The Lab is already a tough first area, full of opponents that encourage you to bring less equipment along (lest they destroy it) and practically
require at least one ranged fighter, with the basic encounters and miniboss often being harder than the final boss itself (assuming you're not fighting your personal Stacy, but I'm not sure you can do that more than once? I've only ever gotten Spewer past the first run, and he's a pushover)... but then you get to the Ice Age, and shit gets tedious really fast. Basic enemies now have 40+ health by default (or a multi-attack that inflicts a stack of bleed per hit), you're rarely going to be fighting fewer than 7 of them at a time, and something like half of them can inflict either freeze or slow on you. Neither of these conditions are particularly scary-- just really fucking annoying, as they just let you play the game less (take away your movement/turn/both and any healing you can dole out) and often drag fights out no matter how good you are. I had a pretty cracking team that could sweep most enemies in the first round, yet I rarely ended an Ice Age encounter within less than 3 or 4 rounds just because of the incessant Slowness spam. (I wasn't lucky enough to roll debuffing on my Cleric, either, so I had no real method of mitigating this.)
To be fair to McMillen: he planned around this. There are a shitload of items you can get in the Ice Age that nullify freeze outright, and some that even eliminate the possibility of injury so that being stunned/frozen/immobilized doesn't immediately lead to a cat getting injured.
I don't really think it's good design to make these new items near-mandatory, really, but the fact that they're there at all is good. But I truly don't think he did enough to mitigate just how fucking annoying those conditions are, because
every fucking boss I fought dragged on past round 10. Not because my team was unprepared, not because I was planning poorly, but because the fucking bastard miniboss had a screen-wide freeze-inflicting knockback attack that inflicted Slow 2 for SEVERAL TURNS ON EVERY HIT. Since I hadn't brought a Hunter or a Psychic along with me (i'd gone Cleric/Druid/Necromancer/Tank), this meant I was basically screwed-- even
with freeze-nullifying gear on half my team-- and had to sit there hitting nothing with most of my team while desperately maneuvering my retarded crow towards the boss (that would then bounce it back before any of my cats could get to him, because this ice-cubed bastard would take two turns for every one turn a cat took). Even the irritating Flintstones parody that spammed bear traps wasn't anywhere near as annoying as this (even though it was part of the problem, due to restricting your movement nonstop if you didn't kill the baby first).
Worse, still, is the final boss-- Lord Bunga. He himself is not much of a threat. He has two big soldiers that have 100HP each, and he has about ~300. You can target all three from the first turn of the battle, so it's not like a phased thing where he's untouchable until the mooks are dead either. The worst part about Bunga is that
he randomly inflicts concussions. All of his attacks involve smacking your party with clubs, but only a specific kind of smack (which seems to have the same animation as another default smack, or I'm just not paying enough attention) will inflict one concussion for every hit. The same attack that inflicts concussion also has a 2x2 area, meaning multiple cats can get concussed at once, and he also knocks you back while doing it. Given that he counters most melee attacks, this becomes a giant problem really fucking quickly. I have yet to fight him without at least one party member going to 0 Intelligence from at least 5-- some have gone into the negative, and my most recent run had half my team getting taken down to 0 from 5 and 7 respectively.
With this in mind, the Jurassic becomes a pain in the ass afterwards-- not due to annoying enemies, of which I've only really found one in very specific circumstances (the Pterodactyls can be very annoying if you've got any team members on low health), but due to a not-insignificant portion of your team now being forced to rely on pretty much only their basic attack. Unless your Cleric has a specific passive that grants minuscule amounts of mana with each heal, or your Druid rolled a similarly pathetic mana-restoring ability, or you brought along a Hunter that restores mana on kills, or you're reckless and want to kill other members of your party to give your Necromancer any mana, you are fucked. You will either have next-to-no mana for spells or none at all. Most injury-healing consumables won't help-- they only heal one injury at a time, and Lord Bunga almost never leaves you with less than 4. They're a patchwork solution at best, and so rare that they usually aren't worth wasting on Bunga concussions. So most of your events will look like this:
Which is very funny when you first see it, but gets old fast if you're not doing very well...
And most of your fights will be drawn-out slogs that could've been solved much quicker if you had access to any spells, but unfortunately ended up taking twice as long as they should because your party is literally too retarded to function.
The final boss is just fucking boring. It's really easy. You hit two of four legs at a time to make the boss fall over so you can hit his head. The legs themselves only have 50 HP-- easy enough, doable in the same round if you're good enough. The boss's head has five hundred, and he tends to get up after you take about 100-150 HP off his bar. So you basically have to repeat the fucking leg thing four or five times. This must also be done while the legs move with every single hit (and stomp on your party members, inflicting chip damage), as well as while avoiding "poop cats" that spawn each turn and have 25 HP each and will grapple + poison 3 you with every single hit. Not challenging, not engaging-- mostly just irritating, and really fucking drawn-out.
I sound really mad: I'm honestly not, I'm just frustrated. I kind of saw this sort of design beginning to creep in with the Moonman, but after reading up on this thread a little I realized I was just being retarded and wasn't meant to power through all that brace. I'm not sure if that's the same for Dreadnoughts-- maybe there's some secret technique that I'm just missing, or I've consistently gotten really really unlucky with Bunga-- but it's just getting to me, because I truly love this game and really hate this section. It's possibly worse than the Crater. Everything is repetitive, drawn-out, and heavily reliant on RNG. If you don't have specific classes/abilities on your team, you basically just get fucked and can't really do much about it save for live with the pain. It exacerbates all of the game's worst traits. It also downgrades the music, somehow, though that might just be me. I didn't like the Ice Age boss theme anywhere near as much as the instrumental, and almost disliked the Jurassic theme outright.
I can still see this stretch of the game being fun if you did bring along one of those required classes. If I'd gone with a fully-ranged party, I'm pretty sure none of this would be an issue. But I didn't want to go fully ranged, and the game punished me for it... despite most of the games' classes being heavily/purely melee focused. I find that ridiculous, and so I'm ranting about it here.
The loot I got from these places was awesome-- it opened up a lot of interesting ideas for synergies, lots of opportunities for future combos, and it was all-around a decent consolation prize to the misery that Ice Age/Jurassic was for me.
I haven't reached the Future yet, nor anything beyond that. I'm hoping it'll be a little less irritating than this. It'll be a while until I get there-- I'm staying behind for some time to try and grind up some better cats, just because I'm running out of space and recently got a lot of Stimulation upgrades for the fuck room-- but I'm hoping it's better in advance. It'd be a huge shame if the game started choking right before the ending.
EDIT: the YouTube version of the Ice Age theme song is completely different to the one in-game. I don't know why or how. Maybe it's an unlockable or something? I'm not a huge fan of the in-game version because of how the unga bunga vocals overpower the instrumentation, even if it is pretty funny (and definitely fits Bunga better). The YouTube version has clear vocals from totally different singers, with actual lyrics, and it's a little better. (Would be even better without the autotuning.)
In-game versus official upload:
Very different.
The Jurassic theme is identical. Doesn't really save it, I'm really not a fan of the constant "got to be tough" bit's delivery or the main singer in general. Everything else is alright.
