[o]Last night, my friends and I sat down to finish our last three months of Pandemic Legacy. August and September had been a bit of a slog, but spirits were generally high.
October didn't seem so tough. Unfortunately, our COdA color was yellow and practically nobody started with any yellow cards, so we couldn't really focus on the Search for Patient Zero objective. We had plenty of cards to find cures for the other diseases right away, though, so we decided to focus on this, sabotaging two military bases, and we used the Quarantine Specialist to easily quarantine the 7 Faded cities we needed to win the game. I think we drew maybe two yellow cards all game, so we didn't have a hope of completing the Patient Zero search.
So we selected our Game End upgrades and moved on to November. We open up the Legacy cards for the month and find one that tells us to scratch it off if we haven't opened box 6 or 7. Well, we've opened box 6, so we're not sure if we actually have to scratch that card off, but a perusal of the FAQ tells us that yes, indeed we have to. So we do so. Inside is the biggest deus ex machina ass pull I've seen this side of the Mass Effect 3 ending. I'm actually stunned that the game basically tells us it will do the searches for us if we haven't been keeping up with them. I'm so floored that I actually wanted to quit right then and there. It just seemed like such a punch in the face by the game and I really wasn't happy about it. But we continued on anyway.
November was a total cakewalk. We actually managed to set it up so that we were able to have three vaccine stations, vaccinate six cities, and sabotage two of the three remaining military bases before we cured the last disease. Not that we had to, but I had an idea that doing all three of the above would be a boon to us in December.
So we're off to December now. Long story short, we didn't quite vaccinate all the necessary cities during the first part of the month, but we did complete the search for the Stockpile, so we had a very easy second part of the month. We finally unveiled the last card in the Legacy deck, which congratulated us and told us to calculate our score.
This is what pisses me off the most and made me never want to play this or any future seasons of Pandemic Legacy again. On the scorecard for the game, there is a -200 point penalty if Team Bravo comes to save you at any point during the game. No matter how many searches you complete, if you leave even one of them undone by the start of November, the game just does it for you and penalizes you a huge amount. There's no gradation here. It's either do them all on time, or don't bother. You're penalized the same either way.
So you are basically punished for winning the game in October if you don't complete the search objective. It's better to lose the first half of the month if you get a bad card draw and hope for a second chance in the second half. But, and this is important, you can't know that until it's too late to fix it. So even though we did really well and blew the game out of the water July-October, because we decided not to do one search objective, we get penalized as much as if we had not done any of them. And winning the month does not make up for the massive point penalty you receive for missing that one objective.
This is a fucking terrible choice. It makes the entire second half of the game feel like a wasted effort. If we had literally not played any of the last 6 months, we would have ended up in the same exact score bracket that we ended up in. Missing those points versus earning them wouldn't have made a damn lick of difference. That just makes me severely disappointed. It's also really hard to be warned by it in a review since no one wants to spoil the endgame of this, but I really wish I had known in advance because I definitely would not have bought this game if I had. I hate to say it, but I certainly won't buy any more Pandemic Legacy games beyond this point and may elect not to purchase any future legacy games at all unless they overhaul the endgame scoring system significantly. [/o]
October didn't seem so tough. Unfortunately, our COdA color was yellow and practically nobody started with any yellow cards, so we couldn't really focus on the Search for Patient Zero objective. We had plenty of cards to find cures for the other diseases right away, though, so we decided to focus on this, sabotaging two military bases, and we used the Quarantine Specialist to easily quarantine the 7 Faded cities we needed to win the game. I think we drew maybe two yellow cards all game, so we didn't have a hope of completing the Patient Zero search.
So we selected our Game End upgrades and moved on to November. We open up the Legacy cards for the month and find one that tells us to scratch it off if we haven't opened box 6 or 7. Well, we've opened box 6, so we're not sure if we actually have to scratch that card off, but a perusal of the FAQ tells us that yes, indeed we have to. So we do so. Inside is the biggest deus ex machina ass pull I've seen this side of the Mass Effect 3 ending. I'm actually stunned that the game basically tells us it will do the searches for us if we haven't been keeping up with them. I'm so floored that I actually wanted to quit right then and there. It just seemed like such a punch in the face by the game and I really wasn't happy about it. But we continued on anyway.
November was a total cakewalk. We actually managed to set it up so that we were able to have three vaccine stations, vaccinate six cities, and sabotage two of the three remaining military bases before we cured the last disease. Not that we had to, but I had an idea that doing all three of the above would be a boon to us in December.
So we're off to December now. Long story short, we didn't quite vaccinate all the necessary cities during the first part of the month, but we did complete the search for the Stockpile, so we had a very easy second part of the month. We finally unveiled the last card in the Legacy deck, which congratulated us and told us to calculate our score.
This is what pisses me off the most and made me never want to play this or any future seasons of Pandemic Legacy again. On the scorecard for the game, there is a -200 point penalty if Team Bravo comes to save you at any point during the game. No matter how many searches you complete, if you leave even one of them undone by the start of November, the game just does it for you and penalizes you a huge amount. There's no gradation here. It's either do them all on time, or don't bother. You're penalized the same either way.
So you are basically punished for winning the game in October if you don't complete the search objective. It's better to lose the first half of the month if you get a bad card draw and hope for a second chance in the second half. But, and this is important, you can't know that until it's too late to fix it. So even though we did really well and blew the game out of the water July-October, because we decided not to do one search objective, we get penalized as much as if we had not done any of them. And winning the month does not make up for the massive point penalty you receive for missing that one objective.
This is a fucking terrible choice. It makes the entire second half of the game feel like a wasted effort. If we had literally not played any of the last 6 months, we would have ended up in the same exact score bracket that we ended up in. Missing those points versus earning them wouldn't have made a damn lick of difference. That just makes me severely disappointed. It's also really hard to be warned by it in a review since no one wants to spoil the endgame of this, but I really wish I had known in advance because I definitely would not have bought this game if I had. I hate to say it, but I certainly won't buy any more Pandemic Legacy games beyond this point and may elect not to purchase any future legacy games at all unless they overhaul the endgame scoring system significantly. [/o]