows the Tamriel Rebuilt principle of perfectionism, and the George R.R. Martin school of transparency on timelines. So maybe best to leave it alone and come back 5-10 years later and see where they'll be at by that time. Hope the voice actors from Pt1 will make a return. The acting is a bit uneven, but the main characters are all amazingly voiced.
Thanks for taking the plunge, so that I don't need to.
I think your impressions about pt2 pretty much match up with mine, so I'm going to take it as a proof that I was right about the whole thing.
