Two. Scarabs. (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, January 04, 2024, 22:42 (113 days ago) @ CyberKN

I've actually always felt that this encounter is a bit underwhelming. Not bad... very good, actually. But underwhelming.

One, it's sort of sloppy. There's too much stuff simultaneously interacting with everything else to have any kind of tight encounter design.
It manages to incorporate a fair amount of real decision-making*, but the mechanics around most of this feel a bit cheesy and forced.

Two, it's got staging issues.
It suffers from the common Halo 3 problem of how to combine the land war with the space war. Two scarabs is a lot bigger than a standard squad of Covenant, but when it's being posed as the last stand of the Covenant fleet, it's kind of "that's it?"
It also has a sloppy setup, with things like the impact sites being super-obviously drawn onto the dirt and snow even before the scarabs land. Furthermore, while it's not the only spot that the game has a pelican awkwardly drifting around doing nothing, it's staged in a way that makes these sorts of things stick out. It's very much a "how the sausage is made" kind of encounter.

*Like, if you grab the hornet, choosing how aggressively to try and preserve the aircraft for tackling the second scarab.