Xfing wrote: ↑Sun Dec 09, 2018 11:29 pm
DarkFlameWolf wrote: ↑Sun Dec 09, 2018 7:49 pm
You know, booting up level 1 and seeing class 2 platformers alongside a good wealth of medium hulks doesn't really bode well for first impressions on the overall difficulty of this set.
Yeah, the difficulty of this set is erratic and doesn't follow any sort of sensible curve, that I can tell you. Of course it gets super hard towards the end, but also has an extremely difficult level really early on and some significant breathers even in the final third.
As I continue playing PS, I found that levels after the demo version (namely, 12 and 13) are getting harder, recently recorded L12, was really brutal when I started practicing it (speaking Insane cold-start of course), but after I found the trick for it, became quite predictable and not that hard. Only problem are those matcens that block every step (at least some triggers are one-shot, but not all) so my run was nearly an hour long. Could be shortened by skipping enemies and some rooms of course. L13 also looks hard but I hope to find the trick for it. Anyway most levels in PS I played only LOOK difficult, before you found the right way to deal with them. Which is a good thing in general.
About sensible difficulty curves, I haven't seen any in various big-sized missions (>7 levels). They all have their ups and downs, evil levels that kill you many times without respect to how good you are, breathers, and in many missions last levels suddenly become easier, like in Lost Levels or AF or D1 itself where you don't find anything close in difficulty to L19 up to the end. And frankly speaking, I don't find anything bad about it, given that all levels are interesting and variative, and require skill, strategy and good planning to do. One thing about variativity is adding weapons and more dangerous robots as the mission progresses, but that's not the whole thing, of course. One can have very challenging levels like D1 L9 without many dangerous bots. Each level having it's own idea, flavor, atmosphere - and good implementation of it - is much more important to me than strict difficulty curve (which would be extremely hard to do anyway). And PS definitely has it in many levels, I like this PS level 12 not because it is hard but because it requires me to think and plan, and also it is beautifully designed and is not like anything I played before. And L10 "Target acquired" filled with the most dangerous missile robots is awesome, although its not so hard if you are careful.
Slight drawback I see in PS is abundance of farmable matcens (in many levels) and general overuse of matcens in some levels, which slow down the pace - like in L12 and 13 - but this mostly concerns Insane difficulty, of course. Slightly reminded me of Lost Levels L13, but that one was real matcens horror.
A question on PS - there is Gauss cannon in L13, is it possible to take? I even looked where the opening switch is in DLE, but that switch does not work, I see only a small part of it and cannot hit it, looks like a bug.
where you are greeted with flash missile bots and other nasties, many in snipe mode, with red laser only, and nearly impossible to reach energy center... And Bahagad L2 surpasses anything I played including AF - simply impossible to play on Insane dificulty because of merc missile bots in snipe mode, often in traps that open one cube away from you 
Lost Levels also had very painful start, need a lot of luck to hit those fast robots with anything. Fortunately it gets much more balanced from L3.
