Lord Basse
Official Reviewer |
Posted on 01/03/15 @ 06:12 AM
PLAYABILITY: 3
This is a pretty entertaining scenario. It has a fitting soundtrack, an interesting premise and good story build-up. Unfortunately it suffers from bugs and bad balancing in key places. Everything up until the big battle is good: the first quests, where you build up your defences, can drag at times, but still serve as a very natural way for the player to discover his camp for later in the game. The stealth quest, while easy, adds to the variation. The main problem arises when the B&D section begins. You're given a medium-sized army (around 70 men) and you're told to defeat the English before a certain timer runs out. The English then attack with their full might, and after only five minutes of fighting the battle is over. The instructions then say that you have successfully stormed the enemy camp, even though you may not even have left your base yet (I hadn't). Then, after a short cinematic section, you win. The so-called B&D section thus contains no B&D at all. This flaw unfortunately brings down the score quite a bit.
BALANCE: 3-
As mentioned above, the scenario is generally on the easy side: the stealth mission is not challenging at all, as you can just waltz into the English camp through the main entrance without any risk of being caught, and the big battle is over before it can become challenging. That said, there are still difficulty elements to the scenario, and you can't just win by walk-over.
CREATIVITY: 3
Some aspects of the scenario were pretty creative, like the fact that the story was narrated by a Scottish commander as a way to spur his soldiers's morale. As mentioned before, allowing the player to discover the base through a series of simple missions was also pretty clever, even though the B&D bug made sure you never had any use of your scouting. The majority of the gameplay was pretty much standard issue, however: fun to play, but not all that memorable. The soundtrack used both clips from the Braveheart soundtrack and other songs, and the final punk song was an interesting touch (and possibly a nod to "The Nexus"!)
MAP DESIGN: 4
The strongest point of the scenario and probably Possidon's finest work to date. The map has a varied landscape with a central river, two well-designed bases, walkable forests, rolling hills and, where it's needed, good use of terrain mixing. Some parts are a little bare, however, and could've been spruced up with either buildings, eye-candy or a few more trees and bushes. Examples of this include the streets of the two bases and the riverbanks, which consist of two simple lines of desert and dirt 2.
STORY & INSTRUCTIONS: 4-
There have been many renditios of the story of William Wallace. The most famous is probably the film Braveheaert (cloely followed by the AoK tutorial campaign!) This scenario puts a bit of a twist to the story, as it is told by a Scottish commander in a later war. The storyline is easy to follow: the narration is clear and well-delivered, and the dialogue rarely lingers for too long (occasionally it even goes by too fast). The characters are set up well and overall the story is easy to follow. However, some twists of the story really come out of the blue. For example, the scout coming in to say that your base has been overrun (when you can scroll over and see that it quite clearly hasn't been) felt cheap. It would've been better to actually have the English army land and take the city. There are some spelling and grammatical errors as well, but they're not numerous enough to impair the score.
ALL IN ALL: Aside from the bugs this is a solid piece of work, and proof that entertaining scenarios can be made even with the most basic design tools, i.e. the AoK (not TC) editor![Edited on 01/03/15 @ 06:33 AM]
|