February 6
Evolutions. Maniac Alphas, Marksman Alphas.
Nothing much happens all day. There’s a Haven Defence but I can’t be bothered to run it.
February 7
Base defence, Haven Defence, Lair. These are getting pretty tedious.
Running low on resources. I can’t really afford any new tech. It’s expensive killing Pandorans.
February 8
The Behemoth shows up. Yay, something different! We load up our Masked Manticore – it’s time to kill us a Behemoth.
The mission is long and requires quite a bit of thinking. The Behemoth stomp is the hardest part to deal with – there’s one nasty moment when our entire team gets dazed just as a poison Myrmidon flies in to hit us. Luckily the one it picks on is my heavy, he disables its torso with a Bash with his single action point, and from that point on no-one is really in danger of dying. Lots of tricky situations, but the Behemoth goes down with no casualties.
There’s a nice video with the Behemoth collapsing, the three factions all throw victory celebrations, and . . . that’s it, I guess? No rewards or anything, just a “yay, you won” message.
And we’re now out of tech. Back to trading and grinding.
Command Fortress finishes. Synedrion whine about it and threaten to declare war. It’s really annoying how the game tries to present Synedrion as well-meaning when they keep acting like total psychopaths.
There’s one last Scavenging Site in Antarctica. We run it, suffer through more performance issues, and that’s pretty much it for the day.
Thoughts
Well, that’s Festering Skies done, I guess. The Behemoth mission was pretty cool. I actually had to think a bit, and the variety was fun.
On the bad side, now that it’s over, I’m noticing that like Legacy of the Ancients, Festering Skies has the problem of being completely un-integrated into the main story. The flyers and the Corrupted Haven missions are tied to the Behemoth ONLY. Which means that now the Behemoth’s gone, so are they. So no more Corrupted Haven missions (which is a shame because they were fun) and no more air battles (which means all those air-to-air weapons we researched and built are now completely useless). Why not have the flyers keep on spawning from Pandoran bases? There doesn’t seem any obvious story or gameplay reason that it’d be impossible.
Oh, and just like Blood and Titanium, you get no rewards for “completing” the DLC. Which is lame.
I’m not honestly sure the DLC is really worth it, now that I think about it.