What was that final fight? (Olympus spoilers)

[Malidictus]

The idea of infiltrating the summit of Mr. Olympus inside a Trojan Horse is neat - certainly fits with the theme of Call of Olympus. But what the hell was that final fight? Let me explain.

After fully building the horse, the player can ring a bell near it to stock the horse up with troops. I was expecting this to include Knights or maybe Spearmen, given that we'll be doing a lot of fighting the Greed on their home turf. However, only workers and archers boarded the horse. I have no idea how many it can take as there's no indication, but I THINK I stocked it up full.

Then the game put me in side a closed-off arena with the horse featuring only three archers of the two dozen or so who climbed aboard, and a few workers. Then Greed meteorites start raining down from above directly on top of my position. I've no real means of getting rid of those, though they often seemed to grab coins from somewhere and run off.

So... what am I supposed to do here? In all Kingdoms previous, the final assault gave me a couple of knights to push through a constant wave of Greed. I had some control over events. Here, I have... kind of nothing? The only thing I could figure was running way ahead of the horse so that the meteorites would fall away from the builders, but this creates a really stupid "dance". Run ahead, wait for the meteorite, run a bit back and drop coins, then run back forward to trigger the next one forward.

The archers on the horse weren't really killing anything, because there was nothing to kill. If I was close enough to put any Greed in their range, that meant meteorites were falling directly on the workers. That and the horse barely followed me. I had to run nearly a full screen ahead of it before it would move. And then I got to the end, rebuilt all four statues and... had to go backwards? OK, but the archers don't shoot backwards, so the Greed were effectively getting free shots on my workers.

Is this how the event is supposed to work? Because if so, this is easily the worst final assault I've experienced in Kingdom. The original cave assault was drastically better as it gave me control of the situation. The 80s assault with the garbage container was equally good, offering me a wall I could control. This was... I don't even know what to call it. Feels like this simple strategy game turned into an 80s arcade platformer.

That ending was so bad it retroactively ruined my experience of the rest of the campaign, knowing that I'll have to deal with it if I want to do another run. Seriously, what was wrong with the existing cave assault mechanics?

[aelogie]

RIGHT? Omg. I was also so disappointed to see the giant python all game, to see it built up as an insane final boss, and then for the Queen to be the end goal. They should completely redo the end!

[Alezul]

So much about this final fight is badly designed.

You can get yourself stuck if you don't notice the bell and just launch the horse empty. Even if you notice and ring the bell, you can't tell what can go in and how many. "Did i wait enough? Should i start? I have no idea".

Then there's the fact that it ignores your huge armies of swordsmen and pikemen you probably accumulated. I get the idea is to infiltrate a small team inside but at least give me a choice of what units to take if you're so focused on giving me a small force.

Then there's the enemy composition. It was just boring basic dudes. The heart of all the evil and...they just have basic dudes. I know you can say the same thing for other game modes where you take the bomb inside the caves but they had time to think of something better.

The snake was soooo much better. It was a constant fight through the entire island. You can use all your tools unlocked up to that point. The last boss traps you inside, you can't change anything anymore, you can't wait for more people, can't try another mount (good luck going with the donkey inside).

[Stardustfire]

and dont forget that you can easy run out of money in that cave what is also a game ender when you dont build the first 4 statues fast enove so you dont got hit to much and can build the last thing for 7 gold. and it also dont helps that you must stay still to pay while you get hit by the stones....

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Alezul:

The snake was soooo much better. It was a constant fight through the entire island. You can use all your tools unlocked up to that point. The last boss traps you inside, you can't change anything anymore, you can't wait for more people, can't try another mount (good luck going with the donkey inside).

Agreed. Jörmungandr is a much more interesting fight, as it uses all of your available tools - ships to attack the body, knights, pikemen and archers to attack the head, and it even has vulnerability mechanics. My only complaint is having to walk forward and wait for the snake head to re-emerge as a means of pushing it back. It just makes no sense for it to follow me like that.

But yeah - the final fight is terrible. The meteorites are the primary issue. They would near-instantly wipe any melee soldiers you bring, which drastically limits what the encounter can actually feature. We can't fight anything more complex than dirt-simple commons because we have no defensive lines. Anything larger would just wipe us.

