Part 19: Tool of War
Part 19 - Tool of Warhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmA-yG_q7RE
There it is, the last part of this LP. The most difficult mission of the game: a lot of enemies, a lot of guard towers and a lot of floating mines. Even some destroyed buildings will spawn a mine or enemy sometimes.
The plot is basically non-existent in this game, which makes this part rather anti-climactic. No reference to our previous sabotage or Riley's misadventures on the river..Just another mission that only has some opening dialogue which boils down to 'if you pulls this off the universe is saved!'.
One of the most annoying things about this mission is that it doesn't end with you flying back to a landing pad..instead, it cuts to credits when you complete the last mission objective. When this happened, I hadn't 100% found all secrets yet. So I had to do it again and make sure to not finish off the last building before getting all kills/secrets
.BUT when I redid the level, most of my powerups and ammo were gone since I used those on the previous run! So then I had to redo a bunch of earlier missions just to prepare for another end run.
Anyway, you can imagine my relief with finally 100%-ing this game.
Let's get started shall we?
The mission
Riley starts the briefing:
"blow up everyone, and there'll be peace"
We seem cynical about this whole 'peace' thing..
Now it's up to our red-haired friend for some extra info:
..and the biggest cliche
Let her know what? huh
With that, we start the level..it's a pretty boring, huge rectangle basically. We start off on the left side and move to the right. We try to attack from a distance, as we encounter guard towers everywhere and we've got little room to dodge missiles.
Pretty early in the run we run into one of the bigger boss-type ships:
We can use a powerup like EM-shock to clear the screen, but killing the ship quickly doesn't prevent these smaller clones from spawning..
..so it's best to use the powerup when we've got most of them in the screen. Although looking back in the video, I managed to mop 'em up with some lucky grenade shots
Now, this area here is a especially devious setup:
That diagonal line of small structures function like a wall of protection for the two turrets placed behind it. You'll have to destroy these structures before being able to auto-target the turrets with missiles. Getting close to the wall, you'll also run into floating mines, making this a good spot to lose health very, very quickly.
Once you know the most efficient timing for when to use your powerups like double-shield, the mission becomes much more managable. The final run that I did was in fact pretty quick, but then by that time I also knew the location of the most of the dangerous areas.
The end and final thoughts
So when we blow up the last structure for the mission, the game cuts straight to this scrolling text:
Basically, we killed the rebels on all the planets so there's peace now! Long live the Phantom Council etc etc.
Looking back on this LP, it was fun to revisit this game but the flaws are pretty obvious. In the OP, I added a review from back in the day and its score of 65 seems pretty justified..although I'd probably score it in the 70's for the gameplay, graphics and audio. The controls can feel a bit clumsy, where it's hard to do any manoeuvring when making turns/strafing at the same time. In the run I barely used strafing at all to keep my movement predictable.
I really like the little differences compared to a Desert Strike-type game: the fast-paced combat, the amount of stuff you can blow up, and the pretty large setpieces and rendered environments. Also, the dialogue and little story-stuff going on while playing it are nice too, even if the story never really goes anywhere.