igusarov
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 116
Registered: 04-20-2006
IP: Logged
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Re: MetDROiD Echoes (+2)
Finally, I've mastered it.
The most important impression: This hold has a great variety of room completion tasks. Let's see: get a monster on the specific tile, get two monsters simultaneously on specific tiles, simultaneously kill monsters / drop trapdoors / set off the bombs, repeat the sequence, play the tune, find special item, develop a special ability upon training, get-safe-in-15-turns, unusual use of blue doors... And that combined with classical: kill all monsters, trapdoor puzzle, bomb puzzle, tar puzzle, orb-door puzzle, snake puzzle, trap-the-slayer, run-against-the-clock, defeat brained horde. That's way too much variety to get me excited through the entire hold.
When I start playing this hold, the impression was absolutely great. A lot of rooms were opening themselves for exploration as I progress, with hints that there will be much more rooms as soon as I unlock some statues. When some statue turned green, getting to it was a matter of two-three rooms. Medium difficulty battles, good story behind the gameplay, a bonus hold art picture... Also I applaud to the way the new paths are shown - I always know what a new key or a new item has unlocked. In brief, the hold is very player-friendly and offers great fun.
By the time I've explored about half the hold, the impression changed. The amount of new rooms decreased, statues get unlocked in distant parts of explored space. Getting to the next statue became difficult: first, remember which room it is in, then hit "restore" to see the hold map and decide how to get to that level and room, desperately trying to remember which teleport would get me where. And then run to that room. Running to that room is a story... The hold would be much better if each puzzle was accompanied by a shortcut path (or a tunnel) that would open once the player solved the puzzle. Considering the scripting quality, I think that adding such feature wouldn't be too difficult. And that would save players (me, at least) a lot of pointless repeating long sequences each time one reenter a room. And yes, I reentered the rooms a lot. Mostly because I was running around, revisiting all rooms several times in a search for an unexplored path or in a search for a path to the room I want to get to.
There was a moment when I get very disappointed that a very promising hold turned out to be prolix. By that time, I think, I could understand those ones who rated the hold negatively. Not because it's bad, but because it turned out less fun then could have been expected by the start.
Surprisingly, once the blue gates get opened, the hold become very interesting once again. And my impression changed back towards excitement. Once again I saw lots of rooms to explore and new types of puzzles. Some more statues get unlocked, thus providing fast access to teleports and shorter routes around the level. Travelling across the world become easier. Difficulty of puzzles increased, and I really enjoyed them. Especially the slayer and warmachine rooms.
Well... The bottom line(s):
1. Scripting is great!
2. The fact that the scripting is used to add a lot of new goals is even more great.
3. Quality of scripting is great too: no serious bugs found.
4. The necessity to replay solved puzzles is disappointing.
5. Use of green statues to mark unexplored paths is great.
6. No checkpoints in some rooms is sad. Given that each room has to be visited more then once, it's definitely not enough to have only one autosave on first enter.
7. The idea to unlock certain abilities only after training is great. Unfortunately, crossbow and catapult trainings doesn't quite fit the hold and story style.
8. Hold is great. Geomatrx, please don't take my criticism by heart.
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/dy