In fact, the "final fight" isn't really a fight, because it features next to no fighting. The archers may as well not exist as they don't do much of anything due to the Trojan Horse design, and workers can't fight like in Norse Lands. It's just dodging meteorites like an old ZX Spectrum game - which is absolutely mind-boggling considering Kingdom is a far more sophisticated game than this.

Personally, I feel they should have used the "Dumpster" mechanic from 80s, giving us some kind of large movable shield wall to push through a gantlet of smaller and larger Greed. Give it enough health and the ability to be repaired, let the player drop coins to make it follow or stop and you have a pretty decent final fight. Anything is better than the glorified Pong we ended up with.

[Alezul]

Yeah that fight uses NOTHING you have learned during all your time with the dlc.

In fact, it even goes against what you may expect. I had to restart like 4-5 times because i kept trying to attack the last portal. As a veteran of the series, that's what made sense to me. In the base game, you go to the other end of the screen to plant the bomb, so that's what i kept trying to do here.

Also, nowhere in the rest of the game are you supposed to dodge things coming down from the sky on you. You are taught to use walls and units to protect yourself. None of that is present in the final fight.

[RCMidas]

All four of the minor islands require you to grab the golden statuette and run from the Greed meteors, plus Athena's large island requires you to release Persephone from her cage whilst more of the same rain down near you. Sorry, but that particular instance of "nothing else in the game teaches you this" is untrue.

That said, even with a slight delay in my first run when I tried to attack the portal myself, the fact that each built statue radiated bright swirling sparks towards the centre of the arena made it pretty clear that something important was happening there to look at. Since you don't seem to get back the builders and slingers you take into the horse afterwards, I didn't even technically lose any followers to the Greed that I wasn't going to lose anyway.

Matter of fact, I think you could get away with only taking a single builder up with you if you're on the bear, chimera, or Cerberus.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

All four of the minor islands require you to grab the golden statuette and run from the Greed meteors, plus Athena's large island requires you to release Persephone from her cage whilst more of the same rain down near you. Sorry, but that particular instance of "nothing else in the game teaches you this" is untrue.

Those meteorites don't home in on the player, but that's not the point. The issue isn't the game not teaching players how homing meteorites work. That's pretty self-explanatory. It's that dodging homing meteorites for the entire fight sucks ass. Kingdom is not an action game. All of the tools that the game provides the player with are focused around fortifications and lines of defence. Walls, knights, pikemen - all of them tools for holding a line between the player and the enemy.

The problem with the final fight is that it disregards all of that in pursuit of meteorite dodging. This is a bit like ending your average Metal Slug game with a chess game against General Morden. Or ending Homeworld with a single-craft dogfight. Dodging homing meteorites is fundamentally a different game from the rest of Kingdom, which should be evident considering it entirely disregards the vast majority of mechanics. It makes absolutely no sense to not bring Knights along with the horse, besides the entirely meta-game reason of "they wouldn't be effective against meteorites". So don't use meteorites, then.

[Alezul]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

All four of the minor islands require you to grab the golden statuette and run from the Greed meteors, plus Athena's large island requires you to release Persephone from her cage whilst more of the same rain down near you. Sorry, but that particular instance of "nothing else in the game teaches you this" is untrue.

But the way you deal with that is nothing like you deal with getting the artifacts.

You don't take damage from the meteor spawning enemies. You can also just run back to town, which you can't do in last fight. You can use your pikemen/archers to attack and hold the enemy back. In the last battle, the only ground units are builders which you need to protect.

It's not an evolution of what you have been doing so far, like the great snake battle is. It's a completely different system that ignores a lot of your progress (all your pikemen, swordsmen, upgraded towers/walls are ignored).

The only good thing i can say about it is that at least it doesn't reset your mount or remove artifact abilities.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Alezul:

You don't take damage from the meteor spawning enemies. You can also just run back to town, which you can't do in last fight. You can use your pikemen/archers to attack and hold the enemy back. In the last battle, the only ground units are builders which you need to protect.

Yeah, those are the lessons I learned from the four intermediate island meteorite events. Either bring soldiers with me to hold the line, or trigger the event and run back to my Kingdom's front line. Exactly like I would do for every other hostile enemy encounter.